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Knowing the Shepherd—John 9—10

Today as we seek to walk intimately with our Lord, we can remember an occasion in the Gospel of John where Jesus talked about knowing him. Although Jesus addressed one situation, the principles in John 9—10 apply to believers in all cultures.

When Jesus heals a man from blindness on a mandatory day of rest, some religious leaders expel the man from their community for following Jesus. Jesus then confronts these leaders in John 9:40—10:18, explaining that those who were truly Jesus’s sheep—like this formerly blind man—hear his voice. By contrast, those who try to lord it over the sheep however they see fit—like these religious leaders—are like thieves, robbers or wolves, who come to devour the sheep (John 10:1, 5, 8, 10, 12). Jesus is the good shepherd, who will lay down his life for the sheep to protect them from the robbers and wolves (10:11).

Hearers who knew the Bible well should have understood what Jesus was implying here. In Israel’s Scriptures, God is the chief shepherd, and his people Israel are his sheep; ungodly leaders who exploit the sheep would stand under God’s judgment (Ezek 34; Jer 23:1-4). It does not matter whether the religious leaders have kicked the healed man out of their religious community. The rightful shepherd declares that the healed man belongs to his sheep, i.e., is one of his people! Most scholars today believe that many members of John’s own audience had been kicked out of their religious communities for following Jesus. John recounts these earlier events about Jesus to encourage his audience that what matters is not the approval of people but the approval of the Lord himself.

The religious leaders, sure of their learning and piety, reject the faith of the man they think had been “born in sin” (John 9:34). By meeting Jesus, however, the blind man enters a relationship much more important than any of the elite members of his people could have offered him. Jesus insists that his own sheep will follow him because they know his voice, the way sheep normally follow only their own shepherds (John 10:3-4); they will not follow the voice of strangers (10:5).

Then Jesus offers an extraordinary claim: his own sheep know him “just as” he and the Father know each other (10:14-15). The same kind of intimacy that the Father has with the Son is the kind of intimacy Jesus wants us to have with him. (John illustrates this elsewhere; for example, the same Greek term is used for Jesus’ intimate position with his Father in 1:18 and for the beloved disciple’s intimate position with Jesus in the banquet in 13:23.)

Jesus was intimate with his disciples. In ancient literature, someone who shared the deepest confidences of his or her heart was a true friend; Jesus shared with his disciples whatever he heard from his Father (John 15:15). But this relationship did not vanish when Jesus ascended to the Father; he promised the Spirit, so that whatever the Spirit hears from Jesus, he will continue to make known to us (John 16:13-15). This means that we can be just as intimate with Jesus as, and experience his presence no less fully than, the disciples he walked with 2000 years ago. When we embrace Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we begin a new life of relationship with him.

Like the formerly blind man, we have entered into a relationship that matters more than what anyone else thinks of us. We may be lowly or despised in the eyes of others. But in prayer and a life of faith, led by God’s Spirit, we commune with the king of all kings. His sheep still know his voice, and we continue growing to know his voice better through studying Scripture and walking daily with him.

Perhaps thirty-five years ago, soon after my conversion from atheism, I had an unexpected experience. Reading my Bible day after day, I longed to hear God like the people in the Bible did, but I did not know that it was possible. One day the longing was so intense, and yet the Spirit sparked faith in my heart to trust God to open my ears to hear his voice. What I heard was the deepest love and kindness I had ever experienced, a love that I had never before known, a love that I yearned to reciprocate by devoting myself wholly to God’s will. Each day I was eager to spend more time learning his heart. I have not heard God as clearly in every season of my life as I did in seasons like that one, but he is eager to share his heart with us. Jesus touched me, as he touched the blind man in John 9. May we all cry out to the Savior to open our ears to hear his precious heart more and more!

Craig is author of The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).

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The Spirit in John 7:37-39

When Jesus commissioned his followers, he declared, “I send you just the same way the Father sent me” (John 20:21), and empowered them by giving them the Holy Spirit (John 20:22). As Jesus’ followers today, we share the same commission to let the world know about the Lord; we also must depend on the same power of the Spirit that Jesus gave his disciples.

