Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. | Philippians 2.3-8
As we looked at Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane last week, we were able to see His humanity: His fear, stress, and disappointment. Jesus did not have some idealized view of the world, but felt all of the pressures that come from being in a limited body in a sinful world. The truth is: all of us feel this struggle. We all know something is wrong and see injustice. What Jesus offers us in the garden is a model for how we should respond to our humanity. How should we live in a world of fear, stress, and disappointment?
The chief characteristic of Jesus, as reveled to us in Philippians 2 (above), is His humility. This doesn’t mean that He was weak or passive; the humility of Jesus means that he did not allow His humanity to become the chief characteristic of His worldview. He was able to see the struggle of others and to do His part (which was a very large part) to overcome the frustration caused by sin. When Paul tells the Philippians to: have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, it is this confidence to be humble that He is talking about. To show you what this looks like in our society, I want to compare two ways that people respond to injustice: activism and activity. The question being: would Jesus lean more toward activism or activity?
To start, we have to define what we mean by these two terms:
Activism | efforts to promote, impede, or direct change through a shift in ideology
Activity | helping people directly through service
If we were going to characterize: activism would be Black Lives Matter, Tea Party politics, and just about every hashtag campaign out there; activity would be people doing little acts of service in their daily lives. We live in a society of activism. In a world of information overload, it is information that has power. Our desire to do something with our lives leads us to press into the place that seem to have the most impact. We post articles, join movements, and want to be part of the next big thing, whether we are actually doing anything to be part of it at all. This is the antithesis of how Jesus lived. Jesus had glory, but set it aside. Jesus had the chance to be crowned, but denied it. Jesus was often invited to enter into the big debates of the day and yet He used these moments to take aim at personal ethics rather than revolutions.
I point all of this out not to demonize activism, but to show its place. Jesus DID speak out for the poor, the children, the weak, and the sick, but He did it to drive people to care for them, not to simply be angry that they exist. In other words, Jesus didn’t cure the world of sickness, but He did heal specific people in a small part of the Middle East. He didn’t solve the problem of bigotry, but He gave us a parable of how we should treat those whom we have problems with. In the garden, He chose to do the hard, right act, rather than to allow His fear and disappointment to reaction. As we enter into a voting year, where movements and ideologies promise to make everything great, let’s not lose focus on the activity that God has placed in our individual lives.
I will following this up with a few more blogs this week focused on why this is so important to us as Christians and as citizens.