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Contrasts. We could not miss contrasts in the Christmas story that we celebrated two weeks ago:
- A powerful God uses a powerless girl through whom to bear the Christ child.
- A wealthy liar in a palace is contrasted against a pure, pregnant girl who hadn’t even a clinic or hospital in which to bear her child.
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A powerless baby (or toddler) and his parents flee as refugees or asylum-seekers to a foreign land to await the child’s emergence as king in his kingdom, while being a threat to a corrupt and privileged king, whose kingdom is on life-support.
- A powerful king whose Roman empire is busily claiming nations (and their resources) not his own – Greece, Egypt, Spain, France, and Britain – is contrasted against a now-powerless child whose birth announces that “the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever” (Revelation 11:15)!
People who staked their lot on Caesar and Herod’s kingdom have long since lost; those who stood on the other side of the contrast – on Jesus – have endured. Those who conveniently and deceitfully declared, “We have no king, but Caesar!” thereby throwing Jesus under the bus, have themselves died for good; while those who stood faithfully at the cross, endure through death to life abundant in resurrection.
In his masterpiece of a letter to an errant gathering of churches in a region called Galatia, the Apostle Paul named nine attributes or attitudes he calls the fruit of the Spirit. Contrasting factors are best referenced alongside their contrasted (non)-partners.
Paul was writing to a church that was having difficulty distinguishing good gospel from corrupt “gospel”; truthful and genuine evangelists from liars, and “dogs” (he calls them in Philippians 3:2) who were religious nationalists rather than Christian, for their dogged identity with Judaism rather than with Jesus.
The nationalists who were wrecking the Galatian church and the Galatians’ faith were more concerned with Jewish identity than identity in Christ. In their effort to protect Jewish identity and nationalism – to prevent Jewish identity from being “poisoned by the blood of Christ” as it were, or by the “garbage” of “Christ alone” – these nationalists would excuse any evil act in anyone so long as that person were championing and defending Jewish “purity” and Jewish identity, including hatred, discord, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and several other forms of depravity (Galatians 5:19-21).
Having named these as acts of the flesh, Paul drops the coordinating conjunction “but,” to show that Christians are not, and are most unlike, (Jewish) religious nationalists, because, they, instead of being participants in hatred, discord, selfishness, divisiveness, and the like, they are people of love, joy, peace, incredible patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). Elsewhere, when Paul makes lists like this (as in Colossians 3:5ff), he adds this: “do not lie to one another” (vs.9). Christians never premise their identity on lies; nationalists do – just as the Jewish nationalists were, who were troubling the Galatian Christians.
At the beginning of a new year, the question before each American Christian then, must be, “on which side of the contrasts shall you live?” Power – of Herod’s kind – is attractive and seductive, relentlessly pursuing Christians like the devil himself pursued Jesus, right after his baptism, and the reason is simple. National power is corruptible; power from above is not. Human power always turns toward self-serving, self-enriching and self-preserving – and it will demean, dehumanize, and even kill anyone who gets in the way. The Spirit’s power always pours itself out to and for others. Human power seeks “authority over” and control of others, which always creates conflict, divisions, and wars; the Spirit’s power seeks “partnership with” others in mutual submission to Christ’s lordship.
On which side of the contrasts shall you live, this new year? How shall you make the year happy, not just for you, but for others, which really, is the Christian way of service, servanthood, and letting the mind of Christ be in you?
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