This Is Why Christians In The United States Are In Need Of Conversion, Those Reborns, Too, and Me

Continued from where the book left of yesterday:

Bad News and Good News 

The theme of conversion, of course, is no less central in the New Testament.  It is widely agreed that a call to repent is the central teaching of Jesus  That is what he came to say first and it may well be the core of all that he had to say:

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand;  repent, and believe in the gospel (Mark 1:15).

This announcement has three parts:  (a) the call to repent, to enter a new arrangement; (b) the empowerment to repent found in the good news; and (c) the substance of repentance is positive and not negative.  It is not to leave but to enter, not to give up but to embrace the new arrangement.   Too often talk about repentance is.  Jesus is not a teacher of a new moral done without good news and without the positive invitation to an alternative, either more rigorous or more permissive.  He is the proclaimer and bringer of a new age in which the claims of the old power relations have lost their force and in which the joyous rule of God has begun to be fulfilled.  It I good news that we live where God rules and it invites us to new ways of life.   Jesus appeals not only to individuals;  he announces that a whole order has lost its power.   People need no longer spend their lives serving loyalties and values which demand and destroy but do not have the power to give life.  He believed and showed that consent may be withdrawn from the order of the old age because the old arrangements have lot their credibility. 

Jesus' announcement of a new possibility and the urgency of choosing it is expressed in two forms to two elements of society.  On the one hand he carries on a ministry of well-off people who had long ago settled in and presumed that God's good rule was already present in the ordering which blessed them so well.  To these Jesus exposes the distorted and partial quality of such existence and invites people to abandon it (Mark 10:17-22). Indeed in every way he announced that the oldness is over and must be given up.  To such people conversion means letting go of an arrangement which benefits them at the expense of others.  Such a call to conversion is a hard demand that old compromising ways be terminated  Obviously this is bad news.  It is the embodiment of what the New Testament means by crucifixion, of declaring in our lives that the deathly ways of the old age have no power over us and that we can reject them.  This is what Jesus did that Friday and what he calls his people to do with him. 

But Jesus' call to conversion is also good news.  It is bad news to those who crave the old order.  It is good news to those neglected by the old order who desperately yearn for newness which can't be any worse and surely will be better.  The ones neglected by the old order obviously include the poor and those denied a fair share of the well-being of the community.  But in a society based on competence, the rejected can also be those who succeed in the system but are exploited and dehumanized by the system.  They also are finally made powerless even though they manage the system itself.  To those Jesus gave power.  By his presence, his word, and his incredible actions, he inaugurated a new power arrangement no longer interested in coveting, control, and manipulation but consisting in freely given gifts.  The old age which people are called to leave is a righteousness based on law which measure and rewards everything by goodness, obedience, competence and success.  The new age which people are called to enter is based on a new righteousness which comes from God, which is freely given and for which there are no preconditions for qualification (Romans 10:1-5).  And he taunts them by saying,  “Should I heal or forgive?”   And they want neither because by doing so he declares that their notions of sickness had lost their power and their notions of guilt were now irrelevant.  And the power of that new definition of reality permitted the man to go home.  “Home” is a powerful image in the Bible and in our time.  We are of course aware of the pathos of displaced persons.  But Peter Berger has recently shown how the whole society is organized to keep people “homeless,” i.e., living so that life is never coherent or integrated.  Many people then and now, are not poor but they are alienated so that they do not belong anywhere.  And the good news is that displaced persons are empowered to belong, to have both dignity and security!  To do so, Jesus must expose the exile producing powers of culture.  It is no wonder people were amazed;  they had defined the situation so that no newness was even thinkable.  And now it had come!   It had come because the Kingdom comes where he brings it.  Amazement is the appropriate response when God's newness overcomes our arrangements.

The ministry of Jesus is to bring people to decide between these two ways of organizing life.  He requires that they should choose between them, although the choice he offered caused people terror and amazement.  Some were terrified because they clung desperately to the old ways.  And some received gladly because the newness was welcome to them.  They were the ones who not only experienced the crucifixion of abandoning what is old but also the resurrection of receiving the surprising newness of God.  Both those who were terrified and those who were amazed had their characteristic reactions:

The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the city sought to destroy him; but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people hung upon his words (Luke 19-4-48).

The passage posted yesterday presented what Walter Brueggemann said, with justification, was the most radical claim in the entire Bible, that God cares so much of us, yearns so much for a relationship with us, that God is willing to accomodate our weakness and our ingrained propensity to do evil without always having a sufficient power of even good will to reliably over come it (Romans 7:9).  This passage, following immediately after it in the book, shows that the Gospel of Jesus is a further call to try and to succeed in overcoming that weakness.

I certainly demonstrate in what I say here that I'm hardly good at that,  we all enjoy taking down our opponents too much to always be exactly good while we do it.   On the other hand, imagine how bad I could be if I didn't think I should at least try to be good.  Maybe some of the atheists might like to think about what it would be like if I didn't believe I had a moral obligation given to me by God to make the attempt.

The contrast between what The Bible says and what the supporters of Donald Trump do while claiming ownership of The Bible are too obvious for me to need to point them out.   It would be an insult to anyone who doesn't support Trump for me to go over his actions in light of The Law, The Prophets and the Gospel.

Oh, I can't help but point out that before the election of Ronald Reagan, homelessness in the United States was looked on as a national shame, after Republicans took over and their media saw they didn't need to make that geture anymore,  the homeless are regarded as the shame and annoyance and the police are tasked with harassing them away out of the good neighborhoods, into invisibility and non-existence.   Those who thump the Bible the hardest, some of the most hard-hearted of those supporters of Republican-fascism.