Jesus’ Egalitarian Social Revolution

Part of my project is to figure out what the Gospel is to Rob Bell as related in this work. Besides the “love of God” goal of the previous posting this chapter has another key identifying element of how Bell understands the Gospel.

“The gospel Jesus spreads in the book of Luke has as one of its main themes that Jesus brings a social revolution, in which the previous systems and hierarchies of clean and unclean, sinner and saved, and up and down don’t mean what they used to. God is doing a new work through Jesus, calling all people to human solidarity. Everybody is a brother, a sister. Equals, children of the God who shows no favoritism.

To reject this new social order was to reject Jesus, the very movement of God in flesh and blood.” Loc. 969-73

Let me first say that I think Christianity clearly brings a kind of egalitarianism to the world. The Apostle Paul who takes some hits on this subject actually has the best egalitarian quotes in the New Testament like Galatians 3:28.

It is also true that Luke in particular shows Jesus upsetting not just the order of the religious leadership of his day but also the Roman system of benefaction. Joel Green’s commentary on Luke does a good job of showing that throughout the gospel.

Culture is the water we swim in, the air we breath. Culture contains the values we can’t help but assume and the yardsticks that we use to evaluate right and wrong. There are few elements to our culture deeper than our belief in the egalitarianism. Fairness and justice are all about equality. Equal treatment under the law. Equal rights. Men and women are equal, yet as Animal Farm notes and protests, “some are more equal than others.” This is so deep within many of us we can’t help to think this way, or can we.

Our notions of equality often have a subtle tension with our ideas of merit. Lebron James deserves his unequal salary, attention and access in society because he performs. People who have exceptional skills or competencies are valued above others for those abilities. Every child ever picked or not picked for a team on a playground knows this. We are constantly valuing people by their smarts, their beauty, their moral performance, their wealth, their power.

If our economy of merit is a dark matter of our egalitarian universe, our valuing of others according to their usefulness to us is our dirtiest secret. We close our eyes to our egalitarian values when it comes to our wants and needs and the utility of others in that economy. I don’t see Jesus so much buying into the values we espouse as he is condemning of our utility based human trafficking.

There is no question that Jesus in Luke is upending established norms, but in what ways? Luke famously has the contrasting set of beatitudes with woes. “Blessed are the poor, woe to the rich.” It is not true that Lazarus and the rich man are the same nor get the same thing. The wealthy and powerful are brought low and the poor, powerless, helpless, meek Lazarus gets to rest in Abraham’s bosom. It is clear from Jesus in Luke that God is not impressed by the things that impress us within our little utilitarian-people-value-system.

Jesus’ value system seems not so much rooted in our own issues of “fairness” or “equality”, but rather more deeply rooted in the Old Testament system of the powerless who look to God for deliverance. Hear Mary’s song that opens the book of Luke in harmony with Hannah’s song which opens the book of Samuel.

Of Masters, Servants and Slaves

I find it difficult to see Jesus as an western-culture-egalitarian because of the heavy emphasis he places in most of his parables and teachings of the parent/child and master/servant relationships. The world of masters and servants are very difficult for us to process especially when we introduce the word “slave” into the mix. Because of the brutal legacy of American race based slavery followed by Jim Crow virtual slavery this is very volatile emotional language. The Apostle Paul gets dinged regularly by us for being non-egalitarian on slavery or gender issues yet in many ways we have less direct language from Jesus in the gospels on the subject. He talks about masters and slaves, usually casting us as slaves and he blushes not one bit.

Jesus told many parables about masters and slaves in which a social order of those who command and those who obey is assumed and not critiqued. Jesus clearly positioned himself as the “master” of his disciples gives them commands and orders without reservation or apology. He does transition his relationship to be one of “friends” at one point but quite clearly he continues to give them orders and demands complete obedience. What can we see in this? That all of these roles relate in a very complex social order that Jesus establishes. It is difficult to imagine that the heart of his message is the establishment of an egalitarian social order akin to what we assume today.

Embedded within master/servant/slave relationships are a complex web of expectations and obligations that establish his moral universe. In many of Jesus’ parables these relationships are not so much critiqued as accepted, in fact the story of Lazarus and the Rich man itself is deeply dependent upon the broader Ancient Near East system of hospitality and obligation found in the Old Testament. A righteous, wealthy man (it’s usually a man) has a duty to use his wealth for the benefit of the community. Even persons of minimal means have a duty to render hospitality to the poor and the alien. The story of Lot and Sodom also mentioned in this chapter is in fact about the failure of Sodom to extend hospitality to the visitors. The rich man fails both in his duty to care for the poor and to extend hospitality and it is his failure to do so that yields him the punishment in Hades that is explicitly described.