When one reads accounts of frontier revivals in the early nineteenth century, or spectacular “people movements” in overseas missions, one is quickly struck by how much of the success was driven simply by the uncontrollable activity of the Spirit. People prayed and labored in faith, but after they had proved their faithfulness, God accomplished miraculously far beyond what human effort could have done. If this were not true, there would be no church in the world today! And since it is true, we should seek God with the same expectancy to accomplish his purposes today.

One passage in John’s Gospel that talks about the Spirit is John 7:37-39. Here Jesus promises rivers of living water to those who believe in him; we begin to drink at the moment we first believe, but we may continue to drink and experience God’s powerful presence throughout our Christian life. (The Spirit is the foretaste of our promised future in glory; Rom 8:23; 2 Cor 5:5.)

Most scholars believe that John wrote to Jewish believers in Jesus kicked out of some of their local Jewish communities for following Jesus as their divine Lord. Thus he often contrasts the true experience of the Spirit with mere ritual. Jesus offers a baptism in the Spirit greater than John’s baptism in water (1:31-33); he values a friend’s desperate situation at his wedding more than the traditional demands of ritual water pots (2:6); he offers living water within the believer, better than Jacob’s well precious to the Samaritans (4:12-14). Jewish teachers could envision Gentiles converting to Judaism through baptism as being “reborn” into Judaism; Jesus told Nicodemus that he needed to be born from the water of the Spirit (3:3-6). Jesus rather than the healing waters of a pool healed a paralytic (5:5-9), and the Siloam pool helped a blind man only because Jesus sent him there (9:7).

Priests used the waters of the Pool of Siloam in a special ritual during the Feast of Tabernacles. After a public procession, they poured water from that pool out at the base of the altar, symbolically reenacting an expectation in Scriptures they read on the last day of that feast: rivers of living water would someday flow from God’s temple (Ezek 47:1-12; Zech 14:8). On the last day of this festival, Jesus declares, “If anyone is thirsty, let them come to me! Let them drink, whoever believes in me!” Then he refers to the very Scripture that was read on that day: rivers of water would flow from the “belly”; Jewish people considered the temple the navel of the earth. Jesus is saying, “I am the foundation stone of God’s new temple! Let the one who wills come and drink freely!” The water of which he spoke was the Holy Spirit, and would be available once Jesus was glorified (Jn 7:39).

John later explains that Jesus was glorified in part by being crucified (John 12:23-24; this echoes the Greek translation of Isa 52:13). Jesus was glorified by being lifted up on the cross, crowned with thorns and hailed “King of the Jews.” When a soldier pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, “blood and water” flowed out (19:34). The spear undoubtedly ruptured the sac around Jesus’ heart, which contained not only blood but a watery substance, but it is not hard to guess why John, alone of all the Gospels, makes a point of mentioning it. Once lifted up on the cross, Jesus offered eternal life to all. We should depend fully on this gift of the Holy Spirit he paid such a great price to provide for us.

Craig is author of The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).

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Beholding his glory—John 1:14

When John declares, “we beheld his glory” (John 1:14), he is making an eyewitness claim that is echoed later in the Gospel (19:35; 21:24). But he is also suggesting something about the character of testimony he is giving. Like Moses, Isaiah, and others, John beheld a theophany, a revelation of God’s glory. Instead of this revelation coming as a single visionary event, however, it came in the flesh, in the entire life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.

Some Greeks spoke about a pure, heavenly realm that could be envisioned only by the pure mind, freed from earthly constraints. John’s Gospel uses similar language, but points out that no one has truly seen or revealed heavenly things except Jesus, the man from heaven (3:11-13). Some, however, have seen a foretaste of heaven in Jesus, a point the Gospel regularly emphasizes and grounds in the Old Testament.

In 1:14-18, John evokes Moses’s vision of God. When God revealed his “glory” to Moses, it was “full of grace and truth” (Exod 34:6); no one could see God fully, however (Exod 33:20), so Moses saw only part of God’s glory (Exod 33:23). But when Jesus came in the flesh, God unveiled his full glory; John says, “we beheld his glory … full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). John goes on to declare that no one has seen God, but that now Jesus, who is perfectly intimate with the Father, has revealed him (John 1:18).

