Who Do We Represent?

Are we Tourists, Businessmen, or Ambassadors (Part 4)

The term “representing” has come to be used in a much more marketing focused way in recent years. You hear the phrase, “way to represent” used is reference to the things we wear, say, and do to show our support for an apparel company, Alma mater, music group, sports team, political perspective, or even a church program. So who are we representing today? 

By way of review, last week we discussed the “how” characteristics of the Ambassador model for cultural engagement for Christ as opposed to the tourist and businessmen models.

·         Ambassadors are invited guests who have a posture of humility and graciousness. They are not in it for their own interests but represent the one who sent them.

·         Ambassadors don’t expect people of “other lands”—different sub-cultures and faith traditions both here and abroad—to learn our “Christian-ese” insider lingo. Instead, they learn how to contextualize Christian concepts to the other person’s ways of speaking.

·         Good ambassadors come to stay until removed by the one who sent them. They listen, are soft-spoken, and literate both linguistically and culturally. What does it mean to be literate in their culture? We must be willing to learn

·         Good ambassadors are compassionate, conciliatory, communicators of God’s grace…without compromise. They bring added value to all they engage.

Where in that post my focus was on how we are representing Christ, this week I would like to focus on the “who” that we represent. This question is huge. An ambassador should be an accurate and approachable representative of the community that has commissioned him/her to go. This is problematic if the ambassador is representing a country or group known for duplicity, injustice, and a desire for power. An ambassador is only as good as who he represents.

Is the Christ that we are striving to represent the Jesus Christ of the Bible, some personally shaped lesser deity, or is he a construct of our western socio-cultural environment? Everyone on the street has an opinion about who Jesus Christ is and what he is like. These opinions have been formed, shaped, and influenced by various sources both good and bad. We who aspire to be ambassadors are no different. Our view of who it is we are representing will shape the how.

I am a strong believer that we are not at liberty to shape idols in our own image and call them “Jesus” any more than the ancient Israelites were at liberty to make a golden calf or two and call it Yahweh (Exodus 32; 1 Kings 12:25-33)…yet we do it all too often. The Jesus of the Bible created all cultures, and works within them but is not constricted by their constructs. If we want to know who we represent we need to read the Bible through regularly, or rather allow the Bible to read us regularly. What does God say about himself in the words of the Old Testament? What does God say about himself in the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, in the four gospel accounts? What does it mean to live as ambassadors of Christ as the New Testament letters encourage us?

To answer the first question, regarding what God says about himself in the Old Testament I submit Exodus 34:5-7, where God came and proclaimed his name (i.e., stated his essential character) to Moses,

The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, ⁷ keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

This same idea is repeated throughout the Bible (See also à Numbers 14:18; Nehemiah 9:17; Psalm 86:15; 103:8; 145:8; Joel 2:13; 4:2; Nahum 1:3). Most people today would probably not realize this truth about God in the OT. Might we have misjudged Jesus as well? I will leave the second and third questions for you to answer for yourselves.

If we are to get past our lesser views of Christ, we must acknowledge that we have them. Our understanding of who Jesus is can be colored by our own fallen desires and the biases of the culture we are part of. It is important that we subject all of our views of Jesus to the witness of the Scriptures themselves, looking to that “Original Communication Context” (OCC) for interpretive clues instead of assuming it was written within a Western/American cultural filter (because it wasn’t).

If we are ambassadors for Christ, what is it about him that we should be communicating? I would like to go further, but will stop here and ask three serious questions:

“In reading the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John)…

1.    What two or three emotions do we see most often in Jesus?

2.    What three to five character qualities do we see used most often to describe Jesus?

3.    What are the four most common verbs describe Jesus’ actions?

Having answered the three questions above, try one more… 

       So as Ambassadors for Christ, are we representing the right Jesus?