Chapter Nine THE CHRISTIAN PRIVILEGE

Speaking in general terms, to be privileged in some regard – to have a privilege or to occupy a position of privilege – can mean either or both of two things. It can mean to be separated from and usually elevated above others in terms of having a special status; or it can mean being being separated from and usually elevated above others because of an accomplishment to which they cannot honestly lay claim.  Let’s consider these possibilities in turn.

To be privileged by one’s status or position may result from many different sorts of factors.  Some may simply be matters of happenstance, with no suggestion that the position results from special merit or effort on our part.  Thus we often say things along the following lines:  I was privileged as a child to be introduced to the President of the United States.  When used in this way, it means something virtually indistinguishable from I was fortunate.

When we speak of a privileged social class or race, the term is often being used in this sense.  The class or race into which we are born is determined by elements outside of our control, and yet, for better or worse, those social and racial statuses often carry with them special rewards and tend to elicit attitudes of special regard from those not so privileged.  We may, perhaps, inveigh against the unfairness of this special social or racial status, but that is to object to its morality, not its reality.  We may protest that such privilege is unearned, but that is to impugn its genesis, not its existence.  As a child’s privilege of meeting a President speaks merely to the fact of the encounter, not to its special circumstances, so also the social or political criticism of class privilege does not address the meaning of privilege, only its distribution.  Even to argue that all social privilege should be eradicated would not alter its meaning, but rather to contend for its elimination.  We might in the same way argue that all children should henceforward be denied access to the President; but that would not alter the privilege of such a meeting: it would only eliminate its opportunity.

The point is that privilege always implies a separation from others in some special regard, whatever the source or moral propriety of that separation.  The citizens of the United States are privileged to vote in America’s elections, not in those of France, and vice versa.  Children who have met a President will always retain the privilege of having done so, even once all future Presidents are limited to adult contact!

Or again, privilege often attaches to special accomplishment or appointment.  A soccer player may be privileged to compete on behalf of the United States in world competition by virtue of her having earned a spot on the national team due to her athletic prowess; a man may be privileged to represent his country in the United Nations by virtue of having been rewarded for earlier service.  Both may be said to have earned their respective privileges, and thereby differ in that respect from the cases discussed above.  But the logic of privilege remains unaffected, even when the grounds for its possession are less fortuitous than the accidents of birth or circumstantial happenstance. 

Having a privilege, whatever its source, means to be distinguished from others in regards to the consequences associated with that particular fundamental distinction, whether those consequences be akin to the bragging rights of the fortunate child or to the representative rights of the ambassador. 

The Christian privilege is the authorization to accomplish divine forgiveness of sin.  The question whether that privilege is more like that of a child privileged to have met a President or more like that of an athlete privileged to represent the United States at the Olympics is an age-old theological debate.  There are various ways of phrasing the debate, all of which circle around the issue of whether becoming a Christian is a reward for our having done something or believed something, or whether it is entirely an unearned gift of grace.  Intimidating terms like predestination, free will, prevenience and so on provide the vocabulary for such debate in academic circles.  But our present concern does not require settling or even entering into such debate. 

Nor need we enter the controversy of what being a Christian, a follower of Christ, actually means, whether it is a fixed and forever status or whether it may be forfeited, whether some degree of hypocrisy in its profession may be tolerated or not, whether there are gradations in its privilege, as there are gradations of rank in a military, and so on. 

Our concern in the present investigation is simply the revealed connection between the privileged authority to accomplish divine forgiveness and being a Christian, whatever further investigation or revelation might determine concerning exactly what being a Christian amounts to, and whether or not its privilege is in some fashion or other merited.  Our purpose for now is simply to move on to a clear understanding of what that privilege is, and we will accordingly set those hoary controversies aside, to be examined on another occasion.

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The privileged authority conferred on followers of Christ – those imbued with his spirit since Pentecost – is to share in the divine forgiveness of sins, that is, the forgiveness of harm done to oneself by another’s sinful behavior.  But we must now recall what we 

established in Part One, that forgiveness, by definition, entails a cost: forgiveness, in fact, simply is that cost, assumed by the one who forgives.  My neighbor assumes the financial cost of repairing her car, waiving all claim on me for monetary recompense.  Similarly, if the harm is emotional rather that financial – the harm resulting from insulting her, say – her forgiveness consists in her waiving all expectation of me rectifying the situation, of her assuming with no demand for assuage the emotional harm caused by my behavior. In the case of perfect, complete forgiveness, she in effect forgets my insult.

The Christian authority to forgive is therefore the authority to accept in Christ’s stead the correlative harm caused in the divine realm, the harm done to divine parental love, by sinful behavior in the human realm.  And exactly as in the merely human realm, that forgiveness entails a cost.  When Jesus forgave the sins of the paralytic, he waived all divine claim on the man; his forgiveness being perfect, he in effect forgot the man’s sin.     By absorbing without demand for recompense in any sense the harm done by that man to Divine love, he restored the man’s relationship to God to what it had been, prior to the sinful behavior.  That is the authority the Son of God has from God the Father.  And it is that same authority that Christ bequeaths to his followers, to all Christians.

The question then arises naturally: why would Christ bequeath that authority?  

