Paul said the time would come, a time when people would no longer “tolerate sound doctrine” but rather follow their own “desires” and “curiosity,” listening no longer to the truth but instead to “myths.”[1] Jesus too—he didn’t suggest his followers would be all that successful in their preaching either. The “world hates you,” he told his disciples bluntly; they had better get used to calling on the Holy Spirit, he said, because they’re going to need him at trial.[2]
The hostility of the world—it’s written into the story; it’s part and parcel of being Christian, belonging to Jesus, belonging to the Church. Blessed are the persecuted, especially those persecuted on account of Jesus—that’s the Sermon on the Mount.[3] At the center of our story is, of course, a crucifixion, so this shouldn’t surprise us. Jesus didn’t win everybody over; he got himself arrested and crucified. And Jesus didn’t say, “I’ve got this;” he said, “Take up your cross and follow me.”[4] No one said the Church would always exist in a well-meaning benevolent world; quite the opposite in fact. That’s just the way it is, the way it has been and will be. This is why we pray for the kingdom to come, every day, every time we pray.
I think about this from time to time, this warning about the hostility of the world and the inevitability of conflict. Writing in different publications, as I do, I witness this in a minor way, nothing serious—a mean email or two. There was a man in Fort Worth, for example, who used to email me to call me a bigot every time something I wrote came out in the paper—without fail every time, bigot this, bigot that, you’re a bigot. I felt like I got to know him, like we became buddies in a weird sort of way. Of course, this sort of thing just comes with the territory of public discourse, comes with preaching and ministry, and I’m not really bothered by it at all.
But it is interesting, the inevitability of conflict—sometimes reasoned and sensible, sometimes irrational and wounded. A woman in Pennsylvania, for instance, wrote to me once, beginning her email, “I agree with everything you say, but you’re Catholic.” And then she proceeded to excoriate Catholicism along the usual lines; then she “agreed with everything” I said. It’s an interesting phenomenon as I said. There’s something to what Paul said, to what Jesus said about the world and the world’s hatred, about the “itching ears,” as Paul called them, of those who don’t want to hear the truth.[5] Such hostility, I have found, remains, even today. Perhaps more so today.
But of course, that’s only part of the story. Yes, the world will hate us; there will be resistance to the truth, almost hypnotic resistance. But we Christians must be careful here. We need not fool ourselves into thinking that’s all there is to it. We shouldn’t think that our failure in preaching the gospel, in speaking the truth is always due to world’s blind resistance to Jesus as foretold in the scripture. That is, we shouldn’t think that our failure to communicate the gospel successfully is somehow predestined and that it has nothing to do with us and with our own failure and sins.
Yes, the world hates us; there is resistance to the truth. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t messed it up ourselves, let the side down, said the wrong thing or said nothing at all. It doesn’t mean we ought not look at ourselves critically, questioning ourselves, asking what we could do better or how we could speak more clearly and coherently. It was Peter who said that judgment begins with “the household of God.”[6] Sometimes we forget that. Sometimes we focus only on the splinter in our brother’s eye and ignore the great beam in our own.[7] Yes, a lot of folks are hostile to the gospel and the truth. But still, we need to look hard at ourselves to see how well we’re preaching the gospel and telling the truth—not just with our words but also with our lives.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that Lutheran theologian killed by the Nazis, in his unfinished Ethics wrote a long section titled “The Confession of Guilt.” In it he laments all the things he thought Christians did and did not do to contribute to moral collapse of Germany and the rise of the Third Reich. It’s a haunting litany of sins and negligence, a hauntingly relevant litany of failure that should make anyone who reads it today shudder in fear. “The Church confesses,” he says, “that she has not proclaimed often and clearly enough her message of the one God who has revealed Himself for all times in Jesus Christ…She confesses her timidity, her evasiveness, her dangerous concessions…She has failed to speak the right word in the right way and at the right time.” “The Church confesses that she has desired security, peace and quiet, possessions and honor, to which she had no right…” On and on his lament runs, confessing the Church’s inability to speak to sexual immorality, the decline of Sunday worship, the exploitation of the poor, her overweening desire for institutional self-preservation.[8] It’s haunting, as I said, to read it today. But we should read it, these words of a man who put his money where his mouth was, a preacher who preached until he was killed, a person who I think has earned the right to speak to us from beyond the grave and call us out.
