Upside Down?
I’m back this week with another conversation about our rights and responsibilities in the Kingdom of God. If you missed the last couple of posts, go back and read them here.
Last time, I wrote about Jesus’ rights and responsibilities and how his life, in all contexts, is a great place to start when evaluating ours. After all, Jesus was the only perfect human being to ever live. He was the most relaxed, at ease, and comfortable in his skin of anyone to ever exist. So, he’s a really good baseline for the rights and responsibilities of human beings everywhere. Here are some of the rights and responsibilities that I identified in Jesus’ life:
Rights:
The right to be treated with dignity and respect
The right to choose how he would live
The right to rule and restore the earth (his Kingdom)
Responsibilities:
The responsibility to perform his job and perform it well
The responsibility to teach God’s word truthfully and carefully
The responsibility to suffer the consequences of his actions
From here on out, I’m going to be speaking about the rights and responsibilities that I see in the Scriptures for the people of God. I’m going to use Jesus and his life as a baseline for anyone living life according to his way. So, if you’re not following Jesus or a Christian, then what I’m about to write about might not apply to you. I think that it’s certainly beneficial to read anyway, but some things might not make sense. That’s ok! Stick with me and, please, feel free to send me a DM and ask some questions!
Alright. Onward.
Even though Jesus had the right to be treated with dignity and respect, he often wasn’t. He gave up that right in order to love and serve the people around him. Namely, to go to his death on their behalf in one of the most undignified and grotesque execution rites humanity has ever devised (Matthew 27:11-56). In fact, according to Paul’s letter to the Phillippians, he gave up a lot more than just basic human dignity and respect Philippians 2:5-11).
In this way, Jesus shows that he is the King of a different kind of Kingdom. Many theologians call this “The Upside Down Kingdom”. In human kingdoms, if you want to be powerful and wield authority, you pretty much have to look out for number one. All “successful” leaders climbed a ladder and many left a trail of bodies behind them. In order to gain power, authority, and influence, they were doing many things, but they were certainly not laying aside any of their rights. They were not laying aside a promotion that they worked hard to earn or abdicating their thrones. Quite the opposite, in fact.
But not Jesus. I referenced the passage in Philippians 2 above where Jesus is noted to have left behind basically every right and privilege that he had known since before time began to become human. And, then, when he became human, he even laid aside the basic human right to dignity and respect.
An upside down kingdom indeed. If we are going to be his followers, we are heirs to his kingdom (Romans 8:14-17). Ergo, we are heirs to a kingdom where the last shall be first (Matthew 20:13-16), the meek inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5), and we give up our rights in order to love and serve those around us (Luke 22:24-30).
Secondly, by his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus began the work of restoring his Kingdom and setting things to rights. So much is broken in our world. Jesus’ work is to restore them. This is his right because he made everything (John 1:1-5), it’s all his.
Imagine with me, for a minute, a world in which everything is as it should be. There’s enough for you, everyone you love, and even people who live on the other side of the world. No one ever gets sick or suffers or dies. That’s a perfect world. That’s the way that it was made (Genesis 1-2).
Of course, there’s the obvious way that Jesus begins to undo some of this death and destruction- he rises from the dead. Before that, though, Jesus was raising others from the dead (John 11, Luke 7). He was feeding hungry people (Matthew 14:13-21). He was healing those who had been sick (Luke 4:40, Matthew 9:20-22). He was eating meals with outsiders and strangers (Matthew 9:10-17, Luke 19:1-10).
As heirs to his Kingdom, we also have the right to restore things to the way that they should be by doing as Jesus did: healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and welcoming strangers and outsiders. Raising the dead is a little more tricky, but it’s not unheard of for the people of God (1 Kings 17:17-24, Acts 20:7-12).
Finally, as heirs to Jesus’ Kingdom, we have the right to fix things that we didn’t break.
Jesus did not break the world. He made it (John 1:1-5). He made it good, whole, perfect, and pure. There was nothing wrong with it. He called it good (Genesis 1). We were the ones who did the breaking. Our first parents did it by trusting themselves and believing a lie that God was holding out on them (Genesis 3). And all their children, all the way down to us, have been breaking the world in variations of that same first failure: “I know better than God and he must be holding out on me”.
The specifics of how the world is broken vary from person to person, locality to locality, and generation to generation, but I think that we can all agree that this place isn’t exactly functioning properly. So, before we consider what we should do, let’s take a look at Jesus.
Jesus fixes what he didn’t break. He did not invite sin, death, and destruction into the world, but he defeated them on behalf of his creation (Romans 6:5-11). He did not make people sick or to have bodies that don’t function properly, but he heals them and sets their bodies in order (Jesus 8:1-17). To be an heir to Jesus’ Kingdom is to have the right to fix things that we didn’t break.
To recap, here are three rights that we have as heirs to Jesus’ Kingdom:
Lay down our basic human rights in service and for the good of others
Restoration of things to the way that they should be
Fix things that we didn’t break
Now, I think that our responsibilities are going to vary a little bit from Jesus’. Mainly because we are not perfect and he is. Nonetheless, here we go.
Jesus had the responsibility to suffer the consequences of his actions. In my last post, I wrote about how his actions, though perfect and right, still led him on a path to his ultimate murder. Of course, he intended for things to go this way, but his actions were still why he was killed.
In our case, suffering the consequences of our actions is, more likely than not, a result of our failures and shortcomings (or the failures and shortcomings of others), not our righteousness. I will allow that there is plenty of suffering for doing the right thing in the world. However, I’ve suffered a lot more because of my pride and selfishness than for my attempts at righteousness.
So, we have the responsibility to fix things that we broke ourselves. We have the responsibility to make amends for the things that we do wrong.
We also have the responsibility to pay our debts. I’ve been talking a lot about Jesus as a King in a Kingdom. It is my personal favorite way to think about Jesus because I desperately crave a perfect and benevolent authority figure, who only ever deals justly. I also think that it’s a really helpful way to think about our lives.
In this context, I’m thinking of humanity as having a debt with God. After all, we did break his world. We act like we own the place all the time and we don’t. So, if you broke something in the King’s Kingdom, you owe him for it.
The only problem is, in this case, we cannot pay our debt. Romans 6:23 says, “for the wages of sin is death…”. If the only thing that we’ve earned from how we’ve been living is death, then we cannot pay our debt. We broke the world and it needs to be put back together with life, not death. Our money is no good here.
The glorious news of the Gospel is that this King (Jesus) has a corner on the market of life. He has a never-ending fountain of it (John 4). And, because he is the king of an upside down kingdom, he is willing to share that life with all of us. He took life out of his own account and paid our debts. Then, he gave us even more life and invited us to come and follow him on his quest to make “everything sad come untrue” (The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien).
As his people, we have the following responsibilities:
To suffer the consequences of our actions (good and bad)
To pay our debts
Everything changes when you follow Jesus. What you think is your right becomes something that you get to give away and what you think is your responsibility becomes something that he takes care of for you. It’s a disorienting way to live.
Or is it a re-orienting?
What if “upside down” was really a bit of a misnomer? What if it’s our world and our kingdoms that are all a bit upside down? If everything I’m saying here is true, and I really hope that it is, then our way of being is the one that’s all out of whack. If we broke the world by trusting ourselves instead of God and we have the right to restore it as heirs of the Kingdom of Christ, then we’re heirs to a Kingdom greater than we ever imagined and our journey to get there is actually about re-orienting our lives so that we will be fit citizens.
It’s a whole new level of right and responsibility.