In the tenth chapter of his Gospel, Luke records how Jesus, having earlier sent out his twelve disciples to spread his message, now appoints seventy others to the same mission.  The number seventy is not chosen arbitrarily, but is clearly intended to hearken back to Numbers 11:16-17, in which Moses recruits the same number to lighten his own burden:

Then the LORD said to Moses, “Gather for me seventy men of the elders of Israel, whom you know to be the elders of the people and officers over them, and bring them to the tent of meeting, and let them take their stand there with you.  And I will come down and talk with you there. And I will take some of the Spirit that is on you and put it on them, and they shall bear the burden of the people with you, so that you may not bear it yourself alone. 

The delegation of authority described in Luke is most commonly understood to signify Jesus, so to say, extending his own reach to those to whom he could not personally minister, and most particularly, to those to whom he would not be able to minister after his own death.  He is training a cadre of ambassadors, according to this interpretation, to extend his ministry, not only into the surrounding cities and towns but also, and much more importantly, into the world’s future. 

But while that task of laying a foundation for his future church was unquestionably part of Jesus’ earthly work, it was not the central rationale for Moses in selecting his seventy elders to share in his work: they were not chosen to extend his reach, either in space or into future generations.  Why then were they chosen?  The answer is given quite explicitly in the text:  to bear the burden of the people with you, so that you may not bear it alone. Moses had never borne the burden of dealing with those outside of his immediate jurisdiction, not to mention those of the future.  The burden he was seeking to lessen in appointing the seventy was the burden which he, Moses, was bearing at the time.

The symbolic significance for Jesus in choosing that particular number – seventy – therefore lay not – or at least, not only – in extending his future ministry, but rather in lightening its current burden, and by implication, its eternal burden as well.  The seventy for Moses were coworkers, not ambassadors, either present or future, and surely that is the point Jesus is making through that symbolic number.

What then is the burden that Jesus is asking his followers to share? 

In the realm of eternity, as we’ve already argued in our chapter on speculative theology, the Son of God accepted the burden of extending divine forgiveness to all of God the Father’s rational creation, that is to say, of bearing the burden of absorbing the harm caused to divine parental love by the sinful actions of God’s children.  That is the burden Jesus authorizes and asks his followers to share.

To put the conclusion succinctly: That authority conferred on Christ from God is the same authority Christ Jesus in turn confers on his followers.  And what is that authority?    Given our understanding of what forgiveness is, the answer is now clear. It is the authority to suffer in Christ’s stead.  Or to express this conclusion in another way:  the heavenly privilege accorded to and accepted by Christ is to absorb the divine cost of forgiveness on God’s behalf; and just so, the heavenly privilege accorded to and, hopefully, accepted by Christians is to absorb the divine cost of forgiveness on Christ’s behalf.  In the accomplishment of divine forgiveness, the Christian stands to Christ in the same relation that Christ Himself does to God the Father.

The Christian privilege is the privilege of suffering in Christ’s stead.

In the strictly material, human realm, having a privilege typically carries a positive attitudinal connotation.  But even there, that is a contingent matter: the privilege of representing the United States in the United Nations’ deliberations may be experienced as burdensome by the US ambassador.  Rather, the privilege borne by the ambassador may be experienced in the way the privilege of Simon the Cyrene was when he was allowed the privilege of helping to bear Jesus’ cross on the via dolorosa.

In fact, since it invokes in reality the very image we have used from the beginning of this book to represent forgiveness, Simon’s assistance on that doleful avenue may provide the perfect illustration for the privilege allowed to all Christians of sharing the burden of the heavenly Christ, the burden of bearing the cost of divine forgiveness of human sin.  The Cyrene took a weight from Jesus’ shoulders.

That’s not a privilege I would choose to acquire! one might understandably exclaim.  Isn’t Christianity a system of rewards and benefits?

Well of course it is that, but it is more than that.

The question may be framed in this way: are the followers of Christ, of any era, to be regarded merely as his material descendants or as his contemporary spiritual co-workers?

Should our image of the relationship between Christ and His followers be likened to that of a king who built a small castle on his land, and then on departing from this earthly life left his children with a grand vision for the property, now theirs, along with a set of instructions for its maintenance and growth and elaboration?

Or should our image incorporate the Christian faith that our King still lives, and that our work benefits not only His vision, but the King Himself.

Although it is admittedly not a decisive argument, perhaps a homely image Jesus himself once used to describe the privilege he was offering to his followers will help incline the reader to the acceptance of the second of these as the better description of Christ’s preferment.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, he counsels them in Matthew 11:30.  The Palestinian yoke was fashioned for two draft animals to work under, side-by-side in coordinated effort.  The less experienced of the two animals would learn from the first how to labor most profitably, but all the while in doing so, it would be sharing and thereby lightening the burden of its more seasoned counterpart. 

Is it sacrilege to regard our Christian labors as not only advancing Christ’s work of spreading the Kingdom to the ends of the earth, but also as benefiting him during its accomplishment?  I think not.  Joint heirs of a Kingdom, after all, may be expected to make the King’s life less burdensome.

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The authority that Jesus devolved upon his followers in the great investiture of Pentecost is the authority to forgive sins – that is the Christian authority.  The exercise of that authority is the sharing of Christ’s burden of forgiveness: that is the Christian privilege.

What remains to be discussed is the Christian responsibility to assume that authority and to exercise its privilege.  That will be the subject of our next investigation.