Likewise, Abraham rejoiced to see Jesus’s day (John 8:56). When Jesus announced this, his hearers were scandalized: Abraham died perhaps sixteen or more centuries earlier, and Jesus was not yet fifty years old (8:57)! But Jesus spoke of Abraham’s encounters with God, such as when Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness (Gen 15:1-21). “Before Abraham was,” Jesus responded, “I already am” (John 8:58).

Yet John complains that Jesus’s contemporaries were too blind to “see” and perceive who he really was, just like the prophet Isaiah warned (John 12:40, quoting Isa 6:10). Isaiah had this revelation, John adds, when Isaiah “saw his glory” (John 12:41). That is, the theophany that Isaiah experienced in Isa 6:1-10 was a revelation of Jesus himself! In this Gospel, Jesus emphasizes that seeing him is the same as seeing the Father (John 14:7-9); the works he did revealed that they shared the same nature (John 14:10-11). In a much lesser sense, he has given us the same works to carry on, to draw attention to himself and his Father (John 14:12-13).

The first epistle of John offers a theological lesson from these truths: Those who have “seen” Jesus by conversion and continue to recognize his glory in the present will be ready to see him unashamed when he returns (1 John 3:2-3, 6). Philosophers thought that meditating on the divine transformed a person to be like the divine; John shows that instead of some abstract conception of the “divine,” we can know God personally in Jesus Christ. Just like Moses reflected God’s glory the more he saw it, knowing Jesus transforms us to be like him (1 John 3:3).

Now that Jesus has gone to the Father, how can the world see him? A good start would be learning to love one another. No one has seen God, 1 John 4:12 emphasizes, but if we love one another (i.e., as he loved us), God dwells in us. How do we carry on Jesus’ mission in the world today? Jesus said that our love for one another is how the world will recognize that we are his disciples (John 13:35), and our unity is how they will recognize that the Father sent Jesus (17:23).

Craig is author of The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).

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As the Father sent me, I send you—John 20:21

What dynamic empowered the earliest church for mission? When Jesus came to his disciples after his resurrection, they were hiding, afraid that they might meet their teacher’s fate (John 20:19). Jesus greeted them with the typical Jewish greeting (the blessing shalom, 20:19, 21). It was more than a greeting that evening, however: it fulfilled his promise to bring them peace (14:27).

Jesus then showed them his hands and side (20:20). Soldiers often displayed their wounds to prove their loyalty; others displayed wounds to evoke sympathy. Jesus may have displayed his wounds to demonstrate that he had in fact died, hence was in fact risen (cf. Luke 23:39-40). This would make sense to the disciples, since some Jewish thinkers expected God to resurrect the bodies of the righteous in the same form in which they died before healing them. When they saw him, the disciples rejoiced: his coming fulfilled his promise to bring them joy (John 16:20-22).

Now the Lord commissioned them. “As the Father sent me,” he announced, “that is how I send you” (20:21). How had the Father sent Jesus? He sent him as his agent and representative, to reveal by both his words and life the Father’s heart for the world. As the Father’s agent, he did what the Father would have done and said what the Father would have said (5:19). As the Father’s agent, he bore the Father’s authority to perform selected signs revealing God’s character. And as the Father’s agent, he was so one with the Father’s mission that he would die to carry it out.

Jesus passes this commission on to his followers. We are his agents and representatives: we must speak his message, and our lives must let the world know that we are truly his disciples (13:35). He authorizes us to speak the message that brings people life or judgment, depending on their response (20:23). But how can we fulfill such a dramatic commission?

Jesus granted his disciples the power to carry out his commission in 20:22. As God first breathed into Adam the breath of life (Gen 2:7), Jesus breathed on them new life. He had earlier promised Nicodemus that those who were born again would be born from the Spirit, who was as mysterious as the wind (John 3:8). Now he declared, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” This was the Spirit that Jewish people associated sometimes with spiritual cleansing and often with prophetic empowerment. This was the Spirit that Jesus had promised would continue his own presence among them (14:26; 16:13-15). The Spirit was Jesus’s agent as Jesus was the Father’s agent (16:14), and the Spirit had come to live in the believers.

How can we dare to attempt to fulfill God’s mission? We must trust him and the power with which he has equipped us. As we faithfully speak and live his mission, the Spirit will make Jesus real to those whose hearts God opens. Jesus made not some but all of his followers like the prophets of old; he has called us to let the world know his heart of love.

