Nobodies Together

When we are all "nobodies" together, we are starting to feel the in-breaking Shalom of God.

At least that is my takeaway from a few days spent in New York with the Faith & Reason creative team. We were in the big city to capture, on film, the thoughts of diverse faith leaders, writers, and artists on how they interpret and respond to the "scandal" of Jesus of Nazareth: that upstart backwater rabbi from Galilee — that "nobody" with a provincial accent — who nevertheless made and still makes a whole lot of history. The comments we filmed were full of wit and insight and passion. Very soon you will be hearing more about the new Faith & Reason project these powerful testimonies will support.

The recording took place at historic Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. I served as senior minister there many years ago, and I went back on Sunday morning for a moving service on the theme of "I Am You." The preachers (there were two engaged in dialogue) took as their point of departure the comment by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel that "spiritual betrayal on the part of some of us affects the faith of all of us."

I am still processing, but thanks to these experiences I believe I am gaining a richer understanding of the meaning of the Jesus scandal and the scandal of the entire gospel message. To my mind, the primary scandal relates to the announcement (clear enough already in the Hebrew scriptures) that God really embraces nobodies and also that God wants those of us who imagine we are somebody to think again.

Mary's "my soul magnifies the Lord" song in Luke 1 — her passionate rejoicing over world-changing good news — already invites us to reflect on God's special interest in the disinherited, on God's surpassing love for the least and the lost. The song even puts the Great Reversal into the past tense as an accomplished fact: "God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty."

This setting aside of the powerful and prominent was shocking news then, in the early days of the Roman Empire. It remains shocking news today, because the natural and culturally approved path for each and every one of us is to go out and make a name for ourselves: to gain recognition, wealth, and even honor in a competitive human culture. It's an absolute scandal for the gospel to be telling us how foolish this preoccupation is, yet God seems to be insisting that the nobodies matter most and that the wannabes need to chill.

When our primary goal is to become a "somebody," we expect God to go along with the program and honor our quest for success. But it doesn't work that way. God emphatically does not buy into our notion of ambition and success; in fact, everything we hear from the prophets and from Jesus tells us that God has a very different idea. God wants us to be done with vain ambition. God wants humility; God invites us to participate in the work of comforting the afflicted and affirming the dignity of all.

The last shall be first, and the first shall be last. Paul makes the point eloquently in a letter to the status-conscious members of a little church he planted in the wealthy city of Corinth: "God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things — and the things that are not — to nullify the things that are."

Nullify: that's a very strong word. It's hard beyond measure for us to take this in, to grasp the difference between our economy and the divine economy. Especially now that we live in what the Russians would call a nomenklatura society where only some people actually get to have "names." As poisonous winner-take-all values continue to advance, most Americans are anxious all the time about how they are ranked and how they are rated and even how they will be remembered when they are gone.

God's loving embrace of nobodies can free us from the fatal grip of status anxiety if only we will let it. But oh, how hard it is to surrender the hunger for status! The encounter between Jesus and the rich young ruler (Matthew 19, Mark 10, Luke 18) is so very sad because this man who had it all could not conceive of living his life as a nobody.

Understanding how God blesses the life of nobodiness isn't just a theological insight. It also offers good medicine for a bitterly polarized country. Our so-called "elites" cling to their high status and high visibility, while our so-called "populists" cling to their anger over what they see as a lack of recognition and respect. The latter naturally gravitate to a religion that makes them feel superior and specially chosen.

To go back to Rabbi Heschel's framing, both parties to this nightmare are engaged in a spiritual betrayal that has fatally damaging consequences for us all. If people on both sides of the divide could see that they are all nobodies in God's eyes, we might actually have a chance to make something new, even to make a love revolution. Especially when it's understood that the nobodies of this world also happen to be precious beyond imagining.

~ Peter