Slaves of the crucified Lord
Paul – the “slave” of Jesus (Rom. 1.1; Gal. 1.10) –
showed us how to follow a crucified King.
His encounter with the Risen Lord on the Damascus Road marked Paul’s
“crucifixion” (cf. Gal. 6.14) regarding the self-assertive ethos that had
guided him up to that moment and his “resurrection” into a new life of
self-emptying, obedient service to his crucified-and-risen master (cf. Phil. 2.5-7;
3.4-11). Indeed, Paul’s autobiographical
remarks in his letter to the Philippians showcase two kinds of apologetic
strategy – on the one hand, Paul’s former apologia had involved him in
the pursuit of intellectual brilliance, socially mobility and respectability,
and what’s more – zeal to the point of using violence to defend the integrity
of Jewish tradition, and, on the other, a strategy of downward mobility, accompanied
by the loss of status, credibility and security, that was albeit no less
zealous. Only that, once he had been
commissioned as an apostle, Paul exposed himself to as much, if not more,
violence than he had previously visited upon the followers of Jesus. Paul put himself forward as an example of
faithfulness to Jesus for his converts to follow (cf. 1 Cor. 4.16; 11.1; Phil.
3.17; 1 Thess. 1.6; 2 Thess. 3.9).
Paul new that to live in light of the victory of
God-in-Christ was to embrace the cross – the place where the “rulers of this
Age” had failed to grasp God’s “foolish wisdom” and had attempted to eliminate
the divine threat to their power (cf. 1 Cor. 2.7-8). Paul strove to make his readers understand
that, at the end of the day, their lives no longer belonged to them (!); they
now belonged to Jesus:
“For the love of Christ
urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all
have died. And he died for all, so that those who
live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was
raised for them.” (2 Cor. 5.14-15)
Jesus
conducted his ministry in a fraught context where there were two obvious and
opposite sides. And yet, he refused
either to collaborate with the Roman regime or to play the role of a violent
revolutionary leader. Jesus’
idiosyncratic revolution was a third way, one that avoided the Scylla of
cowardly collaboration and the Charybdis of vengeful violence. Paul evangelized the empire with a subversive
gospel of a crucified Jewish Lord, which made him, for his former colleagues in
Judaism, a blasphemer and a traitor and for the Romans, a potential threat to
the established order (cf. 1 Cor. 1.18ff).
Both Jesus and Paul died for their strange “revolutions”. Those who would follow Jesus, like Paul did,
must adopt the unpopular stance of confronting both sides of any ideological
conflict with the bracing message of the cross.
Through his
incarnation and death, the Son of God turned the world upside down (cf. Ac. 17.6;
Phil. 2.5-8). A crucified slave, a
slaughtered lamb, now sits on the throne of the cosmos (cf. Phil. 2.9-11; Rev.
5.6-12). Power has been eternally
“revalued”. The Creator can re-create
life out of death for an individual as well as on a cosmic scale (cf. Rom. 8.3,
11, 18-25). The Son of God became a
victim of imperial oppression, and thoroughly subverted all human hubris by
experiencing the ultimate humiliation and triumphing over it through his death
(Col. 2.9-15) and resurrection (1 Cor. 15.20-28).
Those who
follow the crucified Lord are “un-oppressable” – i.e. since they no longer play
the world’s power-games and because they interpret every humiliation endured
for Christ as a victory (just as Jesus did while accomplishing his
Father’s will), since they have renounced their rights and have followed their
Lord’s example in making themselves “condemned slaves” (cf. 1 Cor. 4.9-13) –
they expect nothing from the world besides rejection and contempt (Gal. 6.14),
and they look to Jesus who will crown their loyalty in the new world where true
justice shall finally be the rule (cf. Rev. 2.10; 21.1-5). At the end of the day, we need to embrace the
cross as our only means of victory – to die is to live (Mk. 8.34-35). People like Paul, Bonhoeffer and millions of
others down through the ages have understood this, have died to see the reality
of this. To follow Jesus is to be
liberated from the most pernicious of chains – those of fear and pride. Disciples of the crucified Lord know
themselves to be loved and have no need to prove themselves worthy. To follow the risen One is to walk free of
fear – even death cannot defeat those who have been – and will be – raised with
Christ.
[1] I.e. divine “wisdom”
and “power”: 1 Cor. 1.23-24.
[2] Cf. Chesterton, G.K. The
Everlasting Man: A Guide to G.K. Chesterton’s Masterpiece (Introduction,
Notes, and Commentary by Dale Ahlquist), Elk Grove Village: Word on Fire, 2024
[1925], p. 467, where, in the closing paragraph of his magnum opus, Chesterton
remarks upon the characteristically Christian propensity to demonstrate humour
and cheer in the face of fate and death.
Thousands of martyrs continue to be made around the world each year,
especially in the Global South.
Chesterton explored the idea of a modern westerner taking his (lack of)
faith seriously enough to give his life for it in his whimsical novel The
Ball and the Cross (1909), in which an atheist and a very traditional,
devout Roman Catholic repeatedly try, unsuccessfully and while being pursued by
the law, to conduct a duel over the question of the existence of God.
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