This article is adapted from an article written for the Missionary Seer in 2004; Craig has also written The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).

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A missionary meets the mother church—Acts 21:20-25

When Paul visited the church in Jerusalem, its leaders reaffirmed their acceptance of his Gentile mission: Gentiles did not have to become culturally Jewish to become followers of Jesus (Acts 21:25). Those in any culture who become Christians—whether the culture is geographically distant, immigrants near us, or even young people in our churches—are called to give up their sins, but not non-sinful elements of their culture.

What the Jerusalem church’s leaders understood, however, was more difficult for much of the Jerusalem church to fathom. Their local suffering had understandably shaped their approach to Gentiles. Roman governors had exploited Judea for years; the brief tenure of a Judean king, Agrippa I, had restored Judeans’ self-respect and desire for freedom, but his early death had been followed by even worse repression from irresponsible governors. Most Judeans, whose contact with Rome was entirely negative, felt they had good reason to mistrust Gentiles—and any Jews who compromised too much with them. Even in more recent history, this has been a natural response to colonial oppression.

Unfortunately, it rendered plausible rumors about Paul, a Jewish missionary among the Gentiles who was not back in Jerusalem often enough to defend himself (Acts 21:21). Today, no less than then, some Christians are ready to criticize other Christians without taking the time to understand how they often are relating to different situations than the critics face. Sometimes this criticism misrepresents those criticized and becomes slander.

Consciously or unconsciously, the church in Jerusalem had adopted some of the perspectives of its culture, just as most of us do in our various cultures today. Their identification with their culture was helpful in reaching their culture, to the extent that the values they shared were positive or neutral. After years of Jerusalem believers’ faithful witness within their culture (21:20), the message of Jesus was not as controversial there as it had once been; Paul’s audience in the temple later listened intently as he talked about Jesus (22:2-20). Once he talked about going Gentiles, however, many of his hearers demanded his death (22:21-22).

Paul himself was willing to accommodate local Jerusalem culture to reduce offense (21:20-26). He did this with Gentiles and was certainly ready to identify with his own heritage. (Even in the colonial era the best missionaries, who were often at odds with colonial authorities, related to local cultures much better than did contemporaries from the colonial cultures; e.g., William Carey, David Livingstone, Mary Slessor, and Hudson Taylor.)

But Paul was not willing to compromise the demand for unity with believers from other cultures or the need to preach to other peoples; to do so was to compromise the gospel itself. (From Paul’s letters we may even infer that he was in Jerusalem precisely on a mission of ethnic reconciliation, Rom 15:27.) When any local culture’s nationalism refuses to love people in other cultures, unity with one’s brothers and sisters in Christ comes before unity with our culture. Thus Paul spoke about going to the Gentiles even though it was likely to arouse his hearers’ anger (22:21-22).

The danger of overidentifying with our culture at the expense of the gospel was not distinctive to the Jerusalem church; it is a temptation in most cultures. Missiologists distinguish contextualization from syncretism. Contextualization involves making the gospel message culturally relevant, translating it in such a way that people in a given culture understand it thoroughly. Syncretism is where one replaces or mixes the gospel with cultural elements religiously incompatible with it. Paul identified with local culture, but would not compromise his gospel message. Elsewhere, he rejected false gods and sexual immorality even though they were widespread in local cultures. In Jerusalem, he refused to compromise the universality of Christ’s claim (seeking followers from all nations) to fit the expectations of his own culture.

Only God knew how much the future lay more with Paul’s mission than with the megachurch in Jerusalem. Within a decade, Jesus’ followers had to flee Jerusalem in view of its impending destruction. The Diaspora churches eventually outgrew the Judean churches. In the centuries that immediately followed, Christianity grew especially in western Asia, north Africa and southern Europe; then it spread further west in Asia, north in Europe and south into east Africa. In the nineteenth century, western nations sent most missionaries. Today, many younger churches in Africa, Asia, and Latin America far outnumber churches in the west, often outpace them in devotion to prayer and evangelism, and often send more missionaries. More believers live in these regions than in the west, and much of the gospel’s future lies with them. Mission today requires heeding the voices of the church throughout the world. No one culture’s church has everything. We need one another, and must partner together for Christ’s gospel.

