The Illusion of Relevance
Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." And they divided up his clothes by casting lots.
The people stood watching, and the rulers even sneered at him. They said, "He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, the Chosen one."
The soldiers also came up and mocked him. They offered him wine vinegar and said, "If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself."
There was a written notice above him, which read: THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS.
One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: "Aren't you the Christ? Save yourself and us!" Luke 23:34-39
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Emerging out of the political campaign of 1980 is a significant and potentially disastrous phenomenon: the almost total preoccupation of conservative evangelicals in the political processes. Though not an unmixed blessing, in the very nature of incarnational faith, Christians ought to be involved in translating faith into life in this world; the danger is that secondary issues are given priority to the neglect of essentials. In the sixties it was the liberals who were going to change the world by political processes. Will evangelicals abandon their unique solution for human transformation—the gospel—for political means?
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It is incumbent on those who pray weekly, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," to do all in their power to seek for kingdom-of-heaven conditions in their situations and to act as though they mean what they ask in their prayers; however, it is clear in Scripture that the will of God is preeminently for the eternal welfare of mankind, not simply his earthly condition here and now.
Anger over an ever-increasing bureaucracy with its exorbitant taxes, its growing centralized control, its mounting deficit, its dehumanizing legislation, its immorality, its indifference to spiritual and eternal realities is understandable; but such emotion ought not to replace an evangelical compassion, concerned for the eternal lostness of mankind.
Jesus Christ remains as always the central issue in history. It is fundamental to biblical faith that no human system is ordained to pass over into eternity as the kingdom over which Christ reigns. Every other issue in history is secondary to the eternal issue of man's salvation. It would be tragedy in the first magnitude if those who alone profess to be committed to the eternal salvation of mankind somehow
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were diverted to issues which are transitory and earthly.
One thing is sure: if Bible-believing Christians, so called, neglect the primary purpose of Christ's entrance into history, there are no others who will take up the cause! Evangelicals have been guilty of neglecting social responsibility in the past in their commitment to the gospel; but there is certainly no justification for neglecting the gospel in their zeal for social issues which have their ultimate resolution in the proper application of the gospel. The life and ministry of Jesus established the model.
According to the record, Jesus gave sight to three blind men, made the deaf to hear, the dumb to speak, the crippled to walk. He cleansed lepers and, in three instances, raised the dead. On two occasions He fed huge crowds with a few scraps of food. In short He did a great deal to alleviate human suffering and wretchedness in His three short years of ministry. He attacked frontally the universal enemies of humanity: disease, poverty, famine and death. Did He do this for all who were smitten? That is, did He heal all who were diseased, give speech to all who were dumb, hearing to all who were deaf,
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cleansing to all who were lepers, wholeness of body to all who were crippled? Did He feed all who were hungry? Did He raise all who were dead? The answer, of course, is He did not! Well if not, why not? If He could do this for some, why not more? Why not all? If He could touch blind eyes and make them see, why would He leave anybody blind? If He could take a few loaves and fishes and feed fifteen to twenty thousand people, why should anybody go hungry? Was He unaware that there were others who were blind and deaf and dumb and leprous and hungry? Hardly. If He was aware of this need all about Him was He indifferent to it? One cannot believe this about the man who is preeminently the prototype of human compassion and love. Had He reached the limit of His ability to do these things? Had He run out of power? This is hardly reasonable.
For that matter why did He let Himself be crucified? He said He was in control of this. He said very clearly, "No man takes My life from Me, I lay it down of Myself; I take it up again. I have the power to lay it down, I have the power to take it up again" (John 10:18). When He stood before Pilate, Pilate was aggravated by His silence and under the pressure of that
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decisive moment said to Him: "Speak to me, don't you know I have the power to crucify you or the power to release you?" Jesus responded by saying, "You have no power over Me at all, except it be given you from above" (John 19:10,11). Many times His enemies tried to take Him in the course of His three-year ministry, always without success. Finally, when He was apprehended in the garden, He Himself approached those who came after Him with swords and staves, offering Himself to them. He said to His disciples, "My time is at hand." His final words on the cross were, "It is finished! Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit," as though what He had come to do was accomplished. Then the record says, "He gave up the ghost." He died on the cross voluntarily. He literally laid down His life by sheer volition.
If Jesus Christ had such remarkable, final control of His destiny, why did He not refuse crucifixion, remain alive, and devote Himself to the elimination of all human suffering and tragedy? Why did He submit to crucifixion? This question, you see, is really implicit in the mockery that taunted Him on the cross. It is recorded in Luke 23 that He was challenged three times:
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by the soldiers: "If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself" (v. 37)
and even by the thief: "If you are Christ save yourself and us" (v. 39)!
