What causes fights and quarrels among you?" asks James. Quite a question, and a perceptive answer follows: "Don't they come from your desires that battle within you?" (James 4:1, NIV).
A dispute in the early Jerusalem congregation where James was, illus trates the truth of his thesis and adds an important dimension: "In those days ... the Grecian Jews among them complained against those of the Aramaic-speaking community because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food" (Acts 6:1, NIV). The word "overlooked" is powerful in the context of this and all conflicts. The quarrel centered on the matter of one group being neglected or brushed aside and another, of different ethnic origin, being favored.
This scenario is reflective of the conflict which pervaded the life of the first century Christian community, when interpersonal discord was compounded by the rift that existed between the Jewish and Gentile Christians. Evidence of this struggle is omnipresent in Paul's letters, because it threatened the viability of the early church. Perhaps it threat ens the church even more today. The mass of our contemporary ecclesiastical antagonisms are not all that significant in themselves, but they can rapidly become heavy with nationalism, racism, ethnicism, tribalism, and culturalism. These "isms" manifest themselves in our post-colonial era with unprecedented potency and on a global scale the church has never faced before.
What was the all important alpha principle that the first-century Christian community summoned to derail this threat to the church? Here's Paul's own description of its surpassing strength and beauty: "But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in him self one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility" (Eph. 2:13-20, NIV).
Is it a violation of Paul's context to claim that the blood of the Cross has not only abolished religious "commandments and regulations"? Hasn't it also in fact demolished the national, racial, and ethnic norms of our time? Hasn't it tackled our elitist codifications and definitions, withering the haughty roots of intemperate self-preoccupation and those worldviews that build walls of conceit, hostility, and division between people? Our new standing and identity in Christ ruins the pride and confidence I have invested in my whiteness, angloness, nationalness, and ethnicity. It disgraces all my supposed advantage, and shames the hollow distinctives I accentuate in an attempt to inflate my value in relation to other races, cultures and people. Such things become distinctly secondary in the light of the new "nationality"we now all equally share as the citizenry of Christ's kingdom.
This magnificent principle transcends all others as an operational base for lasting interpersonal peace. It surpasses the pervading approaches used in facing difference and conflict between people, the approaches which dominate the political and social out look of our time. The cross put human hostility to death and produced a revolutionary way for people to appraise one another. It literally gave the world an effective weapon with which to vanquish the onset of "the desires that battle within" them.
Thinking of how he had boasted in his heritage as a circumcised Hebrew, a Pharisee, and an elite Benjaminite, Paul also said "But whatever was to my prof it I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider every thing a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. ... I consider [all of] them rub bish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him" (Phil. 3:4-9. NIV). Here is the prism through which early Christians came to view themselves and one another in their multicultural world.
In the presence of such a reality, how must one respond? Beaming the light of this Christian worldview on the extensive European migrations and colonizations, especially of Africa and North America during the last 300 years, brings me shame and deep conviction. So much of the exploitative nerve center of those movements are still potently present in our world and in the church. Their underlying spirit still subtly or not so subtly governs the way we view one another, whether from one side or the other. And it is not just the people and movements of the past who have violated the beautiful communal mandates inherent in the message of Christ. Collectively speaking, it is each of us, with our own inherited and cultivated condescensions and skewed biases, who keep such things alive and active both in the broad conflicts of the world and even in the mundane, everyday disputes of our churches.
Jesus expressed the comprehensive earmark of genuine Christian discipleship and leadership when He said that "'All men will know that you are my disciples if you love one another'" John 13:35 (NIV). And Paul said, "So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view . . . The old has gone, the new has come" (2 Cor. 5:16, 17 NIV).
