In a previous post, I summarized part of Richard Bauckham’s argument that:
“God is always moving from the particular to the universal, his is a storied narrative of action with three aspects: the temporal, the spatial and the social. In other words, God is constantly moving toward an ever-new future, toward an ever-new horizon and always toward an ever-new people.”
Bauckham goes on to argue that there is another narrative movement that should characterizes all of these three other aspects, as well as the mission of the church.
This is a movement to all by way of the least.
He writes:
God singled out the poor and the powerless, choosing to begin his work with them, not because God’s love does not extend to the cultural and social elite, but actually for the sake of the wealthy and the powerful as well as for the poor and the humble. God’s love has to reach the strong via the weak, because the strong can receive the love of God only by abandoning their pretensions to status above others. Only when they see in God’s choice of those without status that status counts for nothing in God’s sight can they abandon the arrogance and the vested interests that prevent their right relationship with God and with others.
Bauckham argues, using Paul’s arguments in 1 Corinthians, that God’s shaming of the wise and the strong in the preaching of the gospel is a “redemptive contradiction of their values.” By the exaltation of the crucified Christ—the foolishness of the cross—, God defined his own kingdom.
Bauckham concludes with this rather challenging statement for those of us helping to “build movements everywhere.”
So God’s way to his universal kingdom is through a movement of identification with the least.
What are the implications? According to Bauckham, there are several:
Spiritual movements cannot be indifferent to the inequalities and injustices of the world into which we are sent.
The gospel comes to each person in the realities and differences of their social and economic situations.
The gospel engages with the injustices of the world on its way to the kingdom of God.
As we build movements in geographical extension and in numerical increase, there must also be (in the Bible’s imagery) this downward movement of solidarity with the people at the bottom of the social scale of importance and wealth.
And lastly:
We must acknowledge that God has given priority in the kingdom to the poorest, to those with no power or influence, to the wretched, and to the neglected, because he loves them and because he loves all the rest of us who can enter the kingdom only alongside them.
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