Mission is unsafe

Not only are the disciples of Christ called to follow after him: they are also sent by him into the world. The mission of Jesus further exposes his disciples to risk, because he sends them into situations where they will be opposed and rejected, beaten, tortured and killed. They are sent out ‘like sheep into the midst of wolves’ (Mt 10:16). They are not to creep unobserved into the corners of the world; Christ rather calls them to preach the gospel and make disciples of all nations, ‘in Jerusalem, Samaria and to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1:8) – which activity is most certainly for the public sphere. The churches thus are rightly addressed by Peter as a diaspora (1 Peter 1:1-2): they are a scattered gathering. The gospel expands space and foreshortens time: so, there is now not a location in particular that is more (or less) the site of God’s encounter with human beings. In fact, any place on earth will do. The scattered disciples take refuge in the eschatological and heavenly Jerusalem (as in Heb 12:22-3): they are present with the ascended Christ in heaven as he is ‘with them always, to the end of the age’ by the power of his Spirit.

'O Jerusalem...'

Not only was Jerusalem as the holy city the source of divine protection: the Davidic King, whose royal seat this was, was the specific and particular addressee of God’s promise of protection. The narrative of David’s war with Saul is an embodiment for Israel of God’s miraculous protection of his anointed. Yhwh’s covenant with David in 2 Sam 7 repeats and intensifies the earlier covenant promises of blessing, protection and generation. The Land will be a place of no disruption from the enemies that surround them:

10 And I will appoint a place for my people Israel and will plant them, so that they may live in their own place, and be disturbed no more; and evildoers shall afflict them no more, as formerly, 11from the time that I appointed judges over my people Israel; and I will give you rest from all your enemies. (2 Sam 7:10-11)

The eternal rule of the Son of David – including his castigation – is the guarantee of this promise. The Psalms then give voice to this hope from the perspective of the Messianic King in the face of the experience of radical threat. In taking up the Psalter we are immediately thrown into a world characterised by conflict, confusion, doubt, enmity, and violence: the nations conspire against Yhwh and his anointed (Psalm 2:1-2) hoping to overthrow their rule. The Psalmist pleads with Yhwh for deliverance in the face of personal and national disaster. His character is known: especially his love for justice and his all-knowing perspective. So the Psalmist seeks refuge in God again and again. God is the rock (Ps 19:14) the shield (Ps 3:3), the fortress ( Ps 59:16) and the refuge (Ps 59:16). Sometimes, indeed, the hope is barely present, if at all; and the voice of the Psalmist becomes a cry of despair. Clearly, the affliction of Israel at the hands of evildoers was not yet at an end.

Risk Culture

As I noted a couple of days ago, late-modern culture is a risk culture in which management of risk forms an essential component of self-construction. Yet, modernity is good at micro-managing risk but not macro-managing it: there is also a renewed sense of apocalypticism associated with the side-effects of technology.

Because individuals are ultimately powerless to alter this horrible element of risk, belief in fortuna has become a renewed - and necessary - feature of modern life. That is, there is a resignation to the engines of fate: a sense that some alien force turns the wheel of this dumb-show (to misquote Thomas Hardy). This is why we like to gamble!

One of the reasons for secular distaste for strong religious belief is that religious fervour seems to increase the risk felt by the whole community: it is an unnecessary daring of fate to intervene. Strong belief is a powerful force that may skew the forces of fate against us; it may upset the delicate balance that enables us to live our consumption rich quiet lives.

Giddens on Risk

Anthony Giddens points out that trust is essential for 'an early sense of ontological security'...it is 'basic to a 'protective cocoon' which stands guard over the self in its dealings with everyday reality. Trouble is, we live in a 'risk culture'. Which is to say, the concept of risk has become fundamental to the way we organise the social world:

Under conditions of modernity, the future is continually drawn into the present by means of the reflexive organisation of knowledge environments (p. 4, Modernity and Self-Identity)

Not that life is now more risky than it was, but that the parameters of risk have changed: so that the modern world is beset by an apocalypticism unknown to the past. Modernity has produced security, and a better means of calculating risk, but it has also brought nuclear weapons and environmental degradation. What do we do with this sense of doom then? Well -

If most successfully bracket out such possibilities and get on with their day-to-day activities, this is no doubt because they assess the actual element of risk involved as very small. But it is also because the risks in question are given over to fate - one aspect of the return of fortuna in late modernity... (p. 183)

He continues:

There is a good deal of evidence to indicate that unconscious fears of an 'ending to everything' are prevalent among many sectors of the population, and appear with particular clarity in the fantasies and dreams of children.

Safety and the City

In the Scriptures, the promise of protection is necessary foil to the promise of provision. As soon as man steps outside the Garden, he is unsafe. Abel was not safe from the jealousy of his brother; Cain in his turn was not safe from the possibility of vengeance as a wanderer on the earth and needed protection. It is this wandering nomad, in fear for his life because of his own bloodguilt, who becomes the founder of the city of Enoch, named after his son (Gen 4:17). Though civilization shows the evidence of human flourishing – the beginnings of farming and tool-making and music – it is also begun out of fear of reprisal. The city is as much fortress as it is forum. Far from bringing anarchy, the turn of humankind away from God (and the revelation of their wickedness, 6:5) results in a collaboration amongst human beings that is ambivalent. The mission of mankind to fill the earth, renewed in 5:1, is hampered by the rather sullen insistence of people that they ought to collect together for fear of the murderous intentions of other beings.

Yet, it is too simplistic to read the Tower of Babel as merely a tale of pride gone wrong. The desire which drives the massive collective exercise of its construction (using bricks!) is not merely arrogance. The proposed city is to have a ‘tower with its top in the heavens’, granting a heavenly perspective on the earth; and it will be the occasion of the making of name for themselves (Gen 11:4). But there is also a note of fear in the motivation given: ‘otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth’. What was so unappealing about being scattered in this way?