The Relevance Of Our Irrelevance (And Vice Versa)

by Chris Haw

Shane Claiborne and I recently wrote a book called Jesus for President. Now, you may be wondering where the title’s irony leaves off and the “reality” picks up. Indeed, how can we take ourselves seriously with a title like that?! Yet, we believe that Christians are faced with a crucial question today that goes beyond simple politics and culture wars: how is God calling the church to realize and embrace its identity and mission in the world? Or put another way, in light of the frequent clash between faith and culture, how should we be relevant and make a difference in our world? I believe the church’s answer to this vital question is often misguided, and here’s why. To proclaim Jesus as the Christ is to saturate the world with a blessed irrelevance and to perceive differently the whole political drama of “making a difference.” Let me explain what I mean.

As Christians, we follow Jesus. He is our Savior and King, the ultimate embodiment of God’s love and the hope of all humanity. But we live in a globalized world of powerful nations and human “kings” where the way of Jesus seems unrealistic and unlikely to “make a difference.” In our day of suicide bombers and liberating armies, who believes that loving your enemies really works? With increasing gas prices and a cutthroat economy, why listen to someone who commands selling one’s possessions and giving to the poor? In the shadow of strengthening superpowers, who can seriously think that God blesses the poor, meek, and persecuted?

And what about the cross? In a world of smart bombs and military solutions, it doesn’t make sense that Jesus’ “glory” and relevance to the world was ultimately revealed through being tortured to death. And why would first century folks have declared this executed man “Lord and Savior,” especially when that title was already taken by the much more “successful” Caesar? We are left with the perplexing question of how this unknown dissenter, crucified at the margins of the empire, changed his world. And perhaps even closer to home: how has God called us to embody this same posture in order to change our world? This task for the church goes against all human concepts of relevance and appears to be virtually impossible. But Jesus was up against similar odds in his day, and this should give us hope. His Mustard Seed Kingdom seemed like a tiny and hopeless project in the midst of the giant Roman Empire. His ragtag band of fishermen, a laughable sight to the dominant systems of the day. It’s precisely this seeming irrelevance to the grand structures of civilization that intrigues me most about Jesus. And I believe that if we seek to understand the irrelevance of Jesus and his kingdom, we will find our identity as his people.

In the pages that follow, I will explore why Christianity is so irrelevant and why that is such a fascinating grace to the world. I know words like irrelevant and fascinating do not fit together in our culture, so bear with me as I try to dig deep and broad for insight. I’ll be pulling together some different ideas, so here’s the main gist of my proposal: the people of God, begun in Abraham and Sarah and manifest in the church today, are called to be a life-giving contrast-culture to the structures of power and dominance in the world. We’ll examine the backdrop of those powers and their historical emergence, and then how God called Abraham, Israel, and the church to be an alternative community. Then I’ll offer some practical suggestions regarding how we can continue living out that calling today.

OUT OF UR

In light of the large scope of human history, what worth is the Judeo- Christian heritage to the world? It is a fantastic and unique treasure. In order to understand this, let’s step back in time. At the end of the last ice age, as the world thawed from its humble, ancient rhythms of life, the Neolithic Revolution began. Anthropologists tell us that it worked like a snowball effect of power upon the world. The new capacity to congeal dominance and energy was entirely revolutionary over the larger scope of Homo sapien history.¹ Hunting and gathering had been sufficient for sustaining life, but with the acquired skills of planting and tilling, resources became available to support artisans experimenting with newer skills.² Conflicts normally limited to tribal and territorial disputes took new shape; use of the land usually restricted by a day’s walk expanded to major, cross-regional exploitation and shipping. Wide-sweeping changes began to take place.

The agricultural revolution of the Fertile Crescent catapulted Eurasia into a vast development of the potential for conquest and imperialism. But within these incipient spurts of growth, the time was ripe for a potent and salvific submergence — a rising body of people to (re)imagine life with God and form a new kind of people not shaped by the growing insanity of civilization. From the midst of this era of staggering progress in civilization’s breadbasket came a wandering homeless couple — their names, Abram and Sarai. Their inspiration and vision were so contrary to the world around them that they had to, not knowing what was next, come out of Ur (an area now in modern Iraq) — their calling to bless the world so divine and peculiar that even their names would need to change. The Hebrew people that would come from the newly named Abraham and Sarah would mark a virtually unforeseen kind of social body in world history. But here is the irony: it was in coming out of civilization that they become relevant to it. They would be relevant nonconformists. Or, put another way, they would be relevant to the world by being different from it. In becoming a homeless and powerless couple, they became worthy vessels to carry what God said would be “a blessing to the whole world” (Genesis 12:1-3). Somehow, God would better the world by calling a tiny family out of it.

But we all know that Abraham and Sarah did not abandon the world around them; “coming out of the world” meant doing a new thing within and among the world. They were called to inherit the land of Palestine (the word related to “Philistines”). This raises a tricky issue. How do we relate this Abrahamic call, and the promise of land, to the violent hubris related to land grabs, especially in this particular instance? (After all, the Palestinian-Israeli land conflict has proven to be among the most painful difficulties of our time.) Again, the work of historians and anthropologists provides helpful insight. When scholars discuss the so-called conquest of Canaan by the Hebrew people, several theories emerge. Many believe that biblical language indicates “reference to the rulers of Canaanite city-states, suggesting peasant revolt against the ruling class rather than Israelite genocide against the Canaanites in general.”³ And, as Gerhard Lohfink writes, “Biblical archeology has given us even more powerful encouragements. For the period of the ‘conquest of the land’ it cannot offer evidence that a single Canaanite city was destroyed by the Israelites.”⁴ But then, how are we to make sense of the familiar stories that describe the conquest of the Canaanites? What was the use of these battle stories to the Hebrew people if they weren’t to legitimate war or at least revel in its history? John Yoder looks to how later generations of Jews read the stories:

The point made by the prophets is rather, ‘Jahweh has always taken care of us in the past; should we not be able to trust His providence for the immediate future?’ Its impact in those later prophetic proclamations was to work against the development of a military caste, military alliances, and political designs based on the availability of military power.⁵

In other words, there is good reason to understand the period of Jewish nationhood after the “conquest” — kings, political alliances, and armies — as an era of selling-out, becoming too “relevant” and too much like the powers around them. For, as we initially explored, the Abrahamic trajectory was meant to be doing something different in the world in order to bless it. While Israel’s charge was to be in the world and not of it, this period showed that “being in the world” had swamped the “not of it.” This is why the Words of God say, “when you wanted a King you rejected me” (1 Samuel 8:7).

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