This magnificent undertaking, in which God rescues His world, is finalized in the ascent of Jesus and feast of Pentecost, and is a microcosm of the millennia-long global process of salvation.
Or, perhaps, the global process is a macrocosm of the life of Jesus: His time on earth writ large.
Either way, the three or four decades during which Jesus lived as a physical human being on earth are a hinge point, the inflection between the millennia before His incarnation and the millennia after His resurrection, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice describes:
Those who followed him would begin to act as if every life is worthy. The community of people called Christians would minister to the sick and disabled and build hospitals, pursue universal education, spread teaching through universities, and lift up the poor in faraway places, “for they would inherit the earth.”
Life with Jesus includes a balance between the individual and the corporate. Each person has her or his own unique and personal relationship with God. Yet the fullness of faith can be lived out only in community.
God calls people to unity, not to uniformity. Individuals retain their own distinctive qualities and make their own independent decisions, while being interdependent with their fellow disciples and fully dependent on God.
Rice chooses to continue the thought in the first person plural. God gathers people together. He turns a bunch of individuals into a “we” — following Jesus is a team sport, not an individual sport.
Nothing in our human existence has been quite the same since that fateful Sunday so long ago. We join Johann Sebastian Bach in saying (as he wrote at the beginning of his compositions), “God help me.” And we glory in the belief that our Lord answers. But we too often fail to say, as Bach did at the end of his magnificent works, “(Everything) To the Glory of God.”
While the individual retains her or his individuality, and while the community of disciples forms its own corporate self, direction ultimately comes from God.
Followers of Jesus pray for His guidance, and work to set aside their own notions. The task of the self is to set aside the self: not to annihilate the self, but rather to preserve it and to have it play a secondary role to God’s direction. Among Jesus followers, the desire of a leader is to point to God’s leadership. So Moses, a leader, prays to God, asking for His leadership and guidance:
In your unfailing love you will lead the people you have redeemed. In your strength you will guide them. (Ex. 15:13)
A leader is an intermediary, a mediator, a priest: she or he speaks to God on the people’s behalf, and speaks to the people on God’s behalf:
When the people cried out to Moses, he prayed to the Lord. (Numbers 11:2)
Disciples refer to this setting aside of self as “dying to self,” a jarring metaphor which captures the demotion of one’s own priorities. To give away one’s time, attention, money, and energy is to give away one’s life. And to give away one’s life is to die.
Every hour spent shoveling snow for a physically disabled neighbor, every hour spent helping a child learn to read, every hour spent listening to a person in distress grieve, is an hour of one’s life that has been given away.
Shortly before his death in 2013, Byron Porisch was reading a book by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay. In that book, Byron marked passages which made precisely these same points:
Church is God’s people intentionally committing to die together so that others can find his kingdom. Just as God had given away his Son, he was now asking me to give my life away.
In that same book are phrases which point to God’s vision of how He desires to use community. Whichever word is used to label it, it’s not about the building of an institution. The end is too easily confused with the means. God gathers people in order to scatter them: He sends them out to build His kingdom.
It was interesting that in all His teaching, preaching and ministering Jesus never really talks about the Church and He did not establish or plant a church. All He talked about was the Kingdom.
The dialectic of gathering and scattering is the creative cycle in which God trains disciples and uses them to reach out to the rest of the world.
But God is not only about uniting and sending: He is also about reuniting. He is not only about assembling and then distributing: He is also about reassembling. This is why the word “reconciliation” is significant in the New Testament. God will bring together those things — those people — whom the world’s brokenness has separated. He will reconnect those people whom the forces of sin have disconnected:
There is hope for your future, declares the Lord, and your children shall come back to their own country. (Jeremiah 31:17)
Jesus works atonement and restoration. Those who’ve been revitalized by the power of Jesus gather together and yet do so for the purpose of reaching out to others. In the midst of all this creative energy, God restores broken relationships. The petition, “Thy kingdom come” refers to this healing dynamic.
