Releasing the Oppressed – by Moss Ntlha

Discerning the times

Jesus taught His followers to be wise in discerning the times they were leaving in. Without a careful reading of the times, appropriate action is unlikely. A farmer who fails to discern the seasons will sow at harvest time and hope to reap at sowing times.  Timing is important for fruitful and effective discipling, and for taking good account of our presence in the world.

What then are the signs of our 21st century times?

Among other things, the 21st century is an age of freedom, at least in most of the Western World. It is an age that swears by the value of human rights. The doctrine of human rights is enshrined in the constitutions of most countries and is a defining feature in most societies. Rightly so, for it is often the only thing that holds back despots from fulfilling their oppressive inclinations. Many a despot and their ideologies would do well to hear over and over that the peoples of the world demand  and deserve freedom. They are God’s people and were created to be free to worship Him, and in doing so to know even greater freedom.

The trouble of course is that the world, for al its worship of freedom, does not know freedom. The more it reaches out to grasp it, like a mirage, the further it recedes.  Without a solid reference point to define it, and in many ways invested in precisely those things that would complicate our understanding of freedom, the freer we get the more oppressed we get. An example is those who say freedom for people with homosexual orientation entitles them to marry.  The world is hurrying along at great speed  in search for freedom that is proving enslaving. We have also connected freedom too closely to material possessions. To be free is to possess, not to give. To be an individual, and not a  community. In the pursuit of this freedom, we have found it necessary to deny freedom to others. To possess, has meant to deny others the right to possess. A culture of competition for possessing is the defining feature of our world, and has unleashed the disparities of massive wealth side by side with grinding poverty in a world that has become a cruel village for the majority of the peoples of the world.
So in the pursuit of freedom, we have become oppressed, for what freedom can there be for a few when the many are oppressed.

The great deception

The thing with the world is that for oppression to thrive, it must be presented in acceptable garb. A language must be found that hides, rather than make manifest, the reality of oppression.  When Apartheid was designed and enforced upon an unwilling majority in South Africa, it was called Separate Development. Those not on the receiving end of that hideous system could be fooled to imagine that Apartheid was a development strategy that sought justice for both white and black. The truth is that it was white justice for black people.  In the end, millions of people were condemned to misery and indignity.

When Wilberforce started his campaign against slavery in Britain, slavery was pretty much a hidden scandal to the average Englishman, who benefited from the institution but never had to see its brutality.

The tragedy in most oppressions is that those who oppress often find it necessary to mobilize religion in their cause. This is the enemy’s great deception – a most blasphemous act against God – to execute, in His Name, a program whose calculated end is the exclusion of others  while it benefits some. This was the way of apartheid.

It is for this reason that it is important to turn to our Lord Jesus for guidance regarding freedom.

What the gospel teaches.

The Lord Jesus, quoting from Isaiah said: ` The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, He has a sent me to proclaim freedom to the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord ‘s favor’      
 ( Luke 4: 18) 

In this text, with its firm grounding on the Trinitarian doctrine of God the Father, referred to as the Lord in the text, the Son – who is the Subject, and the Holy Spirit, four important insights can be gleaned to shed light on the struggles of many of the worlds poor, and those who seek to make the gospel understandable to them.

1. The Spirit of the Lord .  The third Person of the Trinity is often the most misunderstood and misrepresented. Maybe because the Father, we can relate to from our own human family relationships. So too the Son. But the Spirit is like the Unknown God. To some He is an optional extra in the life of faith, and not a central part of how they expect to accomplish the purposes of God for their generation. It is like David hoping to engage Goliath without the benefit of the anointing. For Jesus, who would know better, the Spirit is the enablement that makes the near impossible ministry that God placed upon His shoulders possible. So too with us. The magnitude of the task that we face as believers, individually and collectively as Church, demands our complete reliance on the Spirit. It can be said that when we retreat from the immensity of the task, and recoil into our own comfort zones, it is because we have attempted the task of  witnessing to the future kingdom without the Spirit’s help.

 

2. The Spirit and ministry to the poor.  Jesus declares that the reason the Spirit of the Lord is upon Him, is because there is a job to do, and an agenda to pursue: to preach the good news to the poor.  How often have we found, in contemporary preaching,  such a connection of the Spirit with the poor?  If  for some reason the Spirit was to us the Unknown God, whose purpose and agenda was to us unclear, Jesus discloses Him as the Spirit with a soft spot for the poor. The sad reality is that in most cases, the Spirit is assumed to be neutral to the plight of the poor. At worst, He is understood to be a friend of the rich.  Those who have found themselves in poverty, oppression and in Wilberforce’s day, slavery, have understood themselves to be cut off  from the life and work the Spirit, mostly because of the theology and practice of the Church. A former slave , Frederick Douglass, who later championed the anti slavery cause in the United States in the 19th centrury, once spoke about how slaves experienced the Christian faith thus: ` we  had been taught from the pulpit … the duty of obedience to our masters; to recognize God as the author of enslavement…to consider our hard hands and dark color as God’s mark of displeasure, and as pointing us out as the proper subjects of slavery..’

