ULDAH MINISTRY

No,78　　APRIL. 2002

【Members of God's Household】

　 As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions -it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith- and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God- not by works, so that no-one can boast. For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth… remember that at that time you were separated from Christ, …without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. …
Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
Ephesians chapter 2

Apostle Paul's message begins with a shocking statement that what one regards as "normal life" in this world is not in fact normal, but dead in God's eyes if man does not live a life given from God through faith in Jesus Christ. Sin, which separates man from God, is closely associated with death in the Bible. The result of God's rejection of sin is death. Therefore, without convictions of one's own sinfulness, man cannot live fully as a living person before God. God's wrath falls upon sin and causes Him to judge and punish sinners with the penalty of death. Before being delivered from His wrath we behaved according to the ways of the world, subject to the devil, i.e., 'the ruler of the kingdom of the air,' and our own flesh. In other words, we were compromising with the world's ways, yielding to temptations of the devil, and being controlled by the cravings of our sinful nature. But for any divine means of rescue out of this vicious circle we would have had to perish in our own transgressions. The all surpassing God had already prepared the way for man's salvation through Jesus Christ to deal with the consequences of His own wrath so that the chosen would be made to be holy and blameless in His sight before the creation of the world. Thus, because of His love, God has given grace to save us, and we have chosen to co-operate with His way, which means that we cannot earn salvation by works but after salvation, we must respond to His grace by good works. What Christ achieved through His death on the cross was to reconcile us to God so that we would be 'fellow-citizens with God's people and members of God's household'. He demolished all the barriers, hostility, restriction and separation between man and God and also between men, nations and tribes in the world. It was God's plan from the very beginning that 'when the times (would) have reached their fulfilment -to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ' (Eph. 1:10).
Paul saw Christian life as a life in the transitional period between aeons, with the convictions that he lived in the final era, in that the old aeon had passed away by the first coming of the Messiah but the new aeon was yet to come according to the preordained plan of God. Therefore, he put an emphasis on the end of the world as a future event, looking forward to the glorious time of consummation by the arrival of Jesus. Even so, he occasionally seemed to believe that the Lord would return in his lifetime or to be convinced of the imminency of the Lord's coming. Thus, he came to a conclusion that his time was temporal, requiring faith and active waiting with patience and hope to enter the world to come. For Paul the completion of salvation was in the future. In this respect, his emphasis seems to be somewhat different from Jesus' understanding of the kingdom of God, portrayed in the Synoptics. Jesus emphasised the present as a time of decision. He stressed the imminent arrival of the kingdom and accordingly the urgent necessity of a radical change of behaviour. His extraordinary statements: 'Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God' (Lk.9:60), 'No-one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God' (Lk.9:62), 'Since that time, the good news of the kingdom of God is being preached, and everyone is forcing his way into it' (Lk.16:16) and so on, can be understood in the light of Jesus' emphesis on immediacy and single-mindedness. For Jesus, who taught that the kingdom of God was already here, man should not occupy his mind for matters of this soon passing world because the glorious kingdom might be due to manifest any moment. If there is no tomorrow how foolish it will be to store crops and goods for one's own sake rather than to share them now with the poor and the needy (Lk.12:13~21, 'The Parable of the Rich Fool').
Likewise, the majority of Jesus' revolutionary teachings were taught by parables and they conveyed the call for immediate and wholehearted decision to enter the kingdom of God with prompt action. In terms of 'the kingdom of God', Jesus taught the way of life in the present under divine rule and power. John Dominic Crossan puts it, 'the kingdom of God is what the world would be if God were directly and immediately in charge.' Though Jesus clearly taught a very revolutionary life-style to be practised here and now, rather than an ideal hope for changed life in the future in the coming kingdom on earth, it is very regrettable that today, His genuine and original teaching is not being put into practice and instead, being replaced by a western value system of materialism, humanism and capitalism even in Christendom. We have become so immune to the materialistic, convenient, self-centred life-style in developed countries that we might not be aware quite how offensive what actually dominate our daily lives and hearts are to God. However, if we sincerely give heed to Jesus' teachings again, we Christians cannot help but tremble at how far we have gone away from being the members of God's family, as Jesus had originally intended.
