Costly Community

Go. The Lord rattles me. 

“Where?” I had just asked to see Him. But His immediate response is annoying.

To the streets and squares. Find me. My heart lingers for a moment, weighing the cost and the precious free time I’d spend. Frustration stirs. Isn’t my whole day spent in ministry and service? Now I have to go find you thirty minutes away?

My own thought reeks of foolish arrogance. “Ok Lord. I’m coming.”

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It’s easy to value life with the other when we ourselves are pleased. But when celebration transitions to service, and there’s nothing to receive, community becomes chore. We’ve realized the relational seesaw with its highs of receiving and lows of dealing. We understand that intimacy with another requires sacrifice—a necessary evil of sorts.

Our flesh grimaces. It learns to reject intimacy because we know it means crucifixion. We’ll attend church, play ball, and even share a meal. But to go further would require sacrifice. So we sift compassion, allowing emotion through but refraining from commitment.

But this attitude reveals a shallow understanding of the gospel. Shallow because we idolize the depths of intimacy with Christ, while barely wading into waters with another. We’ve disconnected the call to community from closeness with Jesus, and in so doing, become the very Pharisees we vilify. 

We have surrendered ourselves to Jesus in the broader sense of ideology, but fortified our hearts from dying for another. Jesus' death for us is preached on loudspeaker, while becoming the least of all and servant of all is left on read. 

But to claim zeal for God while standing idly by the other is death. “... ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’” To love the Christ is to dare follow a King who ministered to the needy, washed servants' feet, and took on the cross.

So Why? Why, in light of Jesus’ example, do we fear crucifixion? Why do we maintain ourselves on the throne and see each other as projects to be calendared and compartmentalized? Why do the Christ’s words above create in us discomfort instead of inspiration?

Because we have come to see salvation simply as a heroic narrative rather than the love story it actually is. For most of us, God is ruler, not lover, and obedience means duty, not desire. We sound more like the complaining Israelites than David singing the words, “One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple (Psalm 27:4).”

To become, like David, people after God’s own heart, we need a paradigm shift. We must fall in love with the person of Jesus. We must become the beloved in desperate search of our lover. “All night long on my bed I looked for the one my heart loves; I looked for him but did not find him. I will get up now and go about the city, through its streets and squares; I will search for the one my heart loves… (Song of Songs 3:1-2a).” We must have real desire for our Lord. A longing that leads to looking. 

Though we may try, we will never fall in love with an idea or concept. If we attempt to force a love of Christ in abstraction, we will forever backtrack to burdensome duty. But if we seek the Lord as a knowable person, with a heart of radical pursuit, we will surely find Him (Jeremiah 29:13). 

This moves service from obligation to desire and people from task to opportunity. Pursuing the burdened, smelly, sick becomes the scent of our Savior. And gazing into the eyes of the costly, needy, nobodies transforms into a glimpse of the Most High. 

Illustration by Anna Rendall

The suffering Christ invites us into the same other-oriented sacrifice that He modeled on the wooden beams. And those who love Him readily accept that invitation. They are not concerned with the death of self because they know that in so doing they will see the face of the one they most adore. 

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He points me to her. A middle-aged woman slouched in a corner by an ocean of passing population; I hear Him whisper. There I am. 

Abba Father, show us your cross, that we may know your death. Let us share in your suffering that we may share in your glory. Reveal to us those who are in need, that we may see your face. Open our eyes to the unseen, and fill us with the Spirit of God, that in whatever we do, we would do it by your guiding hand. Amen.

The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ Matthew 25:40

Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. James 2:15-17