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Born from water and the Spirit—John 3:3-5

When Nicodemus, himself a religious teacher, praised Jesus as a great teacher, Jesus revealed himself as more than a teacher. Jesus is a savior, and he confronts this religious teacher with his need for salvation. “You must be born from above,” Jesus told him (John 3:3). The Greek word for “above” can also mean, “again,” and Nicodemus supposes that Jesus asks him to enter his mother’s womb again (3:4). So Jesus explains further: “You must be born from water and the Spirit” (3:5).

 

Not only Nicodemus, but a host of interpreters through history, have wondered what Jesus meant. What Jesus most naturally meant in light of first-century culture Nicodemus assumed that he could not mean! When Gentiles converted to Judaism, they normally ritually immersed themselves to wash away their former Gentile impurities. According to later Jewish teachers, once a Gentile converted to Judaism they were like a newborn child, having forsaken their previous people and lifestyle and now serving the God of Israel. Had Jesus told a Gentile to be “born of water,” Nicodemus could have guessed what he meant. But he could hardly imagine that Jesus would demand the same of him, a religious Jewish teacher descended from Abraham!

 

Yet this is likely precisely Jesus’ point. We are not saved by our ethnicity or because we grew up in church; we are not saved even by our religious deeds. We are saved because Jesus died for us (John 3:16) and rose again. Jesus was telling Nicodemus that he had to come to God on the same terms that Gentiles did, the same terms that we all do: he had to accept God’s gift of salvation in Jesus Christ. Later, in John 8:44, Jesus argues that people who have sinned (everyone) are children of the devil, following his nature; when Jesus comes into our lives, however, we get a new nature and are born from God. We may not start off by living out that new nature perfectly, but at least we are aware that we have a new Lord.

 

But why does Jesus add, “born from the Spirit”? As Calvin and others have suggested, the Greek phrase here translated, “water and the Spirit,” may be what is called a hendiadys, using the conjunction epexegetically. In other words, we might translate it, “born from the water of the Spirit.” Jesus uses “water” as a symbol for the Spirit in John’s Gospel (John 7:37-39). Thus he is telling Nicodemus not that he will be saved by Jewish ritual immersion, but that he will be saved instead by a spiritual baptism by the Spirit, i.e., by the gift of God’s Spirit transforming his heart. All those who embrace Christ as savior become God’s children (John 1:12-13).

 

Jesus probably alludes in this context to the restoration promise of Ezekiel 36:25-27: God would sprinkle clean water on his people, put a new spirit in them, and give them his own Spirit. Thus, Jesus speaks of the spirit that is born from the Spirit (John 3:6). He goes on to compare God’s life-giving Spirit with the wind (3:8), just as in Ezekiel’s next chapter (Ezek 37:1-14).

 

God does not save us because we are Jewish or Gentile; God loves the entire world, including all peoples and cultures (John 3:16). All of us have sinned and left God’s way, but when we accept and trust the gift of God’s Son, he welcomes each of us as his children. May we labor until all know about him.

 

This is adapted from Craig’s 2005 article in the Missionary Seer; Craig has also authored The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic), which received an award of merit in the Christianity Today book awards.

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Jesus is the only way, John 14:6

When Jesus declares that He is the way, the truth, and the life, the context makes clear that He means that He is the way to the Father. He further claims that no one comes to the Father except through Him (John 14:6). This fits the rest of John’s Gospel: there, even many of the religious people who believed in the one true God opposed God’s agent; if they were not following God’s heart, how much less those who worship false gods or (like myself before my conversion) no God at all?

 

This claim is a startling and offensive one in our culture, where all truth is often considered relative (except the truth of relativism). But while some truth may be relative, sometimes it matters what one believes: if I drink nitric acid because someone tells me that it is orange juice, there will be consequences to my faulty information. Yet the claim is no more offensive today than it was for the early Christians; had they agreed to the existence of other gods in addition to their own, they would not have faced much persecution in the Roman world. Gentiles did not deny the Jewish God, but often despised Jews and Christians for worshiping him exclusively.

