By Neil Earle
In the Jewish world of First Century Palestine, the world to which Jesus came, Messiahs didn’t die.
Nor did Messiahs particularly care about little children, cups of cold water, bleeding victims lying half-dead in a ditch, reckless sons who blew the family fortune, or boys clutching a small lunch of five barley loaves and three small fishes.
Messiahs certainly didn’t have to be escorted by their parents into Egypt as a political refugee.
No.
But Jesus of Nazareth’s life experiences resonated with all these folks even if his fellow-countrymen, chafing under both the corrupt Herods and the sometime brutal Romans, yearned for a Military Deliverer in the mould of the Judges of old – men like Ehud who rammed a sword through a fat king’s belly (Judges 3:15-30). Or Samson, who killed 1000 men with the jawbone of an ass like Samson. Or David, who knocked over armored, clanking giants with one rock from a slingshot.
In the popular understanding of the First Century, the prophesied Messiah would have little time for the less, the least, the lost and the little.
All of which introduces two key concepts that Christian teachers as diverse as Robert Capon, N.T. Wright and Gordon Fee keep presenting. One of them is this: The Bible is all about the Kingdom of God, yet the King of this new order kept talking about the Kingdom as a mystery. Even mysteries – “the mysteries of the Kingdom” (Matthew 13:11). Instead of an Alexander the Great, a king on a white horse, God offered a naked carpenter nailed to a tree, a Kingdom that Galilean housewives could understand, one working invisibly but relentlessly like yeast in a batch of dough.
Down-and-outers flocked to hear Jesus talk about a Kingdom where “bad” people are often rewarded – a crooked steward, a spendthrift son, the grumpy neighbor who reluctantly helps you at midnight. Not unexpectedly then in this Upside Down Kingdom “good” people are sometimes scolded. Think of the devoted priest and dedicated Levite who left the wounded man in his own pool of blood until a kind Samaritan happened along. Mark Twain used to say that the older brother in the Prodigal Parable (“You never threw me a party”) was a good man in “the worst possible sense of the word.”
The religiously self-satisfied, the pew warmers of the day, they often missed the Kingdom Jesus preached about by a country mile.
Today’s deadening familiarity can still kill us to such mysteries as these: that God won by dying, that Jesus did his best work by letting his enemies run roughshod over him, that he qualified us for eternal life by lying dead in a cold tomb, that his triumph over death was not recorded by Campbell Brown-babe types on CNN but by a woman out of whom he had cast seven devils.
All of which is to say that this Mystery of the Kingdom is almost hidden from a big wide world merrily going on its way to eventual destruction or death. Meanwhile, the mystery is activated secretly in soup kitchens, cold weather shelters, visits to hospitals, kid’s camps, sing-alongs at nursing homes and seniors apartments. This kingdom will not be voted in by political action committees but continues relentlessly proceeding at the pace of a crop growing in the field, a Kingdom so outwardly weak by human standards that it can’t even stop weeds from threatening the good crop.
Which means what, exactly? The answer introduces us to a second concept, that of “left handed power.”
Robert Capon defines left-handed power (a Martin Luther phrase originally) as power that looks like weakness, the kind of paradoxical concept that Paul was expounding in 2 Corinthians 12 when he said that God’s power worked best through human weakness. “My grace is all you need,” Jesus told Paul, “for where there is weakness, my power is shown the more completely” (2 Corinthians 12:9). The human Paul saw a lot of that in his life – beaten, whipped, stoned, shipwrecked, yet God delivered him time after time so he could deliver the message of God’s saving grace from deep personal conviction. This is one reason he became the greatest missionary who ever lived.
Left-handed power, says Capon, is an intervention in this world that looks like weakness, so minor and insignificant to human eyes that it looks like non-intervention. So weak that it seems determined to stop no evil whatsoever – like, like, tares springing up among the wheat. (Kingdom, Grace, Judgment, page 16). This is the power that manifests itself in yieldedness, in humility, in quiet acceptance of the worst that this life can throw at us. Jesus said of himself that he came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many (Mark 10:28). The Quaker poet James Russell wrote of
“Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own”
The world would be saved by a Messiah on a cross, one who would be faithful unto death and whose death reconciled all men and women to himself. “Jesus will do his saving work, not at the top of the heap,” writes Capon, “but in the depth of the human condition.” That is the mystery of our salvation, the way things work wherever Jesus is allowed to reign, the Sovereign Ruler of what Donald Kraybill calls “The Upside Down Kingdom.”