Now I bring all this up for two reasons. First, because of the gospel today, the story of Jesus sending his disciples into the world on mission, “like lambs among wolves,” a mission we know is still ongoing. We too are sent out into the world to preach peace and the kingdom.[9] But also because of what Paul said, how he described his apostolic ministry, when he said, “I bear the marks of Jesus on my body.”[10]
When we think about how we should present ourselves as Christians; when we think about how we should preach the gospel or speak the truth in the world, we shouldn’t, of course, be naïve to either the spiritual or philosophical hostilities we’ll face, much less the cultural and political enemies we’ll make. We will indeed remain “lambs among wolves” until the Shepherd comes. Yet, we mustn’t forget that our witness in the world will always be cruciform, taking the form of sacrifice and suffering, the form of the cross. It will never take the form of brute power or violence, not even pragmatic violence. It will never be arrogant. It will never fear death, never live by an ethics formulated by fear of death or even the fear of just losing. That’s what Bonhoeffer said in substance went wrong with Christians in Germany. They feared losing their own earthly good over the truth, losing their earthly lives over the promise of eternal life, over that which should have shaped their judgment and actions, which should have made them bravely stand up against evil instead of cooperate with it.
Charles Péguy, that French poet killed in World War I, a Catholic, he wrote once, “Christianity in the modern world is no longer what it was—of the people…Socially it is nothing more than the religion of the bourgeois…a wretched sort of distinguished religion…It is therefore nothing; that is why it means nothing.”[11] The point I’m trying to make, the point I think people like Paul and Péguy and Bonhoeffer were trying to make, is that authentic Christian witness, authentic preaching, requires of necessity a commitment not only to truthfulness but also to vulnerability and suffering. It requires that we embrace the powerlessness of Jesus. Christian witness is not about making the world a better place, winning an argument, preserving civilization—all goals which can tempt us to idolize power Jesus himself renounced—rather, Christian witness is about being faithful. It’s about living the life Jesus asked us to live even in the face of danger, even when we have enemies, even when they attack us, even when they kill us. We need to make sure our Christianity hasn’t become merely a cultural form, merely cover for the mores of a tribe. We need to remember the actual truth and ethics of Jesus, realizing it’ll put us in a far more vulnerable position than we’re comfortable with, a risky position, which is what he meant calling us “lambs among wolves”—lambs like he was a lamb, suffering and sacrificial. That’s what Paul meant by saying he bore the wounds of Jesus in his body; he understood what it meant for Christians to be lambs. For we are not wolves. We can’t be wolves—not without letting go of Jesus.
And so, here we are this Fourth of July weekend. We’re fools if we’re not grateful to be in this great country of ours, plain fools if we’re not thankful for our freedoms. But of course, we are a troubled country, divided in many ways. Even we Christians are divided. But we should be thankful, nonetheless. This is still a great country, and we’re still a great people.
But as Christians, I think we need to think about what it means today to be witnesses of Jesus, to be Christians, to be presenters of the gospel. Now I don’t have answers for you here; you’ll need to find them on your own. But I will say that I think the question for all of us is this: What does bearing the marks of Jesus in our bodies look like today? If our participation in the world—in the culture, in economics, business, in politics—if our participation is to be cruciform and bear the marks of Jesus, what does that look like? What does that mean? That’s the question. That’s the spiritual question we should ask ourselves as Christians and citizens. We shouldn’t shy away from it, covering ourselves with false confidences like a child with a blanket. Otherwise we may find that we’re not following the Lamb, but something else. And that would be tragic—for only the Lamb will win. Amen.
[1] 2 Timothy 4:3-4
[2] John 15-:18-19; Mark 13:11
[3] Matthew 5:10
[4] Mark 8:34 paraphrase passim
[5] Ibid.
[6] 1 Peter 4:17
[7] Matthew 7:3
[8] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 110-116
[9] Luke 10:1-9
[10] Galatians 6:17
[11] Alexander Dru, Péguy, 82
© 2022 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