Implicit in their challenge is the matter of relevance—the relevance of Christ to history, to human need. Definition is fundamental to the understanding of our responsibility as Christians in this contemporary world which is demanding relevance. What is relevance? Is it a pragmatic test, meaning, does a thing work? Even more personally, does it work for me? Does it work in my situation? Does it address itself to the real problem? Does it give answers that are valid? Will it work? The word relevance cannot stand in isolation because it involves relationship. It means to be related, to be appropriate, to be germane, to be suitable. It can be understood only in application to objects or things or people or circumstances. In other words, when one asks, "Is Christian faith relevant?" it is quite proper to reply, "Relevant to what?"
The challenge of relevance, explicit or implied, can be very subtle, seductive and intimidating to evangelicals. It is precisely in this context that Christian faith is
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being tested today, and not uncommonly—on the basis of inverted values—repudiated. In the name of relevance there is insistence that Christianity serve one human system or another; and if it does not work for whatever system championed it, it is presumed irrelevant or invalid, null and void.
Some say Christianity must be socialistic or capitalistic, liberal (economically, politically and sociologically, that is), or conservative. Christianity must serve integration or segregation, democracy or totalitarianism. By such false criteria Christians are being divided. There are Republicans who honestly believe a Democrat cannot be a Christian, and Democrats who feel the same way about Republicans. There are those who say a Christian cannot be politically liberal; others who insist a Christian cannot be politically conservative. People are locking the gospel of Jesus Christ to human systems and demanding relevance on their limited terms. If Christianity does not produce on their terms it is rejected, just as Jesus Christ was rejected as He hung on the cross, and for the same general reason.
The issue is clearly drawn in the challenge of the thief,
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"If you are the Christ, save yourself and us." Such was the contempt of this criminal for the dying Saviour! And Jesus has been indicted with such a challenge in every generation to the present moment, even by many of His friends, so-called. Now the thief had a false idea of Christ's purpose: "If you are the Christ save us." As far as he was concerned the integrity of Jesus Christ rested on his own personal, immediate physical relief. "Get me out of this mess or you are not Jesus Christ." He was saying, in effect, prove you are the Messiah by getting me off this cross and out from under the penalty of my life of crime. He was laying down the conditions under which he would take Jesus Christ seriously. He was saying, "You conform to my demands, and I will believe you." The world has been requiring this or its equivalent ever since.
The number is legion today of those who fashion conditions under which they will honor God! As far as they are concerned, like the thief, Christ is to be judged according to their own personal interpretation, their own criteria for relevance; and if Christ is to be acceptable He must conform to their standards.
One fact is uniform in these demands—the criteria for relevance
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is always worldly in the sense of "this worldliness," life this side of the grave, physical life. In whatever pious context it is put, Christ is judged on commercial grounds which involved primarily self-interest. (Not always, of course; for Christ is often judged on so-called humanitarian grounds.) For example, people have angrily left churches because they would rather nurse their prejudices about people whose color of skin differs from their own, than be Christian about it.
Some put it this way: the Christian hope is "pie in the sky by-and-by." This half-truth, which incidentally betrays abysmal ignorance of Christian eschatology, this cliché, implicit in which is the idea of relevance, has been used to ridicule Christian faith for more than half a century. And the incredible fact is there are those today in the church, even clergy, who still fall for this ludicrous bait and write the gospel off as irrelevant. They are like the thief on the cross: "If you are Christ save us!" They fail completely to understand Christ's purpose in history.
The thief also had a false idea of the Messiah. He was not only completely wrong as to the purpose for which the Messiah entered history; he was completely
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wrong as to the means whereby this purpose was to be achieved. He said, "If you are the Christ, save yourself." One never ceases to be amazed at the stubborn and perennial conspiracy to eliminate the crucifixion from Christian faith. It must be masterminded by some transcendent force. Even Peter tried.
Minutes after Peter made his great confession, Jesus began to prepare His disciples for His "rendezvous" in Jerusalem where He would "suffer many things from the chief priests and the elders and the scribes, and be crucified and rise again" (Matthew 16:21). The record reveals that Peter took Him aside and rebuked Him, telling him in effect, "No, Lord, you are not going to do this" (v. 22).
The two disciples on the road to Emmaus, following the crucifixion, were convinced that Jesus' death was a terrible, tragic mistake, the end of their hopes and the complete frustration of His historical purpose (see Luke 24:21).
