No Christian Supremacists

Sometimes I think there’s a strange idea floating around Christian circles that seems to long for Christians to be the dominant force in the world.

It’s a longing I understand: wouldn’t the world be such a lovely place if everyone understood how small they all were and stopped worrying about trying to make themselves big and got on with loving God and each other instead? And while I may answer a hearty yes, the parable of the sower in Matthew 13 is a biblical cold shower on any such dreams of Christian dominance.

The word is sown, and there are 4 responses to it, and of those 4 only one actually reaches its potential and bears in the world the richness the Christian life is intended to bear.

It seems to me that humanity can’t get over dreams of power. Every religious or political system humans seem to be a part of, at some point gets co-opted into their dreams of running the world their way, or having the world styled as they would style it, but God never seems to have that agenda.

In Matthew 13, Jesus has a chance to use his profound powers as a teacher to convince large numbers of people to get on board with his program, but instead he speaks in Parables with the express intention of not getting the clearest and best coverage for himself. Then further, when he explains how the Kingdom of God will actually operate he explains that it will always be a movement that springs from weakness, and works in and through weakness, using only the few.

Perhaps one day Christians will realise their profoundly distinct heritage of being the unique minority, and cherish that weakness, and love from that weakness, and not feel burdened to make this Kingdom of service into the empire of control human ambition longs for.