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Nobodies yet Somebodies
In last week’s blog I looked at one way in which the Bible’s understanding of God’s people – as ‘Wanderers yet at Home’ – is illuminated by our present context in a multi-ethnic society. This week I want to look at how living in a multi-ethnic society also illuminates a related paradox for our theology and spiritual life as the people of God: that we are both Nobodies and Somebodies.
“It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you – for you were the fewest of all peoples” (Dt 7:7). The Lord frequently underlines that his election of Israel was not due to any intrinsic strength of theirs but rather the reverse, the Lord delights to work with unprepossessing material – illustrated as an individual case in his choice of David, apparently the least impressive of the brothers.
Relationships between ethnic groups are inextricably entwined with questions of power. Theology has veered between undergirding the power of the powerful, and alternatively seeking to undermine the powerful in the cause of liberation. But that ought not to be to create a new power base, rather the people of God are to know that, as Paul was to write, ‘power is made perfect in weakness’ (2 Cor 12:9); so rather than seeing the weak, as is often the tendency today, in need of ego reparation the Lord has no inhibitions in stressing not the greatness of his people, but their weakness and their need for faithful dependence on him, through which alone they receive true power.
One aspect of this is that as Israel became powerful, and at the same time idolatrous and unfaithful, so the Lord used the marginalized for his purposes as an acted rebuke. On two occasions this role was filled by black Cushites. One was Phineas. “His name translates as ‘the Negro’,’the Nubian’ or ‘the Cushite’: that is, one of the black people who inhabit the land of Cush.” (J Daniel Hays: From every People and Nation: A biblical theology of race’, p 81). He was the grandson of Aaron (by his son’s wife from Egypt). He is celebrated as being, with Moses, one of the great intercessors who ‘stood up and interceded, and the plague was stopped. And that has been reckoned to him as righteousness from generation to generation for ever’(Psalm 106:30,31). Faithfulness, as so often in the Old Testament (thus Rahab) trumps ethnicity. Similarly, Ebed-Melech, who successfully petitions King Zedekiah to release Jeremiah from virtually certain death when imprisoned at the bottom of a cistern (Jm 38:7-13), was ‘probably the ranking representative of the Egyptian army in Jerusalem’ (Hays as above, p 136). Like Phineas he stands out as someone commended by the Lord for their faithful trust: ‘you shall have your life as a prize of war because you have trusted in me, says the Lord’ (Jm 39:18).
That God delights to bless the vulnerable and the marginal receives a wonderfully vivid description in Psalm 107 of how those outside of settled society (itinerants, prisoners, self-harmers, sailors) are addressed by the ‘steadfast love’ and ‘wonderful works’ of the Lord.
This understanding becomes even more explicit in Isaiah 40-55, which speaks of a God dwelling simultaneously ‘in a high and holy place, and also with him who is contrite and humble in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite’ (Is 57:15). John Goldingay uses the word ‘crushed’, in opposition to the NRSV (and also NIV) ‘contrite’: ‘the word means the people are objectively crushed, whether or not they have therefore come to feel penitent’ (Isaiah, NIBC, p 323). From this section of Isaiah Richard Bauckham argues that the ‘new Exodus’ that Isaiah anticipates therefore comes through “the witness, the humiliation, the death and the exaltation of the Servant of the Lord” portrayed most powerfully in the depiction of the Suffering Servant in 52:13-53:12 (Jesus and the God of Israel, p 35). The passage prepares us most obviously for the ministry of Jesus, but also casts our view forward to the church’s universal mission today, where repeatedly it is amongst ‘the crushed’ that Jesus comes to be exalted.
Bauckham continues: ‘The God of Israel, indeed, is characteristically the God of the lowly and humiliated, the God who hears the cry of the oppressed, the God who raises the poor from the dust, the God who from his throne on high identifies with those in the depths, the God who exercises his sovereignty on high in solidarity with those of lowest state here below. . . . The radical novelty of Philippians 2 lies in the way in which God in Jesus Christ dwells in the depths, not only with but as the lowest of the low. God’s characteristic exaltation of the lowest becomes a pattern in which he participates himself’ (pp 54-55).
