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Compassion is a grace, not an achievement. It is the child of the radical centering in God that we see in Jesus; empty of self, one can be filled with the Spirit of God, the compassionate one. If we take Jesus seriously as the disclosure of life in the Spirit, then growth in the Christian life is essentially growth in compassion.
The third core element of life in the Spirit is its relationship to culture. It is a movement away from the many securities offered by culture, whether goods, status, identity, nation, success, or righteousness. The vision of life lived and taught by Jesus means leaving the "home" of conventional wisdom, whether religious or secular.
Life in the Spirit does not simply draw one away from culture. It creates a new community, an alternative community and alternative culture. So it was for Jesus and his followers, both during his lifetime and afterwards. The new life produced a new social reality, initially the "movement" and then the "church." In the Jewish world in which it was born and in the Roman world in which it soon lived, it stood out sharply as an alternative community with an alternative vision and values. (TUB 141:6.4; 162:6.3; 191:5.3)
From The Urantia Book: "Your mission to the world is founded on the fact that I lived a God-revealing life among you; on the truth that you and all other men are the sons of God; and it shall consist in the life which you will live among men--the actual and living experience of loving men and serving them, even as I have loved and served you. Let faith reveal your light to the world; let the revelation of truth open the eyes blinded by tradition; let your loving service effectually destroy the prejudice engendered by ignorance. By so drawing close to your fellow men in understanding sympathy and with unselfish devotion, you will lead them into a saving knowledge of the Father's love. The Jews have extolled goodness; the Greeks have exalted beauty; the Hindus preach devotion; the far-away ascetics teach reverence; the Romans demand loyalty; but I require of my disciples life, even a life of loving service for your brothers in the flesh." (191:5.3)
There is a radical-ism to the alternative community of Jesus--but only if it lives that radicalism can it be "the city set on a hill whose light cannot be hidden." And it can only do this by being a community grounded in the Spirit.
Taking the vision of Jesus seriously calls the church to be an alternative culture in our time. Though there may have been periods in the history of the church which roughly coincided with the central values of the early Jesus movement that time is no more. The dominant values of contemporary western life--affluence, achievement, appearance, power, competition, consumption, individualism--are vastly different from anything recognizably Christian. As individuals and as a culture, with our securities and values centered in "this world," in "the finite," our existence has become massively idolatrous.
We live in a modern Babylon, one largely unrecognized as such and all the more seductive because of its mostly benign and benevolent face. Indeed, Babylon also lives within the church, so thoroughly has it been infected with the "spirit of this age." Modern culture functions as a rival lord in our lives, conferring values and identity and demanding obedience, all in conformity to its vision of reality. If the church were to take seriously entry into an alternative culture, it would increasingly see itself as a community which knows that its Lord is different from the lord of modern culture. It would live the life referred to in John's description of Jesus' followers as in the world, but not of the world, grounded not in the world but in God.
How then can our modern culture be "transformed by the power of the Spirit?" The politics of compassion did not lead Jesus to withdraw from culture, but to a passionate mission to transform the culture of his day. Because he saw God as caring about what happened to human beings in history, he saw culture as something to be transformed--and not simply rejected or legitimated.
Taking the vision of Jesus seriously thus entails seeking to structure the life of society in accord with the politics of compassion. A society organized around the politics of compassion would look very different from our culture, which to a large extent is organized around the politics of economic individualism. In many ways, we live within a secularized form of the Torah-derived "politics of holiness," with only the standards of righteousness changed. Achievement and reward are its driving energies.
The politics of compassion is organized around the nourishment of human life, not around the rewards for culturally prized achievement. It does not emphasize differences--deserving and undeserving, friend and enemy, pure and impure. Rather, it stresses our commonality. It is inclusive rather than exclusive. Such an ideology would look sharply different from the way we presently order our national and international life.
The politics of compassion as a way of organizing human social life is an ideal. Yet it is
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