Repentance means seeing people the way God sees them
Our lives are based around hierarchy. When you become a member of any organization — a club, a council, a military, a government — the hierarchy is one of the first things you need to learn. You have to know who the head of the group is, who the influential people in the group are, and what they want. This is not only essential to not getting yourself in trouble, but it’s essential so that you can effectively contribute to the group.
You can often tell who the leaders of a group are just by spending a few minutes with them. They’re usually the confident ones, the strong ones, the smarter ones, the wealthy ones, the talented ones, the popular ones, which of course makes sense. If you want to command the respect of a group of people, you’ve got to display some attributes that give them a reason to respect you. And confidence and strength and intelligence and wisdom are things we respect. This is true in every aspect of life.
So when we become followers of Christ, we become members of the kingdom of God. And like with any other organization, we have to learn the hierarchy. But it’s a very different hierarchy than what we’re used to. This kingdom, Jesus says, belongs to the poor and the meek and the mistreated.
Jesus repeatedly shocked his followers by emphatically honoring the young and weak and sick and poor. Most of his followers were poor fishermen who couldn’t even read a Bible. He encouraged his followers to become like little children. Although we might have a sort of nostalgic admiration of children for their carefreeness and loyalty and ability to trust, becoming poor, meek, lowly, or like a little child is not a way to become admired or respected in any system — except in the kingdom of God.
When we evaluate people, we tend to evaluate people based on how attractive their personality is, how skilled they are and how useful their skills are, their physical appearance, their social and economic status, their intelligence, and other stuff like that. It’s almost always based on one or more of those things that we determine whether that person is worth getting to know.
God doesn’t see people that way. He doesn’t look down on us and say, “That guy’s a great speaker; I want him on my side,” or, “That woman’s got so many friends; I want to get know her.” He doesn’t do that. In fact, as Paul told the Corinthians, “Brothers, consider the time of your calling. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were powerful; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly and despised things of the world, and the things that are not, to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast in his presence.”
If we take these words at face value, it seems that God sometimes intentionally chooses those who are weak and timid and poor and outcasts, so that we all know that nobody can brag about why they were called by God to be one of his people. It’s all Him. Nothing about us.
And so in a later letter, he explains:
“So from now on we regard no one according to the flesh. Although we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come!”
If we really want to make ourselves fit for God’s kingdom, we have to learn to see other people in a whole new way. We have to change the way we evaluate people. We have to judge them based on who they are to God. Those who live in poverty are richly satisfied. The humble and meek servants, unnoticed in this life, are exalted like presidents and nobles. The ones who suffer and die for Christ are crowned as if they were high princes. Those who trust in God with an unflinching, childlike faith will be seen as having more wisdom than the greatest geniuses of today’s world. And the billionaires and presidents and celebrities — and yes, middle-class Americans — will honor them.
So we should aspire to be like them. The groups that Jesus mentioned in the Beatitudes — they are our role models and leaders. To fully function as part of the kingdom of God, we need to learn its hierarchy, and appropriately recognize the honor of those at the top. And as Jesus said, “The last will be first, and the first will be last.”