During Jesus' days, in the first Century Mediterranean Palestine, they had firmly established the familial, social, political groupings, which had inevitably created discriminations, hierarchies and exclusion in society. For those who enjoyed living such life of familial, social, systematic and structural and traditional values in the society, Jesus' teachings would have come down as a shock. On one occasion, Jesus asked, "Who are my mother and my mother and my brothers?" and looking at the crowd who had followed and listened to Him, said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother," and also on some other occasion, He replied to a woman who had put value on mothering a great and famous son like Jesus, with an unexpected remark, "Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it." On both occasions, Jesus emphasised the primacy of today over tomorrow, and of the kingdom of God over the present earthly world. Without delay, the crowd was encouraged to commit to the work for the kingdom, rather than to cherishing worldly values. This meant that Jesus had negated the establishment of a narrow family tie symbolised by patriarchal chauvinism that could not accommodate the ideal familial relationships in the kingdom of God and so introduced the new but eternal family tie of the members of God's household. He revolutionarily opened up a whole new grouping to anyone who wishes to join it, and such membership of God's family should have been practised among followers of Jesus since then. Paul developed this idea of the united household of God from a smallest unit of society, i.e., a family uniting every nation beyond discrimination of aliens, sex or gender in the above quoted passage. However, our presupposed definition of so-called family is so deeply bound by primacy of blood relations that it seems very difficult for us to practise what Jesus taught and what Paul interpreted. Then, who can be most likely to be the best candidate to enter the kingdom of God as a member of God's household? Jesus' answer to this question is also very revolutionary.
When Jesus taught, "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God," He really meant, 'Blessed are the destitute or the beggars who have nothing at all …', and not simply the poor who still had means to survive in society, by distinctively using the term 'destitute (pt?chos)', instead of 'poor (pen?s)', according to Crossan's exposition. The implication behind the usage of this term were social, structural oppression and injustice in Jesus time as well as the time of the Old Testament prophets, who had successively warned against social evil caused by man's greed and abuse of power and advocated a sharing, caring and loving community. Jesus, who challenged and exposed the society's discriminatory groupings and institutional evil operations, declared that only those beggars who possessed nothing in this world and had to single-mindedly depend on God could literally inherit the kingdom of God.
His revolutionary negation against established power structure of society is also reflected in His attitude towards small children. In His days, in the Mediterranean world, infants were regarded as a nobody, i.e., an utterly powerless and helpless existence, in that paternal authority and power were often abusively administered to terminate his own newly born infants' right to live. Therefore, Jesus' declaration: 'I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me,' (Matt.18:3~5) would not have been accepted at its face value unless people themselves had first humbly accepted children as Jesus did and taught. Thus, only those who can accept the neglected, the oppressed, the outcast and the disadvantaged in society like the beggars and the children are to be welcomed to be the members of God's household by the heavenly Father.
What Jesus intended in His teachings -they were not ideal features of the future kingdom but Jesus' followers had to practise them now- was also demonstrated by His several revolutionary actions. Among them, open table-fellowship was distinctive, against which Jesus was accused of social deviance as 'a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and "sinners" ' (Matt.11:19) by His furious opponents. What Jesus illustrated concerning invitation to banquets in the parables such as 'The Parable of The wedding Banquet' in Matt.22:1~13, and 'The Parable of The Great Banquet' in Lk.14:15~24, and also how He lived it out were viewed as egalitarian enthusiasm by them and it was actually threatening society's established and customised hierarchical and discriminating table fellowship. Crossan comments that anthropologists see "table fellowship" as a map of economic discrimination, social hierarchy, and political differentiation. In other words, human relationships in a society can be characterised by with whom, where and how one eats. Jesus broke this conventional rules of table fellowship and brought about the revolutionary new non-discriminating open table fellowship. The kingdom of God is such a place where this open table fellowship is without restriction, to be practised by the members of God's family and it should have already materialised among us.
As Pierre Bourdieu's description of Mediterranean "honour and shame" is very right to the point and seems to give us a good norm to know to what degree we remain in Jesus' teaching, it might be worth quoting. 'The point of honour is the basis of the moral code of an individual who sees himself always through the eyes of others, who has need of others for his existence, because the image he has of himself is indistinguishable from that presented to him by other people. … Respectability, the reverse of shame, is the characteristic of a person who needs other people in order to grasp his own identity and whose conscience is a kind of interiorization of others, since these fulfil for him the role of witness and judge … He who has lost his honour no longer exists. He ceases to exist for other people, and at the same time he ceases to exist from himself.' (For further reading: Crossan, John Dominic 'Jesus' Harper San Francisco). Bourdieu's description suggests that if we are among those who take their identity through the eyes of others, we are still not living up to Jesus' standard, i.e., the standard of God's kingdom. In other words, we are not responding to God's grace and Jesus' redemptive death on the cross by leaning on our own efforts, works and others' reputation rather than God's in order to secure our identity.