I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”
This quote from Groucho Marx has served me well through the years. I take it as a fundamental reality of human life that we are determined to deceive ourselves about ourselves. As such one of the most basic and fundamental Christian virtues is humility, and more specifically, the humility to be shown where we are wrong. Among other things, this means I cannot assume that where I’m at is the place that I, or anyone else, ought to be.
That humility is a Christian virtue is very interesting in light of the fact that we Christians are often so certain that we are right. For many of us, our faith in Christ means that we are on the right side of a cosmic struggle between good and evil. But if we are truly humble, won’t we have to face the fact that we are often quite capable of evil ourselves? In fact, if Christians were more eager to really see and own their propensity for and complicity in sin wouldn’t we be less eager to draw hard lines between us (the saved) and them (the unsaved)?
This “us” vs. “them” line-drawing is very evident with many of the young Christian students I teach. For myself, I can remember as a young high school student being very concerned to demonstrate how my faith was true and how everybody else’s was false. Things certainly have not changed much in the past decade or so, as many of my students are still very sure that they are “in” with God, while unbelievers are “out” and need to either turn or burn.
I recognize that the flip side of the “us”/”them” dichotomy is often a tolerant relativism that reduces the distinctions between Christians and non-Christians to matters of perspective or taste. While I am not at all advocating this sort of liberal demolition of Christian boundaries, I think it is important that we approach the “other” with deference and humility, if for no other reason that the outsider might be the one through whom God is calling us to repentance.
Thus, it stands to reason that our humility before Christ will require we be humble before our neighbors, regardless of whom they worship. If Christ is Lord of all, then it must be possible that he may come to us in ways outside of the traditional Christian boundaries we have established. After all, without humility, I may just write him off as another lost outsider.
