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From time to time, we as a magazine and I as the editor step on our readers’ toes. We do not take a perverse delight in doing so, but we are not a magazine that is fearful to speak boldly. Oftentimes, though not often enough for our tastes, our readers speak back boldly. We hold our convictions with conviction, and we want others to do the same.
This month, however, we have in one sense played it rather safe. In addressing the communion of the saints, we have no fear that our mailbox will be filled with nasty-grams from the Anti-Communion of the Saints Brotherhood. There is no community bound together around the conviction that community is wrong. We need not expect that our circulation will plummet. Everyone is in favor of communion.
What separates us, what brings division among the brethren, is not our commitment to being one. Neither, however, are we separated only by differing views on other matters. Division in the church is not merely the shrapnel from the explosion of the clash of ideas. If we all could agree on when to baptize people, on what kind of music to play, and on the relationship between God’s will and ours, even then we would have divisions.
Our communion is broken not only by our differing ideas, but by our differing selves. We lose sweet fellowship because we are not always so sweet. The problem is not our ideas, but we who hold the ideas. Consider this question that divided the followers of Christ: Who will sit at Jesus’ right hand? As the disciples bickered among themselves, they did so not for theological reasons. It wasn’t as if John argued that he would get the seat because sound doctrine required it, and Peter retorted that Hezekiah 2:5, rightly interpreted, showed him to be the man. The issue was one of power. What caused the division was not a disagreement but an agreement. Each of the disciples wanted the same thing—the seat of honor.
We see this same desire working itself out in a far bloodier way in the story of Abimelech. He doesn’t argue that he should rule as judge over Israel after the death of Gideon because all his brothers have embraced the Hymenean heresy while he has kept himself theologically pure. Instead, he proffers two arguments, one cynically practical, the other merely cynical. There would be, he reasons, far too much bureaucracy with 70 rulers. One, though it might be the loneliest number, is far more elegant. And besides, he is a local boy. He knows who his true friends are. With the money given him by his friends, he hires a band of mercenaries to slaughter all but one of the rivals to his throne. Jotham, the lone survivor, is not a threat, and so Abimelech’s position is secure.
The thirst for power is powerful, enough so to incite mass fratricide. But surely we could never stoop to such wickedness, right? We not only could, we do. We regularly murder our brothers in the pew with our unjust hatred and loose lips (Matt. 5:21–22). We murder reputations, not so we might be king, but merely to raise ourselves up a peg or two. We murder our community by dividing over the trappings of power and prestige. And like the disciples, we do it in the very presence of God, coram Deo, while sitting at the table with Christ.
The story of Abimelech, by itself, might be misconstrued as a mere morality tale. We might come away thinking something as profound as “Thank goodness we have elections in this country.” But when we consider the immature bickering of the Twelve, however, we discover that both of these stories are about ourselves. Abimelech is like us, just as the church is like Israel.
There is, however, a profound difference between these stories. Our end is not the end of Abimelech. For instead of having our heads crushed by our enemies, we are in Christ, who crushed the head of His enemy. The back-biting, bickering, power-mad community that we are is precisely the flock that Christ came to redeem. And in redeeming us, He calls us to be like Him.
He is our model, who laid aside His glory, the prerogatives of a King, to become the Suffering Servant. He is the one who took off the robe of glory and took on the robe of flesh, that He not only might wash our feet, but wash all that we are. To be like Him, we not only need to stop vying for position with the ones with whom we are in communion, but we must love those with whom we are in communion who still are vying for position. Peter was called to love John, and John to love Peter. And both were called to consider the other to be the greater. If Jesus could love them while they bickered, must not we love those with whom we are bickering?
We must learn to be bold for truth, and boldly recognize the truth that we are the least in the kingdom. Our humility is not over the truth that is in us, but the us that holds the truth. We must, with Paul, boast in Christ, and in Christ alone. We must lift each other up. We must not be like Abimelech, who reminded his followers that what tied them together was their shared flesh and blood. Instead, we must be like Christ, who reminds us at His table that what binds us together is His flesh, broken, and His blood, spilled. It is because of His work that we all will sit at His right hand, the brotherhood of Christ, united in Him.