The Poverty of God--November 12, 2019
"For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich." [2 Corinthians 8:9]
Jesus has a way of redefining our categories by crashing right into our ordinary lives and turning them upside down. He has a way of taking our usual expectations about what is "good," what is "successful," or what is "worthwhile" and pulling them inside out... and then helping us to see that we were really the ones who had things backward all along until he came along to set us right. My goodness, as Paul notes here, with Jesus, even seemingly obvious categories like "rich" and "poor" get inverted, blown apart, and reassembled in the light of Christ.
It reminds me of an anecdote told about Bob Dylan, the legendary folk-rock music hero and poet of his generation. After he had achieved some commercial success and fame, he was interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine and asked if, with his achievements by that point, "Are you happy?" And Dylan's supposed response gets me every time. The troubadour answered, "Happy... unhappy, these are yuppie words. The question is blessed or not blessed." And just like that, our old categories of how to measure the good life explode and need to be reassembled. How about that--happy and unhappy are yuppie words... and the right category for thinking is about being "blessed."
Dylan is right, of course. And in a way, he was making a roughly similar point to Paul here in Second Corinthians. Paul is in the midst of asking (well, it's a lot closer to guilt-tripping) his readers in Corinth to support the church in need in Jerusalem and Judea, which was dealing with a famine at the time and needed help with food. And in the course of making his argument, he makes an appeal to Jesus himself. Jesus' coming among us--his willingness to enter human life as one of us, here among us now in all of our messiness and need--becomes the example for our calling to be generous to others, too. Paul says that Christ Jesus "was rich," presumably meaning that in divine eternal glory, he had no wants or needs at all. And by coming into humanity, by entering the brokenness of this world, Jesus gave it all up--for the sake of us needy humans... so that we might have the abundant life he offers. In other words, Jesus didn't think of his own needs, comfort, or even, to echo Dylan's point, "happiness," for the sake of humanity. He gave all of that away, so that we could all share in the joy--the "blessedness," if you like--of being with him.
And just like that, our old categories are broken open and made anew. The Christian faith, at its core, then, is about a God who is less interested in preserving his own insulated comfort and bliss than God is in giving us the good things we need for life. And, as Paul has it, if Jesus has to choose between staying sequestered in self-centered happiness and "riches" on the one hand and giving it all away in order to be with us in our lowliness, Jesus is going to choose us every time. Jesus seems to think that happy is a yuppie word, too.
Of course, the idea isn't that by Jesus "coming down" from heaven, we all get bonuses in our bank accounts or a windfall wad of twenty dollar bills falling from the sky. And by the same token, now that Jesus has come and "become poor," it doesn't mean they had to sell the pearly gates and replace them with old rusty chain-link fencing. It's about taking the old categories of "rich" and "poor" and turning them inside out. The Gospel's promise is not that if we are good and faithful we'll get a bigger paycheck, but rather that Jesus fills our lives where they are empty and pulls us out of the dead-end way of life that is focused just on our own self-interest. We are pulled out of the tail-spin and brought into a new way of living that begins now and lasts beyond the grip of death. But it all happens because, like the start of a chain reaction, God in Christ chose to let go of comfort and "riches" to take on our poverty, our fundamental human empty-handedness.
You don't have to pity Christ for having done that--he clearly thinks he made the right move by refusing to stay up in the insulated blissfully rich "happiness" of heaven if it came at the cost of our being lost and in need. And you don't have to pity the followers of Jesus who make the same move in their own lives, too. When Paul dared his readers in Corinth to give up some of their abundance and their creature comforts (and you might even say, the day to day things that made them "happy"), he did it because he was convinced the life that is oriented outward at caring for others is ultimately where joy flourishes. There's no thought of "you have to do this to earn God's love" here, but rather, "if you're only living to chase after your own wealth or pleasure or happiness, you're wasting your life--the real thing is here as a free gift for the taking!"
It all starts, though, with Christ coming among us--here among us now, right in the unvarnished, unglamorous choice to live a human life that knew hunger, that was familiar with oppression, that was spent on the margins, and that had no investments to count on. The gift we have been given in Christ--the life that really is life--begins because ours is a God who chooses poverty with us rather than riches without us, a God who chooses the share pain with us rather than to dwell in blissful ignorance.
Ours is a God, then, who renounces the privileges of being God, for the sake of being good to beggars like us and makings us part of the family. What other word is there for than "blessed"?
Ol' Bob was right: happy is a yuppie word, and it's a waste of an existence to chase after. But to give yourself away in love? That's blessed... indeed, it's downright divine.