 

The claim is also painful. Many people we love do not know Christ; half the world has never even had the gospel explained to them. But the painfulness of a claim need not make it untrue. That tens of thousands of people die daily from malnutrition and preventable diseases is catastrophic, but we do the world no good by denying its reality; instead we must pour our resources into meeting those needs. In the same way, if Jesus is the fullest revelation of God’s heart, we must devote our labors to making that available to spiritually needy people that God created for fellowship with Himself. We do this by sharing our faith (both with our lips and with lives consistent with our testimony), directly with with those around us, and less directly by supporting our fellow laborers who share God’s love in Christ among those who have not heard it.

 

Some people object that all religions are the same regarding “what matters.” Unfortunately, such an objection is offensive to most religions, because it waters down what matters to them. One religion says that Jesus is God’s Son; another says that God has no son. Some religions say that there is only one God; others that there are many gods; others still that everything is god. While such distinctions may not matter to outsiders, they matter to practitioners of these faiths. Tolerance and kindness are necessary virtues, but genuine tolerance means that we get along (and, according to Christian teaching, love our neighbor) even when we disagree, not that we always agree. Many who want to make all religions the same are unwilling to tolerate the differences!

 

When John’s Gospel claims that Jesus is the only way to the Father, it is not saying that no one else has any truth. It does, however, claim that Jesus is the only way to a completely saving, personal relationship with the Father. The apostolic message throughout the New Testament preaches as if our eternal destiny depends on our response to God’s offer of a relationship with Himself in Christ. If we genuinely believe that claim, we will live in such a way as to devote our lives and resources to making Christ known.

 

This article is adapted from Craig’s 2004 article in the Missionary Seer; Craig has also authored The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).

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Global sharing, 2 Corinthians 8—9

Any reader of the Gospels knows that Jesus taught radical sharing of our possessions with people who need our help. Luke’s Gospel is particularly emphatic about this principle. God’s prophet invites the truly repentant person to share anything they have beyond what they need to live on, even if they have just a second pair of clothes and someone else has none (Luke 3:8-11). Whoever wants to be Jesus’ disciple will surrender all his or her possessions (Luke 14:33; cf. 12:33).

Whether literally or as a principle expressed perhaps hyperbolically, these passages are surely demanding. Some Christians in history, such as St. Anthony and many monastic movements, followed this literally for themselves. Others, such as Charles Finney, suggested that this teaching applied to all prospective disciples: we do not lose all our possessions at the moment of conversion, but we do lose our ownership of them.

We see this principle lived out by the early Christians in times of revival in Acts 2:44-45 and 4:32-35. The church eventually developed mechanisms for strategic sharing with local Christians, and handled fairly complaints of minority groups within the church (6:1-5). Eventually, however, the church outgrew a single locale, and Christians who had more than what they needed to live on in one location needed to help Christians who had less than what they needed to live on in another location. Paul and his coworker Barnabas were agents of the Antioch church’s gifts to the Jerusalem church (Acts 11:28-30), and this may have provided the model for one of Paul’s most ambitious projects: a collection for the poor in Jerusalem (cf. 24:17).

One of Paul’s driving concerns involved Jerusalem’s status as the mother church. Because Jewish Christians contributed to the Gentiles spiritually, Gentile Christians owed them material aid in their time of need (Rom 15:27). Paul probably uses this collection to establish reconciliation between the culturally distant churches of Jerusalem and the rest of the Roman world.

Another aspect of his concern is particularly relevant to us, however. Many of Paul’s “mission churches” were in cities with stronger economies than Jerusalem, and many of the members in his churches had more than what they needed to live on. This may have been true in Galatia (1 Cor 16:1), but believers in Macedonia (Rom 15:26) gave even from relative poverty (2 Cor 8:1-5). Corinth, however, was one of the wealthiest cities in the Roman world—and its Christians there unfortunately had to be prodded into giving!

Paul lays out the principle plainly for them: “equality” (2 Cor 8:13-15). If God supplied Christians in some parts of the world more than what they needed to live on, it was so they could help Christians in other parts if the world who had less than what they needed. God supplied the total church with sufficient resources to make sure that everyone was taken care of, but gave some individual churches more than others. Why? So those with resources could share God’s ministry of giving. God is the provider for all of us, so when we share with others the praise goes to God (9:8-15). The church in each part of the world must, of course, be self-supporting, except in times of emergency such as famines; but we can still coordinate our various resources as strategically as possible. Someday the roles of the needy may be reversed (8:14), but the principle remains unchanged.

