Of One Church, Of One Gospel
One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched. There in front of him was a man suffering from dropsy. Jesus asked the Pharisees and experts in the law, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?” But they remained silent. So taking hold of the man, he healed him and sent him away. Luke 14:1-4
In a passage that so clearly challenges the ordinances of the law, and so wonderfully shows Christ’s transcendence of it, we are again reminded of the Gospel-freedom Christ introduced. The sociological lines that Christ smudged still bear witness to believers today; Christ speaks loudly to a war-struck, economically depressed, and socially divided world. In this day’s devotion, Christ makes a call to both the prominent Pharisee and the dropsy victim in a single stride.
Through the inspired Gospels we witness Christ touch the untouchable, eat and drink on days of fast, claim equality with God, accept women followers, foretell his own death, insult the lawmakers and Pharisees, and demand love toward one’s enemies. Far from a vigilante charge, the earth-life of Christ serves as a perfect image of the all-accepting God above.
I so often wish the Christ-example of unity guided our churches today; instead it seems that each corner serves only its corner of the equality pie. What if only one Church, one Gospel, and one centering focus on all God’s people existed—rich and poor, intelligent and ignorant, privileged and deprived? What would this church look like? I think it would look an awful lot like the Kingdom we so eagerly await.
Perhaps we have spent too long deciding too much about things over which we have too little control—things like who’s in the kingdom and who’s out of the kingdom and whom society accepts and whom society rejects. Christ rejected no one. After all, He stopped to heal the swollen body of a street-wanderer before visiting the swollen pride of a Pharisee.
