Boundaries of Identity

I’m not going to say that it’s impossible for us to be a part of any broader society. Rather, I’m going to say that we cannot be a part of the one we are in now. In order to walk in obedience to Christ, we are obliged to build a parallel society. However small our society might be is not the issue; we cannot make common cause with American society at large.

When Jesus talked about turning the other cheek, He was addressing the Covenant People in a covenant setting. We might consider doing that in various situations in the wider world, but it is “the law” within our covenant community. Jesus was challenging Jews who had come under the Pharisaical influence of distorting the Covenant identity, who had insisted that there is one set of rules for the ritually pure elite, while the wider peasant population was accursed, to be treated almost like Gentiles. It was naked elitism based on legalistic nonsense.

Thus, our Lord insisted repeatedly in His preaching that the Covenant Nation was all one family. The way the Covenant worked was to build a social structure that would bless those whose faith was less than perfect. You cannot walk alone and should not try. It was not inclusive of the world, but of the folks God Himself labeled as your family.

Once that old covenant was nailed to the Cross, the New Covenant called for a different basis of kinship — the manifest Presence of the Holy Spirit. In practice, everyone who bowed the knee in submission to Christ was declared “family” until they proved a threat. And because the religious establishment became the single biggest threat to the early church, it was for the church to pull together as a new parallel covenant society, a visible yet unofficial nation rooted in an invisible empire of souls.

Jesus warned that the New Covenant would divide literal human families. It is not DNA that pulls us together, but covenant kinship of hearts.

You and I are not going to change the world. We are called to pull back from the world as much as possible, while still engaging the world with the challenge of the gospel message. We are not a secret society, but we are guarded by spiritual privilege, manifested in covenant privilege. People must declare a higher loyalty to our common Master in order to receive the full range of gifts that we have to share. Family is treated differently. We let our family members come inside our moral defenses because that’s the way we enter into the full range of glory.

Not every random outsider has the same claim on us as spiritual covenant family does. We turn the cheek to each other, not so much to the outside world.