Jonathon Wilson-Hartgrove
An excerpt from God’s Economy by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (with a capsule bio below):
Jesus points to a better way—a road that leads to life. This is the forever-promise of God to his people: I will lead you in the way of life. Jesus saves us from the way of living that leads to death and for abundant life in God’s family. This is the good news.
The powers and principalities conspire to frustrate our deepest desires and send us chasing after the opposite of what will truly satisfy us. And we humans are easily frustrated. We want the good life in the here and now, but our desires are unfocused, our imaginations limited, and our wants misplaced. We want abundant life, but we want it on our own terms.
The surprising twist in God’s story is that the way to real life passes through death. Christ, on the cross, exposes the scheme of the powers and principalities: we spend our lives trying to ignore death, but Jesus confronts death head-on. The abundant life—which is so full and rich that Jesus calls it eternal—is in direct opposition to a life that shuffles toward death, step after distracted step. Jesus dramatizes the contradiction by challenging death with the extravagant abundance of his own life given willingly to his enemies. Our lurch toward death is interrupted by Jesus’ death on the cross.
Most of us don’t like to be interrupted. Although we sing songs thanking God for the cross, its actual intrusion into our lives is almost always an offense.
Our imaginations are captivated by the options of the powers and principalities. The way of Jesus, however, is a way we could never imagine. It is the way God makes when there is no way. Jesus was born homeless to a family living under Roman occupation and grew up as a refugee in Egypt because the authorities back home wanted him dead. Jesus had no illusions of changing the world by taking over the palace. He was marginalized from the start.
There were other available options in Jesus’ day, but he rejected them as well. The Pharisees represented otherworldly pie-in-the-sky, but Jesus rejected their way. The Zealots advocated revolution, and while Jesus sympathized with their concerns and even drafted a few of them as his disciples, he refused to take control of Jerusalem by violence. By all accounts, he had the popular support for an overthrow on the first Palm Sunday, and Judas seems to have thought they should go for it. But Jesus chose another way.
All of your familiar options, Jesus says, are dead ends. They won’t get you to God’s kingdom because none of them is radical enough. At God’s table, Jesus says, “I am the way …” (John 14:6a). “Watch me. Just as Israel went all the way to the Red Sea, I will go to the cross.” It is at the ultimate dead end that God makes a way out of no way. Jesus rises from the dead.
The resurrection is an invitation for us to reread Jesus’ life-to hear again what he tried to teach the disciples about God’s abundance. Power is deceptive, and we cannot wield it without being controlled by it. Following the way of Jesus doesn’t require us to be in power. When we see the evils of empire, most of us want to end the occupation, and if we can’t, we get depressed. The options, it seems, are to compromise with power and do the best we can or drop out of the “system” and stay pure on our own. But Jesus offers us a way to live abundant life when you can’t drive the Romans out. He teaches tactics for ushering in a kingdom through the cracks.
The tactics of Jesus have the power to liberate our imaginations and inspire creative subversions of the status quo. They carve out a space where we can ask questions we never knew we could ask:
What if it’s possible to live as citizens of God’s abundant kingdom no matter what government we live under?
What if it’s possible to work against the principalities and powers of this age without being captive to them ourselves?
What if it’s possible to live God’s good life here and now, no matter what economic situation we find ourselves in?
What if another world is possible?
What if it’s already here?
—- From God’s Economy by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.
**** “God’s Economy is a timely expose of Money’s conspiracy to blind us. It does more: it is an articulate witness that the light of Christ reveals life abundant all around…. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is bearing witness; he has been living for years now what he writes. Trust him. I trust him.”
— from the foreword by Eugene Peterson, author of The Message
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**Bio
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is an author, New Monastic, and sought-after speaker. A native of North Carolina, he is a graduate of Eastern University and Duke Divinity School.
Shortly before the United States began bombing Iraq in 2003, Jonathan and his wife, Leah, traveled there as members of a Christian Peacemaker Team determined to tell Iraqis that American Christians did not all support the war. Their experiences became the subject of To Baghdad and Beyond (Cascade Books: 2005), which describes the couple’s conversion to the “new monasticism.”
Jonathan is an Associate Minister at the historically black St. Johns Baptist Church, and is engaged in peacemaking and reconciliation efforts in Durham, North Carolina. The Rutba House, where Jonathan lives with his wife Leah, their son JaiMichael, and other friends, is a new monastic community that prays, eats, and lives together, welcoming neighbors and the homeless.
Jonathan directs the School for Conversion, an alternative seminary that hosts courses around the country. He is Editor of the New Monastic Library Series (Cascade Books) and Associate Editor of the Resources for Reconciliation Series (InterVarsity Press).
An evangelical who connects with the broad Christian tradition and its monastic witnesses, Jonathan is a leader in the new monastic movement and conversations about Christianity in the 21st century. He speaks often to churches and conferences of the “new evangelicals,” but also connects with Mainline and Catholic audiences who are interested in reconnecting with ancient Christian practices. Writing as both a grassroots intellectual and popular theologian, Jonathan connects with a broad audience, engaging them personally on a wide spectrum of challenges facing the church today.Advertisement