So did the Jewish leaders in this text, "The rulers derided Him, saying, 'He saved others; let Him save Himself, if He be Christ, the chosen of God.' " You prove you are the Messiah by coming down off that cross.
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"The soldiers mocked Him, coming to Him and offering Him vinegar and saying, 'If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself ' "(23:36, 37). This recurring effort on the part of humanity—within the church as well as without—to remove the cross of Christ from Christian faith, is monotonous by its regularity and its consistency.
Jesus Christ's purpose in history transcends all the ideas and systems and utopias of men. It is an eternal purpose only in terms of which history has meaning; and this purpose required that He lay down His life on the cross. The crucifixion of Jesus Christ is God's ultimate remedy. As the cure is to the disease, so the cross is to human need. Anything less is temporary, as relief is to symptoms.
Take one social evil, for example, crime, in one limited area, metropolitan Washington. Suppose it were decided to eliminate crime in Washington, D.C. Suppose it were possible to prevent crime from being imported into the city so that you could instead deal with other problems that exist. What legislation, what organization, what education would it take? And how much would it cost? Is it possible to eliminate crime by any social program, by any human effort? How about poverty?
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Drug abuse? Alcoholism? Racism?
How about war? At the Japanese surrender ceremony following the Pacific war, General Douglas MacArthur said: "Military alliance, balances of power, League of Nations all in turn have failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. The utter destructiveness of war now blots out this alternative. We have had our last chance. If we do not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advance in science, art, literature and all material and cultural developments of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh."
In an editorial in U.S. News and World Report of May 5, 1956, David Lawrence wrote, "It is a temporary answer to the threat of world disturbance that we face. The North Atlantic Treaty is temporary. The United Nations is temporary. All our alliances are temporary. Basically, there is only one permanence we can all accept. It is the permanence of a God-governed world.
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For the power of God alone is permanent. Obedience to His laws is the only road to lasting solutions of man's problems."
Consider a statement made by Mario Savio, the twenty-two-year-old philosophy major at the University of California, Berkeley, who was the leading figure in the free-speech movement which exploded in the sixties. Savio was addressing the Trotskyites Young Socialist Alliance, explaining the student protest to them. He said: The most important concept for understanding the student movement is Marx's notion of alienation. Its basic meaning is that the worker is alienated from his product, but the concept is applicable to students too. Students are frustrated. They can find no place in society where alienation doesn't exist, where they can do meaningful work. Despair sets in, a volatile political agent. The students revolt against the apparatus of the University. This is the motive power of the student movement!"
Amazing, a brilliant, articulate, militant student leader diagnoses the root problem as alienation and meaninglessness or purposelessness. It is almost as if he is drawing from Scripture. Why did
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Jesus Christ enter history and lay down His life on the cross? Because men were alienated from God, therefore from each other, and life had no meaning; they were lost! Jesus' purpose was to reconcile men to God so they would no longer be aliens from God and each other. Is it not interesting that the heart of Christian faith addresses itself precisely to the problem that this student leader speaks about at the University of California? This is relevance.
Now back to the question. Why did Jesus Christ not remain alive and eliminate, generation by generation, all the evils which beset humanity? Because He is the Great Physician, and in the finest tradition of medical science He is unwilling to be preoccupied with the symptoms when He can destroy the disease. Jesus Christ, the Great Physician, is unwilling to settle for anything less than elimination of the cause for all evil in history.
The picture is ludicrous but it is analogous. Suppose years ago medical science had decided it was wasting its time and money and energy on this business of research into the disease of poliomyelitis, for example, "Take all the money spent on research and build iron lungs. When people
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get polio an iron lung will be available, free." Can you conceive, somewhere in the future, a civilization sustained by iron lungs!? Millions of people, having contracted this disease, kept alive by iron lungs.
This is precisely what our modern world is asking Christianity to do in principle. Thank God, the Son of God was the Great Physician. He knew that poverty, prejudice, human wretchedness, tragedy, war and death were due to a malignancy in the human heart which required his own sacrifice on the cross. He came into history and went to Jerusalem and the cross to solve this problem once for all and forever. "I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek" (Romans 1:16). That is relevance! "The blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleanses from all sin" (1 John 1:7). That is relevance.
How is the gospel relevant?
How is love relevant to loneliness?
Hope to despair?
Direction to drift?
Purpose to meaninglessness?
Fulfillment to frustration?
How is food relevant to hunger?
Water to thirst?
Light to darkness?
Rest to exhaustion?
Life to death?
Resurrection to the grave?