Lord Jesus, thank you for all you gave up, so that we can be share in your abundance.
Jesus has a way of redefining our categories by crashing right into our ordinary lives and turning them upside down. He has a way of taking our usual expectations about what is "good," what is "successful," or what is "worthwhile" and pulling them inside out... and then helping us to see that we were really the ones who had things backward all along until he came along to set us right. My goodness, as Paul notes here, with Jesus, even seemingly obvious categories like "rich" and "poor" get inverted, blown apart, and reassembled in the light of Christ.
It reminds me of an anecdote told about Bob Dylan, the legendary folk-rock music hero and poet of his generation. After he had achieved some commercial success and fame, he was interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine and asked if, with his achievements by that point, "Are you happy?" And Dylan's supposed response gets me every time. The troubadour answered, "Happy... unhappy, these are yuppie words. The question is blessed or not blessed." And just like that, our old categories of how to measure the good life explode and need to be reassembled. How about that--happy and unhappy are yuppie words... and the right category for thinking is about being "blessed."
Dylan is right, of course. And in a way, he was making a roughly similar point to Paul here in Second Corinthians. Paul is in the midst of asking (well, it's a lot closer to guilt-tripping) his readers in Corinth to support the church in need in Jerusalem and Judea, which was dealing with a famine at the time and needed help with food. And in the course of making his argument, he makes an appeal to Jesus himself. Jesus' coming among us--his willingness to enter human life as one of us, here among us now in all of our messiness and need--becomes the example for our calling to be generous to others, too. Paul says that Christ Jesus "was rich," presumably meaning that in divine eternal glory, he had no wants or needs at all. And by coming into humanity, by entering the brokenness of this world, Jesus gave it all up--for the sake of us needy humans... so that we might have the abundant life he offers. In other words, Jesus didn't think of his own needs, comfort, or even, to echo Dylan's point, "happiness," for the sake of humanity. He gave all of that away, so that we could all share in the joy--the "blessedness," if you like--of being with him.
And just like that, our old categories are broken open and made anew. The Christian faith, at its core, then, is about a God who is less interested in preserving his own insulated comfort and bliss than God is in giving us the good things we need for life. And, as Paul has it, if Jesus has to choose between staying sequestered in self-centered happiness and "riches" on the one hand and giving it all away in order to be with us in our lowliness, Jesus is going to choose us every time. Jesus seems to think that happy is a yuppie word, too.
Of course, the idea isn't that by Jesus "coming down" from heaven, we all get bonuses in our bank accounts or a windfall wad of twenty dollar bills falling from the sky. And by the same token, now that Jesus has come and "become poor," it doesn't mean they had to sell the pearly gates and replace them with old rusty chain-link fencing. It's about taking the old categories of "rich" and "poor" and turning them inside out. The Gospel's promise is not that if we are good and faithful we'll get a bigger paycheck, but rather that Jesus fills our lives where they are empty and pulls us out of the dead-end way of life that is focused just on our own self-interest. We are pulled out of the tail-spin and brought into a new way of living that begins now and lasts beyond the grip of death. But it all happens because, like the start of a chain reaction, God in Christ chose to let go of comfort and "riches" to take on our poverty, our fundamental human empty-handedness.
You don't have to pity Christ for having done that--he clearly thinks he made the right move by refusing to stay up in the insulated blissfully rich "happiness" of heaven if it came at the cost of our being lost and in need. And you don't have to pity the followers of Jesus who make the same move in their own lives, too. When Paul dared his readers in Corinth to give up some of their abundance and their creature comforts (and you might even say, the day to day things that made them "happy"), he did it because he was convinced the life that is oriented outward at caring for others is ultimately where joy flourishes. There's no thought of "you have to do this to earn God's love" here, but rather, "if you're only living to chase after your own wealth or pleasure or happiness, you're wasting your life--the real thing is here as a free gift for the taking!"
It all starts, though, with Christ coming among us--here among us now, right in the unvarnished, unglamorous choice to live a human life that knew hunger, that was familiar with oppression, that was spent on the margins, and that had no investments to count on. The gift we have been given in Christ--the life that really is life--begins because ours is a God who chooses poverty with us rather than riches without us, a God who chooses the share pain with us rather than to dwell in blissful ignorance.
Ours is a God, then, who renounces the privileges of being God, for the sake of being good to beggars like us and makings us part of the family. What other word is there for than "blessed"?
Ol' Bob was right: happy is a yuppie word, and it's a waste of an existence to chase after. But to give yourself away in love? That's blessed... indeed, it's downright divine.
Lord Jesus, thank you for all you gave up, so that we can be share in your abundance.
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