A unique vocation in the world
Stephen Curkpatrick

In politics, we see humans at their best and at their worst. Politics shows us that humans both seek goodness and compromise it. Even with the best intentions of creating and enacting the human good, one possibility is judged more expedient than others in balancing individual liberties and social obligations. There is never a singular or adequate solution for these competing demands.

In delivering compromised solutions for perennial human dilemmas, politics will invariably disappoint most people. Every outcome of politics is wrought from compromises within compromises. A democratic government exists through an electoral event of compromise—elected by barely half of society, it is dissolved again within a few years.

Christian testimony reminds us that righteousness is finally beyond any society’s purview and competence. Governments deliver approximations of the human good that are variously forged through compromise, invariably toward retaining power. Promises made in quest of power are also compromised in having gained it.

Christian focus on Christ crucified is contrary to notions of power derived from society. The Christian community of faith—in having the mind of Christ and without conformity to the world—introduces another dimension to inducting the human good amid the inevitable compromises of politics, even at its deputed best in democracy. Life-giving paradoxes of the gospel introduce a radical critique of all political possibilities, even beyond the partisan positions sometimes assumed by Christians.

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Familiar expressions of Christian political possibility revolve around a seeming mandatory citation of Matthew’s judgment scene of sheep and goats. (Matt. 25) This drama is often interpreted within existing political possibilities for society. Yet such engagement is sheepish about judgment by the Son of Man. Accountability beyond human forums seems a little unreal for any present political vision to contemplate, yet this gospel drama concerns ultimate accountability for tangible decisions in the face of human need.

Those who are adamant that sheep and goats represent partisan political imperatives are unlikely to engage the scene’s message of judgment. The scene can be cited to identify partisan political ally and foe without reference to the gospel context of New Testament testimony. Ironically, by ignoring the issue of judgment, political use of this scene suggests no final accountability for human actions.

In the absence of accountability beyond competing partisan machinations, political engagement becomes rhetorical point-scoring. Without reference beyond human possibilities, one view is pitched against another in a contest of rhetoric and recrimination over arranging society in which, whatever the outcome, there are always winners and losers. Without accountability beyond our own reckoning and rhetoric, there is only relativity—whatever spin it is given within competing expressions of human altruism.

Matthew’s judgment drama presents our source of relational accountability. If human need is met in commitment to a person, Christ as the ultimate source of relationships is also served. Accountability is relational not legalistic; it is the desire to be accountable to another in love. If we will not be hospitable among those in need, we are culpable before Christ in God who is entirely hospitable as wholly relational. The scene’s impetus for tangible human care is also framed by the gospel’s life-giving grace as our source of relational accountability, ultimately before God.

The scene does not give us the liberty to pronounce who the righteous might be today, for even the righteous in this judgment drama were not aware that their actions had such significance. We cannot be sure whether our commitment to another is finally adequate, exposing us to the possibility of unrighteousness through neglect by degrees. Who will measure what degree of response to any human need is ever adequate? Are we not always in deficit?

Only God knows human hearts. Only grace can enable us to respond readily to human need without lapsing into self-righteous declarations as to who has supposedly not fulfilled this challenge.

As to nations, judgment is scaled down to individuals in tangible situations of human need that summon from us, deeds not talk, much less vociferous partisan ideals concerning perennial human dilemmas. This tangible challenge calls us to a vocation in grace of which the wider New Testament context of this drama speaks.

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Christian testimony articulates extraordinary participation in the reality of God disclosed in Jesus Christ as a response to the most enduring challenges of human existence.

The perennial enigma of human life and its highest good is ultimately framed by the troubling horizon of death. This enigma is more radical than any subsidiary issues posed within ready-to-hand competing versions of the human good. These are ultimately forged from selected phenomena and ideals within partisan expressions of anxiety that seek to preserve “a place under the sun.”

The grace of God calls us to a different reality and a unique vocation in the world. This reality has no equivalent in natural and cultural phenomena, secular or religious; this vocation is sustained beyond human resources. The reality of grace alone gives the freedom and capacity to overcome evil with good—not perpetuating evil in partisan expressions of confronting it on fragmented terms but instead, absorbing its opportunities through turning the other cheek and tangible expressions of love.

Self-relinquishing expressions of love are only possible as Christ crucified and risen absorbs human anxiety over the quest for a place under the sun and the evils such anxiety can generate in the fear of being displaced by another. Human anxiety ultimately reflects a fear of death. Address this, and every subsidiary issue can also be addressed with durable deeds and words in the grace of God.

The grace of God gives life precisely where it cannot be endorsed in conformity to the world, including its politics. The challenge to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice, after the self-giving love of God, does not register as a source of life and freedom in our world.

To be formed by Christ is to be given this perspective and possibility in grace, for to receive such grace is to be transformed. To offer ourselves in the same grace is to prove what is good, acceptable and perfect in life lived wholly before God in Christ.

Humans yearn for wholeness in the face of their inexorable negation in death. Our greatest service to humanity is to live generously in deed and word out of the gospel’s paradox of life that exceeds death announced in Christian testimony to Jesus Christ.

God is for us in Christ, self-giving and transforming to the extent that humanity is called to participate in the triune communion of God—endorsing life in creation with grace and tangible hospitality beyond mortal anxiety. As recipients of this life, we are called to a truly peculiar commitment—losing life to receive it.

Christian commitment is not possible on any perspective of reality that is available politically, much less in the conflicted partisan recriminations that accompany either political ideology with its tyrannies or political expediency with its compromises. Tangible expression of Christian grace and hospitality is a gift given within the gospel as it calls us to new life by trust and gratitude.

Our response is met with endorsement of our humanity in grace that transforms our aptitude for living. It is within this reality that we are both exposed to and given the desire for losing self to receive it in excess, in Christ, for the sake of others. The gospel, through faith, offers unique possibilities for human life and its expression in generous community in the midst of creation, yet these possibilities always remain gifts of grace and truth in Christ.