Yhwh es mi Patron

Related to the master/servant/slave relationship of Jesus’ value system is the particularism of a relationship to a master. After living a number of years in Latin America one aspect of American culture that became plain to me upon my return was our preference for impersonal relationships. The West likes to mediate our relationships through institutions. We pay wages, have employee policies, pay significant attention to human resource laws all in the pursuit of an egalitarian system. Traditional Latin American systems of patronage are far more personal and are likely closer to the kind of systems within with Jesus and his stories were embedded. Masters were free to treat servants and slaves as individuals and to treat them differently. That isn’t to say that there wasn’t a code of fairness and of justice(parable of the day’s wage for example) yet clearly masters related to slaves, and slaves to masters as individuals and individual circumstances, rules and exceptions were recognized.

Throughout the book Bell spends a lot of time criticizing Christian particularism. Deeds of good and moral people separated from the God of the Old Testament and Jesus are valued, which they should be, but the Bible clearly also values personal relationship and particularism when it comes to the claims of Yhwh and Jesus. The world is not without an owner. If someone thinks the virgin birth is hard to accept, try the statement “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” It is certainly clear that God understands ignorance of particular information and can weight that into account as is done in many stories in the Old and New Testament of people coming into contact with the people of God. Completely eliminating any consequence to relational particularism, however, is difficult to warrant from anything in the Bible. God is a just judge, but justice requires understanding and weighting every individual case and that individual attention is intended to go both ways.

God within our egalitarian system

Our chief means of enforcing our egalitarian ideal is protest. If our society was less secular churches would more often be the targets of demonstrations. After apathy, the most common human response to the intrusion of God into our business is anger. “What gives God the right?!”

In fairness this is an old issue. The declaration that “there is no God” in the Psalms is not so much an atheist manifesto than an observation that God often seems to be an absentee landlord. Job wanted a face-off in court to make God respond. Of course in the end of the story the face-off didn’t turn out as Job expected. The point is, however, that an inevitable consequence of making people for God was to become the subject of our judgment. We don’t just ask “what if God were one of us”, we expect that he should assert no greater prerogative than we would allow each other.

CS Lewis and Dorothy Sayers imagined God writing himself into the story as his chief means of communicating with us. The downside of this for rampant egalitarians is that in the trinitarian system we use Jesus as a rope to make Yhwh one of us as too.

I am not my own

Part of the wonder of the pastoral vocation for someone as ADHD as I am is to simultaneously ponder multiple texts. In my adult Sunday School class I’ve got Rob’s Bell ringing in my ear while I work through 2 Samuel 8-12. In this portion of the book David is in a long and dangerous slide in terms of his regard for the Almighty. With each successive step he is increasingly viewing Yhwh not so much as the master of the universe who rescues him from lions, giants and insane tyrants as a tool to embellish his increasing empire. The ark makes such a nice God box. A temple would finish the city off nicely. As David, now sending bloody Joab to do his work, gets up late from his bed and sends for Uriah’s wife to fill it, God seems nowhere to be found. The book of Samuel opens with an infertile woman, Bathsheba and David couldn’t be so lucky. Uriah is dispatched in more ways than one and David imagines the empire of his hands is secure.

Yhwh then sends Nathan to David and the crisis comes to full exposure. Nathan tells the masterful allegory and David pronounces the justice due himself. The story then takes a twist. David has committed adultery. David has committed murder, but the charge leveled against him is despising Yhwh. David immediately confesses “I have sinned against the LORD” and his sin is taken away from him.

Um, didn’t we forget Uriah?

Uriah was the epitome of the faithful servant. Uriah refused to sleep with his wife or eat the king supplied feast while his people were sleeping in tents or out in the field. David, who earlier in the story couldn’t fail at anything now couldn’t make a drunk soldier sleep with the woman whom the man who could literally sleep with every virgin in town couldn’t resist. Uriah then is once again dispatched to the front with the orders in his hand for his final dispatch. Uriah is the real deal, a servant of his master. David has become a fraud. David is now an egalitarian with God, and no one else.

What does this have to do with Jesus’ social revolution? The Bible isn’t finally the story of human rights, of us getting what we deserve. It is the story of unfaithful servants getting better than they deserve in a very un-egalitarian way. David’s son will die, David will live. Uriah will die, his wife will be consoled by her new husband.

Jesus’ parables are mixtures of faithful servants getting their just rewards, and unfaithful servants sometimes getting judgment and at other times getting what they don’t deserve at the protest of the righteous. David’s big lesson is that he too is a servant and all servants must finally stand before the owner. David will get a lot of latitude, cutting down 2/3rds of Moabites, burning cities, taking crowns, putting together a first-rate harem, but forgetting whose servant he is a line he must not cross.

The Heidelberg Catechism begins with a very non-abolitionist confession. “I am not my own.” This is the language of slavery to a master. Jesus does undertake a social revolution, but it is a peculiar revolution. There is an egalitarian aspect to our servitude. We all finally report to one master. Uriah, the faithful servant, could disobey David’s command to participate in the cover-up by appealing to the higher master. In Jesus’ parable of the unforgiving servant he makes it clear that orders from the top must be applied at every level. The application is egalitarian even if the structure is not.