I grew up in a minister’s home where we had very little in the way of material possessions, but I was very fortunate to be given a narrative about our lack of wealth that made sense to my young mind.  My parents explained that dad received a stipend, not a salary, and the stipend was enough to keep us comfortable without needless extras.  And we would always be secure.  That is a privilege.  Furthermore, my mother pointed out that children of the manse were welcome and accepted in the homes of every class in the community.  The poorest and the wealthiest all thought we belonged with them.  So I grew up feeling privileged rather than poor.

Isn’t that what the community of Jesus should be providing for us all?  Everyone belongs, with dignity and without the destructive distinctions we draw between those at the top and those at the bottom based on irrelevant factors like wealth, power, gender, ethnicity, strength.

We are all at the top in the eyes of Jesus.  And we help him establish this by voluntarily taking our place at the bottom so we can push everyone up ahead of us.  Notice how much of what Jesus says deals with inverting the social order. The first shall be last; take your place at the bottom of the wedding feast; watch me as I wash your feet and go and do the same; don’t be like the religious elites who pray ostentatiously in public; do be like this poor widow who offers her last small coin to God; be like little children, etc.

Our privilege comes not from what we have, but from whose we are.  As children of God we need no other claim to fame.  And this as a source of dignity and worth is far more robust than depending on wealth or status or any other source that can be removed.  No one can remove our status as children of God.  It gives us resilience in times of trouble.

But if we then begin to see this as a source of superiority over others whom we regard as not in the Kingdom, then of course we have entirely missed the point. The Bible is quite clear that all are God’s children.  There is no one we should feel superior to.  

So everyone needs a narrative that positions them securely in the centre of the community.  Action for justice in an objective sense needs to be accompanied by a narrative that enables every person to feel subjectively that they belong with dignity.  

Love and justice belong together.  Love without justice is a too-soft thing and certainly not love in the Christian sense of wanting the best for our neighbour.  Justice without love is hard and heartless, sometimes destroying more than it protects.

Justice that frames the poor, the hungry and the mourning as powerless victims is also destructive, damaging people in their hearts even as they may be fed and protected.  So action for justice needs to be accompanied by a narrative that provides dignity.

I think this is the effect of much of Jesus’ teaching.   

For example, in Luke’s version of the beatitudes, he suggests that real joy can be had by those who currently lack the external trappings of success:  How blessed are you who are poor/ who now go hungry / who weep now / when people hate you.  Then he gives reasons why they can be happy despite their circumstances: they belong in the kingdom of God, where they will eat and laugh.  Luke does not seem here only to be referring to another life, but also to the establishment of God’s rule here on earth. 

He goes on, rather dauntingly, to suggest that those who do enjoy success now, have had their joy and are in for a bad time:  Alas for you who are rich / who are well-fed now / who laugh now / when all speak well of you.  These will go hungry and mourn.

This is a narrative about life that gives the poor and marginal a reason to have dignity.

I hope that participants in this blog will work together to understand and implement a way of life that affords dignity to everyone through the way we love each other, and the way this love drives us to change the current order of things in a way that affirms, protects and provides for each person.

We need structural changes to society, complemented by a narrative that affirms individual dignity.  And we need to love individual people, underpinned by action that changes the conditions in which they live.  This requires action to leave a transformed legacy, but even more it requires a life that demonstrates this – as the audio-visual illustration of what Jesus intends, the quality of our lives matters even more than our actions, although of course they cannot be separated.  We demonstrate love by what we do and what we do only has lasting impact if we do it with love.

It even means loving our enemies, as Luke’s Gospel indicates shortly after the beatitudes. That requires another blog!