It is therefore quite significant that the modern Pentecostal movement,  understood to originate from Azusa Street, LA California, from whence it spread throughout the world, was a movement that was led by a former African American slave, the one eyed William Seymour.  This may very well be God’s way of reasserting His preferential option for the poor in a world where the gap between the rich and the poor is ever widening. The Church, and all too often because of the sins of omission and commission of its leaders, finds itself in the comfortable embrace of materialism and wealth. The cries of the poor unheard and unheeded. We have not taken the exhortation of Paul seriously when he warned: Do not conform any longer to the patterns of this world, but be transformed to the renewing of your mind..’ ( Rom 12: 2 )

3. The Spirit and Jesus’s  ministry to the captives.  In this reference to the captives, the Lord calls attention to the enslavement of His people to forces stronger than they are. These may be spiritual and demonic, as is possible for example in witchcraft, occult or some other spiritual oppression, where oppression is individualized. Enslavement also happens more broadly, where large communities are brought under the captivity of the devil’s deception through ideas, ideologies, institutions, media an economic systems that value profit over human life, individual freedom over community, narrow self interests over environmental sustainability.  Such enslavement can be so pervasive that even Christians who are not vigilant can find themselves thinking, believing and acting out the dictates of the spirit of the age.  In Wilberforce’s day Christians were implicated in the perpetuation of the pain of  slavery. In apartheid South Africa, Christians were implicated in propping up the system, benefiting handsomely from it and even giving theological justification for it.                                Jesus takes this form of captivity seriously, and taught that it is part of the ministry of the Spirit to convict the world of sin, of  righteousness and judgment. He taught that without the Spirit’s work, we are unlikely to know just how wretchedly sinful we have become, adding that the Church would need conviction about the fact that the prince of this world is already judged. The systems of the world are under judgment. It does not make sense for kingdom people to cower under their influence and be intimidated by their pervasiveness.  Our prophetic vocation is to rebel, at a personal level, against the tendency of the world to force us into accepting the patterns of the world, as if there are no Kingdom alternatives to the way the world conducts its business.  If we do nothing else, at least our personal lives as individuals must bear witness to the fact that the evil of our day stands condemned before God. From personal revolt, we need to escalate  the witness to communities and fellowships that revolt against the standards of the world. Only when we are not captives to the ways of the world can we proclaim liberty to those held captive in the world. Mother Theresa championed the cause of the poor and destitute in India, a land that operates a Caste system that tolerates and legitimizes the exclusion of many. In doing so, she literally defined what it means to be good. In popular language, to say someone is good, you might as well say they are Mother Teresa.

 

4. The Spirit and Jesus ministry to the blind.  While Jesus was concerned about the physically blind, and He healed many of them, He seemed more concerned about the sighted blind. Those who, with eyes wide open, could see nothing of the ways in which the spirit of the age has seduced them to think like, as well as behave like the world. He writes to the Laodician church, conformed to patterns of the wealthiest city of Phrygia  in Roman times, a congregation apparently steeped in affluence and complacence  : `You say I am rich, I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing. But you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from Me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness, and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.’ (Rev 3: 17-18)  Sighted blindness is harder to cure, because it comes with an illusion of vision. A `know it all’ arrogance , reliant on the wisdom of  the world to solve the crisis of the world. Jesus said to another  group of  the sighted blind: `If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.’ (John 9:41) The scandal of sighted blindness, is that it is able to take such a blatant abomination as slavery, touch it up with a veneer of religious justification to make morally acceptable, make it ` invisible’ as a necessary part of the furniture of our homes, close eyes to it, and hope that God’s eyes too are closed to it.

Conclusion:

The  text is calling us to a basic truth: If our God is the Trinitarian God of the Old and New testament, then His agenda ought to be our agenda. We are at no liberty to fashion Him after our own interests or the standards of the world.

Justice for the poor is not marginal to God’s dealings with the world, it is a defining feature of His redemptive purposes. To marginalize the poor is to misrepresent Him entirely, and to be found to be a false witness.

Let us take courage in the fact that the Spirit is our Helper in empowering us along the way of faith and prophetic witness in a world held captive by the prince of this world.

Being ourselves released from the blinding captivity of the age, let us proclaim freedom to the captives and sight to the blind in our midst.

by Moss Ntlha