But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. | Ephesians 4.7
One of the biggest mistakes Christianity has made is to read the gospel through a Platonic lens. Plato believed that everything on this earth was nothing more than form of something divine. In other words, what we experience is nothing more than a shadow of the original, an imperfect replication of a specific type.
At first, this sounds very Biblical. God created men and women in His image; we sinned and now live as a broken image-bearers. We are imperfect forms of our original glory. The reason this is damaging is because it leads the idea that there is ONE perfect human form that we are all marred from. People spend a lot of time and energy trying to decide on what this looks like and tries to conform all people to this one type. Whether that means that we should all be type A outgoing, social butterflies, social gospel pioneers, successful business men/women, or barefoot and pregnant…it understands the goal of humanness as uniformity.
When God created people, He (and I can’t believe I am going to say it) broke the mold. The same God who created Musk ox and platypus, dung beetles and toucans, mountains and canyons, also created us. When He did, it was not so that we would all fight to become the same, to remake the world into the image of God that we have decided we like best. Jesus didn’t come to earth so that we could have a living model of the ideal to try to copy; He came to redeem us from our desperate search for meaning and identity. He gave us the ability to celebrate diversity.
The world we live in is anti-diversity. I know the term is plastered everywhere, but the reality is, it is used as just one more ideal to try to force everyone into to. I was having a conversation about this last week: the COEXIST bumper sticker is an insult to every symbol represented because it refuses to ask what makes them different. It desires to flatten everything out for the sake of peace. Same goes for gender; appreciating women does not mean treating them like they are men. As a matter of fact, I can’t think of a less helpful way of treating the differences in gender than to try to blend them together, downplaying the beauty of distinction in order to create a hybrid (which makes everyone feel like a failure). A celebration of diversity allows us to find great joy in differences without having to ‘level the playing field,’ de-feminize women, and emasculate men. We don’t have to be the same; our differences are by design!
This doesn’t mean that there are not universal laws and aspects of Jesus character that we are not called to emulate. It does mean that the way that this character is lived out will be different. It is the collective whole of all of these reflections that makes us the image of God. The body of Christ, the manifestation of God in this world, is not held by each individual exclusively, but is found in the community of His people. The clearest picture we can give of Christ is in how we live out community, bearing with one another in love. The church has the ability to celebrate diversity like no other group because that which binds us together is greater than our differences…and it makes our differences GOOD.