Soaked with Fidelity in 2024

Jesus invites us to soak ourselves in his ongoing cruciform movement that is healing the world.

Disordered desires within. The push and pull of the world around us. Both mean that our fidelity to Jesus is always challenged. And during this year’s election cycle, modern politics will fiercely test our practical allegiance to Jesus. Many people will try to pull Jesus off the cross and into their projects, campaigns and schemes. 

Gregory Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, describes this challenge well: 

The right wing would stare at [Jesus] and question where he chose to stand. They hated that he aligned himself with the unclean, those outside—those folks you ought neither to touch nor be near. He hobnobbed with the leper, shared table fellowship with the sinner, and rendered himself ritually impure in the process. They found it offensive that, to boot, Jesus had no regard for their wedge issues, their constitutional amendments, or their culture wars.

The left was equally annoyed, they wanted to see the ten-point plan, the revolution in high gear, the toppling of sinful social structures. They were impatient with his brand of solidarity. They wanted him to see him taking the right stand on issues, not just standing in the right place.

The Left screamed: Don’t just stand there, do something. And the Right maintained: Don’t stand with those folks at all. Both sides, seeing Jesus as the wrong size for this world, came to their own reasons for wanting him dead.

But Jesus could not find a strategy more soaked with fidelity than the one he chose—the cross.

It shocked the world when total power found its clearest expression and highest good in Jesus’ submission to brutal suffering and death on a cross. In response, Jesus invites us to soak ourselves in his ongoing cruciform movement that is healing the world, offering a different quality of life—eternal life—a life marked by love of neighbor and enemy.

To live soaked with fidelity to Jesus in 2024 requires us to understand and practice three vital concepts: kingdom, cross and eternal life. 

1. Kingdom

The kingdom of God is the extension of God’s being. It is the spaces and places in which his will is perfectly done. Jesus taught us to:

• Pray for the kingdom to be manifest in the various aspects of human life, as it is perfectly manifested in God’s realm, in heaven (Matthew 6:10).

• Seek the kingdom above all else (Matthew 6:33).

• Decide if we really want the kingdom, if it really is to us the pearl of greatest price, a great treasure (Matthew 13:44-46). 

• Store up for ourselves treasures in heaven…for where our treasure is, there our hearts will be also (Matthew 6:19-21).

How is a concept like kingdom practiced? Seek it first, above all else. That means we seek the Kingdom of God above any political agenda or any loyalty to a group or cause. We must not rationalize setting aside our Kingdom priorities and giving into bad behavior because, “Well, it's politics.” 

2. Cross

The cross was, from a governmental point a view, a way to torture and kill enemies of the state, to warn others to never dare to do that for which the criminal was being crucified.

But what did Jesus think was happening in and through the cross? In Simply Jesus, Tom Wright says:

Jesus’s death was seen by himself, and then by those who told and ultimately wrote his story, as the ultimate means by which God’s kingdom was established. For Jesus, the real enemy, to be met head-on by the power and love of God, was the anti-creation power, the power of death and destruction, the force of accusation, the Accuser who lays a charge against the whole human race and the world itself that all are corrupt and decaying, that all humans have contributed to this by their own idolatry and sin. Jesus, in other words, has taken the accusations that were outstanding against the world and against the whole human race and has borne them in himself.

The counter-cultural power of the cross must continue to shape our core religious imagination, our soul, and our social interactions in 2024.

How is cross practiced? To truly follow Jesus, we must live a cross-shaped life. That means we must die to our own disordered desires, to our old life, so that we can embrace a new kind of life—eternal life.

3. Eternal Life

Eternal life is not life physically separated from earth, out in space somewhere. It is not something you get when you die. It is not merely never-ending life. Eternal life is a certain quality of life. It is life marked by interactive knowledge—knowing and being known—that soaks us in relationship with the Trinitarian God (John 17:3).

How is eternal life practiced? We practice and experience eternal life when we submit our lives to the realities of kingdom and cross. We don’t allow anything to capture our allegiance but God and the outworking of his perfect will. We don’t seek earthly power or prestige. We willingly give up our own preferences and priorities to embrace those of Jesus.

Practicing kingdom, cross and eternal life gives us a great gift in return—a vision for and capacity to live out a Christian social imagination in 2024:

Soaked in fidelity to Jesus, we are poured out for the sake of the world.