Distant Compassion or Love in Proximity?

This week, if you’re driving in the car, doing some gardening, on a long walk or just taking it easy at home, can I encourage you to listen to my podcast with Shane Claiborne? It’s so good!

Shane Claiborne’s deepest conviction is that we are meant to live ‘as if Jesus meant the things he said’. So for him that has meant living in community in inner-city Philadelphia for a few decades now, having picked up some lessons from a stint working under Mother Teresa in Calcutta. His activism has involved confronting various systemic injustices and speaking up for and standing alongside those whose voices aren’t being heard. 

I felt very challenged afresh, in a good way. He warned of focusing too much on climbing the ladder of upward social mobility, because we might bump into Jesus on that same ladder but on his way down! Shane’s book quotes Kierkegaard: “To want to admire, instead of follow, Christ is not an invention of bad people; no, it is more an invention of those who spinelessly want to keep themselves detached at a safe distance from Jesus.”

A while back he did a survey of misconceptions of Jesus. In the survey, he asked participants who claimed to be ‘strong followers of Jesus’ whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Nearly 80% said yes. Later in the survey, he sneaked in another question, asking this same group of strong followers whether they spent time with the poor, and less than 2% said they did. He concluded: “I learned a powerful lesson: we can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.”

As I said, I felt challenged.

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