We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded by your direct support for ReKnew and our vision. Please consider supporting this project.

cross

Voluntary Suffering and the Kingdom

In a post from two days ago, I wrote about the call to voluntary suffering for others as it is laid out in the New Testament. For the first three centuries of the church, Christians understood this call as they sought to follow Jesus’ example of forgoing the use of violence and expressing God’s self-sacrificial love toward others, including their enemies. Unfortunately, this mindset was lost when the Church acquired political power in the fourth century. Because many leaders viewed this political power as a blessing from God rather than a temptation from the enemy, Jesus’ refusal to use coercive power had to be re-interpreted.

For instance, Augustine speculated that Jesus’ decision to suffer unjustly rather than use coercive force was not intended to be a permanent example for all Christians to follow. Rather, he reasoned, Jesus had to suffer and die unjustly because he was the Savior, and his suffering and death were necessary in order for us to be freed from the devil and reconciled to God. Now that this has been accomplished, however, and now that God (allegedly) had given Christians the power of the Sword, it was not only permissible for Christians to use violence when the cause was “just,” but they also had the responsibility before God to do so. Voluntary suffering was no longer necessary.

But if we take seriously the passages from the New Testament about voluntary suffering, it could be argued that the Church’s willingness to suffer cuts to the heart of what it means to manifest the kingdom of God.

Jesus’ willingness to suffer out of love for his enemies rather than use coercive force against them is consistently identified in the NT as the ultimate expression of God’s love and the ultimate means by which the powers of evil are defeated. It’s what Calvary is all about. And so, the willingness of God’s people to suffer out of love for others—including our enemies—rather than use coercive force against them must still be considered the ultimate expression of God’s love and the ultimate resistance against the patterns of this world.

This attitude expresses the most radical difference between the kingdom of God, ruled by God the Father, and the kingdom of the world, ruled by Satan. The kingdom of the world relies on using “power over” others, but the kingdom of God relies wholly on “power under” on behalf of others. This is the power of the cross. By removing the cross from the center of what it means to be a follower of Jesus, we eliminate the most fundamental distinction between these two kingdoms. And when this happens, the church takes on the character of the kingdom of the world.

Photo credit: Oli4.D via VisualHunt.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Related Reading

Sermon Clip: Dear Abby

In this short sermon clip, Greg Boyd discusses Matthew 7. The infamous “plank in your own eye vs a speck of dust in your neighbors. He clarifies what this verse means when you have a close friend with an issue that you are helping them with. In the full sermon of Heart Smart our team…

Contemplating Food Choices

As many of you know, Shelley and I have been vegetarians for the last eight years or so. This is a personal conviction, not a doctrine, but there are compelling reasons for adopting this lifestyle. The main conviction that led me to quit eating meat was that I felt I should never kill anything out of convenience…

Who Rules Governments? God or Satan? Part 2

In the previous post, I raised the question of how we reconcile the fact that the Bible depicts both God and Satan as the ruler of nations, and I discussed some classical ways this has been understood. In this post I want to offer a cross-centered approach to this classical conundrum that provides us with…

Corrective Love

drp via Compfight Kathy Escobar posted the other day about providing “corrective experiences” to those who have been hurt in the past. How many of us have approached Christians with our wounds and have been offered more of the same instead of the love and acceptance we’re longing for? How beautiful it would be if…

If you really want to defend the poor from Caesar, shouldn’t we use the political means that exist? It’s easy to make your argument when you are in a position of privilege.

Question: I’ve been reading your blogs for a while. I’ve read multiple texts written by you and it’s difficult to listen much longer as someone in poverty. It’s easy to make your argument when you are in a position of privilege. The Church doesn’t have the power and resources to help the poor everywhere. Christians…

Q&A: Already-Not-Yet

Question: My question is regarding our “entanglement” with Christ that you spoke about a few weeks ago. In the sermon you noted how we are joined with Christ like those two particles that can be separated by light years of distance and yet both will react equally to a force acting on the other one. So here is my question: If…