Paul shows that sharing is not just with needy individuals (as one might guess from reading the Gospels), but also with needy churches. Some have spiritual resources to contribute; some have material resources; each individual and each church must contribute what we can for the greater good of Christ’s body.

Given the exchange rates, a dollar can do many times more in most African countries, and many other parts of the world, than it can do in the United States. In one country, I was told that my background commentary would cost a pastor two months’ salary. Twenty year ago, after I discovered that, I re-prioritized my giving. At the time, 25¢ could provide a meal for a person in a famine-stricken country. I was single at that time, and chose to live in an efficiency apartment that doubled as my office, eating as simply as I could so as to make available every cent possible for wider needs. Having a family has since adjusted how I must budget my resources, but the principle of caring for others remains important. In a world where millions of children die annually from hunger, malnutrition and preventable diseases; in a world where some countries have over a million AIDS orphans; in a world where millions of people live in cardboard boxes in dumps and lack clean drinking water, the sacrificial generosity of Christians can make a life-and-death difference.

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A tale of two kings, Luke 2:1-20

Part of our Christmas story is a tale of two kings: one powerful in the eyes of the world, and the other identifying with the lowliest of people. It is the latter who is the true King, and this reminds us that we serve a God who is not impressed with power or status, but who dwells close to the lowly (Ps 34:18; Is 57:15). If we want to find God’s presence, we too will likelier find Him among the lowly.

This passage opens with a decree of Augustus Caesar, who displays his power here by censuses used to collect taxes for Rome and its empire (Lk 2:1). Augustus had achieved power by brutally crushing his competition, and he maintained power through absolute political control. Emperors fed Rome with free grain levied as taxes on Egyptian farmers—whose children sometimes starved. His was an empire maintained by force and propaganda, utterly different from the unpretentious kingdom that Christ came to bring.

All the important people would feel honored to be in Caesar’s presence; by contrast, Christ was born to a betrothed village couple from Judea’s “frontier” of Galilee, forced to migrate to Bethlehem for Caesar’s census. In contrast to Caesar, Christ was not born in what people of status would have viewed as a “respectable” family.

For readers in the Roman Empire, the narrative here is full of similar contrasts. Augustus lived in a palace; Christ was born in a feeding trough meant for animals. Choirs in Augustus’ temples hailed him as a god, lord and a “savior” for the empire; an angelic voice hailed Jesus as “born this day a savior,” “Christ the Lord” (Lk 2:11). The empire celebrated Augustus’ birthday; heaven celebrated Christ’s.

Imperial propaganda announced and celebrated the “Pax Romana,” the “peace” that Augustus established (i.e., imposed) for the empire by subduing (i.e., conquering) many of its enemies (i.e., neighbors). By contrast, at Jesus’ birth heaven announced God’s offer of true peace to humanity (Lk 2:14).

Virtually everyone in the empire knew of the emperor. Yet God chose to reveal Jesus’ identity to shepherds, who were outcasts to most of ancient Mediterranean society. Who would heed shepherds? Yet they faithfully proclaimed what they had experienced to anyone who would listen (Lk 2:18). Some ancient laws rejected the testimony of shepherds and women; yet Luke’s Gospel opens and closes with such testimony, approved by God.

If Augustus had a son now, he would be born in a palace and clothed with expensive garments (cf. Lk 7:25). But some time after Mary and Joseph reached Bethlehem, Mary gave birth and laid Jesus in a manger in a cave, apparently because the house was too crowded. (Contrary to most translations, there was no “inn” involved; if anyone excluded them from the house at all, it was apparently not an innkeeper, but relatives!) Mary wrapped Jesus with “swaddling cloths” (wrappings meant to help a baby’s limbs grow straight), not royal robes.

At Christmas we celebrate the incarnation of God in flesh, the incomparably great one sharing our broken humanity and ultimately our mortality. When God came among us, he came not among the great and mighty. He was not impressed with the pretension of human power, as if the prestige of powerful human empires mattered anything to him. Instead, he came among the broken, among the lowly, and showed us that we do not need to pretend to be anything great; he welcomes us by his own generosity. Like the shepherds, let us recognize the love of our king who cares for each of us, and tell everyone about him.