Jeremiah identifies the counterintuitive blessing that the crushed exiles in Babylon might bring, not by working for the rectification of their oppression but rather by giving the seemingly treasonous advice to ‘Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find welfare’ (29:7). A dynamic sense of divine mission overrides grievance over the oppression and indignity they suffer. Christopher Wright speaks on the ‘hope for the future that turns victims into visionaries’ (The Message of Jeremiah, p296).
In his ministry Jesus had no inhibitions about similarly underlining the comparative insignificance of his followers: they are ‘little ones’ (Mark 9:42; Matt 10:42; 18:10 & 14); ‘the least (Matt 25:40, 45); ‘simple ones’ (Matt 11:25). It is a perception which shaped Matthew’s writing of the genealogy of Jesus, a genealogy which deviates from the standard male line to mention Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba – not only women who have some sort of scandal attached to them, but also who have either Gentile origins or connections. J Daniel Hays points out that he could have mentioned more reputable forebears such as Sarah or Rebekah, but instead is deliberately working against the grain of standard genealogies which was to express racial purity. Thus he points forward to the gospel not just crossing but removing cultural boundaries. Further, Hays speculates, ‘Perhaps the subtle theological sub-plot of Matthew 1 is that racially mixed marriages among God’s people are a normal part of the new community that Christ creates in the world’ (as above, pp 159, 160).
Again, the New Testament church sought to express such convictions in both its teaching and practice. A fundamental text for God’s choice of nobodies to express his purpose of making them somebodies is 1 Corinthians 1:26-31. Paul writes “Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth” (v 26), as the basis of their calling by God, in order both to shame the wise and the strong, and to undermine all attempts at human boasting. Dunn notes that Romans 16 (written most probably in Corinth) gives “a fairly clear picture of the extent to which the first Christian groups in Rome drew their strength from the lower strata of Roman society” (Dunn, Romans WBC, p 900).
However it is intriguing that Paul should write this of the Corinthians. Piecing together the little we can know of the New Testament churches, it is possible that by comparison with other churches Corinth included an unusual number of high status people. We know of Titius Justus who owned the house next door to the synagogue and was probably a Roman citizen (Acts 18:7); Crispus (Acts 18:8), possibly the same person as Sosthenes, associated with Paul in the writing of the letter (1 Cor 1:1) and the unfortunate synagogue official who before his conversion was beaten by the Jewish crowd for leading the futile attempt to have Paul punished by the proconsul (Acts 18:17). Also we have Gaius, mentioned by Paul as sending his greetings to the church in Rome (Rom 16:23), who ‘must have been a man of considerable means’ since he was ‘host to the whole church – a typical well-to-do home could accommodate 30-50’; (Dunn, p 911; see also 1 Cor 1:14). With Gaius Paul mentions Erastus, the city treasurer (Rom 16:23) and quite possibly the person commemorated by an inscription for laying a pavement in the city at his own expense. By human standards that’s quite a powerful group of people to have in one fledgling church. Yet Paul chooses not to flaunt the high-status converts who have joined the church, but quite the opposite – he foregrounds the weak, the low, the despised. In foregrounding low status church members he is possibly laying the theological basis for his rebuke to the rich members for disrespecting the dignity of the poor at the communion meal (1 Cor 11: 17-34 – blog forthcoming). Further, he may be sensing over the horizon the inappropriate mind-set that gave a welcome to the arrogance and bombast, the ‘power’, of the super-apostles (see 2 Cor 11:20, as part of his wider argument in chs 10 to 12).
