Christianity in the US and the Eclipsed Christ – Mark Rich

“Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, ‘Come here at once and take your place at the table’? Would you not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink’? Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’” Luke 17:7-10

Taken on its own this passage is offensive to most Americans. Luke begins his account of Jesus’ ministry in chapter 4 with Jesus’ proclamation of a new kind of jubilee. Then during the travel narrative Luke gives three sayings about slave service:

Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. 12:37

No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. 16:13

And then there is the parable and saying I first cited.

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We white American Christians don’t want to serve anyone and we’re quite sure we don’t have to. We hear the words of the Declaration of Independence exactly as they were intended: as addressed to us and not to black nor brown people. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [meaning white, propertied adult males] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” There it is, we are endowed with liberty and we’re pursuing happiness. It belongs to us now – thank you Creator! The Constitution goes on to prohibit aristocracy, so now we have it: we’re free and we’re about our own happiness. We don’t have to serve anyone, and we don’t want to do so.

Part of that freedom means that we don’t have to serve Christ unless we want to and only to the extent that we want to. It had better not interfere with our happiness, and in the US of A happiness has a lot of materialism to it, and we know that Jesus isn’t keen on materialism. So what that ends up meaning is that Christ has got to just take his place, and keep it – in church, in Sunday School, on the sidelines of life, until of course the end of life when we suddenly need him a lot.

I believe this is why we do the dance of biblicism. If the Word of God is not centered on nor aimed at the gospel of Jesus Christ, but can be made from just anything we can fetch out of the Bible, then we, and not Christ, are the masters of the Bible. He is then the servant of us (Thank you, Jesus of Luke 12:37!), but not the other way around (Really, Jesus of Luke 17:7-10??). So biblicism functions as one of the main ways that we Christians eclipse the gospel while making ourselves shine as really, really super Christians.

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There is of course that other servant text, 16:13. So let’s talk about that God/mammon thing.

Annie Leonard puts this issue in other, more American-friendly terms in her latest video The Story of Solutions. The whole society, culture, politics, and media we are living in is devoted heart and soul to MORE – more stuff, more money, more consumption, more power – i.e., mammon in Jesus’ terms. What we need instead is a society, culture, and politics devoted to BETTER, which is definitely God’s game – what Jesus calls the reign of God. (I am making the theological interpretations, not Ms. Leonard.)

Our American belief in our own freedom is in large part a game, because we humans are always serving some god or other, no matter how free we think we are. And roughly speaking, the two major gods available are MORE (the kingdom of this world or of Satan) or BETTER (the reign of God). As Jesus correctly points out, they cannot both be served. As Leonard points out in her inimitable way, MORE leads to destruction of the environment as well as meaningless lives and helpless community, while BETTER infuses lives with purpose while also building up community and respecting the environment. If we don’t know the difference between the two, then we will unconsciously be serving the default way, MORE.

So how free we are is actually a question of who we are serving, who we are devoted to. Real human freedom can never be simply described as freedom from something or someone (the British empire, the guvmint, our parents, etc.) – although freedom from (such as freedom from slavery or oppression) may surely be part of the quest for freedom. But real freedom is also finally freedom for, transforming what and who we are living our lives for, what and who we are serving. True freedom is service of God, service of the greater good that God is creating through Jesus Christ in the reign of God, the society of BETTER rather than MORE.

Jesus Christ’s whole life and cause is this fullest form of freedom; freedom that seeks not his own power, possessions, and freedom, but that of everyone else. It is the cause he calls us to join, to learn that service.

That correspondence of freedom and service sounds jarring to us because we live in a culture that likes Jesus as a spiritual buddy who can befriend us in personal yet non-specific undemanding ways. (The  Doobie Brothers expressed this perfectly. “Jesus is just alright by me…”) The church, still unsure about its relation to the culture, both attracted to its promises of success and repelled by its morals, shys away from the politics of Jesus and Jesus’ lordship.

The church is that community devoted to that transformative cause, to BETTER. When we  eclipse Christ, we are turning away from his healing, liberation, feeding, and resurrection because we have tacitly decided to follow the way of MORE, getting our healing, liberation, and feeding from the system. But we can always do BETTER, and that will necessarily mean that we let his light shine.