It is arguable that the church has rarely followed Paul’s pattern and prioritized its ministry towards those who were not wise, powerful or of noble birth. But it is a pattern commended by Jesus, notably in the Parable of the Judgment of the Nations (or the Sheep and the Goats) in Matthew 25:31-46, which gives sacramental significance to ministry to the deprived and marginalized as ministry to Jesus himself, and which is especially apt in societies where the ethne (nations) are marked by clear distinctions of wealth and power.
But Paul’s purpose in underlining that the Christians in 1 Corinthians 1 are ‘nobodies’ is not so much to correct or overturn the world’s judgment of them, but rather in order to humble all people ‘so that no one might boast in the presence of God’ (v 29). It is not that ‘nobodies’ now instead become ‘somebodies’. The observation in Proverbs 30:21,22 that ‘the earth trembles’ when ‘a slave . . becomes a king’ has had many unhappy fulfilments in history. Rather through God’s grace we become simultaneously both nobodies and somebodies. It is God’s wisdom that is vindicated in the transformation. Seneca observed: “The customs of this accursed race have gained such influence that they are received throughout the world. The vanquished have given laws to their victors” (quoted in Dunn, p li). Tacitus, writing in the context of Nero’s persecution of Christians, referred to “Rome where all things horrible or shameful from all parts of the world collect and become popular” (Annals, xv, 45 in Lewis & Reinhold, 1966 II, 266).
The pattern continues today. Writing on Pentecostalism, Paul Alexander notes the cultural parallels, quoting the jazz trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis, on why jazz came from Afro-Americans: “That’s how it always is. Cinderella, the one you keep out, and you push down, and you kick, that’s the one with the moral authority, with the gift. That’s as old as night and day, as old as dust.” As a rather nostalgic ‘roots’ Pentecostal, Alexander is uneasy about the glitzier mutations of Pentecostalism that have emerged over the past half century, and overlain its origins amongst the black and white poor. (See Paul Alexander: Signs and Wonders: Why Pentecostalism is the World’s Fastest Growing Religion. San Francisco 2009).
Similarly, in ‘The Triple Package: What really determines success’ (about successful ethnic minorities in the contemporary USA) Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld observe “To be an immigrant is almost by definition to be insecure – an experience of deep economic and social anxiety, not knowing whether you can earn a living or give your children a decent life. . . Insecurity runs deep in every one of America’s most successful groups, and these groups not only suffer from insecurity; they tend, consciously or unconsciously, to promote it” (pp 9, 10).
Again, the pattern goes back to Abraham. Promised a son, as the only possible gateway to becoming father of a great nation, yet stalled apparently by his wife Sarah not conceiving, and then – after her miraculous conception of Isaac – what is Abraham called to do by God but to sacrifice that very son? Paul sees this as indicative of the character “of the God in whom he (Abraham) believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom 4:17). It is a verse that has been a special guiding light in my own ministry – God is honoured by calling into existence churches amongst those whom the world regards as nobodies, amongst those (like Jesus on Easter Saturday) are seen as ‘dead’. Seemingly with nothing to offer. So it is that in the world today, and in Britain, the gospel grows especially amongst those – notably those ethnic groups - who are not supposed to matter.
Reflections
* God frequently works in unanticipated ways and amongst unexpected people. When the great and the good of the Christian world met in Edinburgh in 1910 to consider the world mission of the church, no one there could have imagined that the greatest impulse or world mission in the twentieth century had started just a few years earlier with a revival in Azusa Street in an impoverished part of Los Angeles. Anything similar today?
* The Corinthian church illustrated that God chose the foolish and weak to shame the wise and the strong (1 Cor 1:27). If that doesn’t square with our experience today, what are the different ways in which we might respond?
* In desperate times how does hope arise?
Add Ons
Last week’s blog which touched on issues of migration and hospitality missed an open goal: the arrival an expected 130,000 refugees from Hong Kong this year. Thanks to Christopher Ramsay for drawing my attention to this.
Information about how Churches can respond and how to join in at: https://www.ukhk.org/church.
See also this video on ‘Hong Kong Ready churches: