We're landed with our relatives and have to make the best of what may be a mediocre bunch. However, we want to be able to choose our friends and don't wish to be told who we should or should not like.
St James, in tomorrow's epistle reading, has some profound things to say about favouritism in the church setting where such choices can come into sharp conflict with Christian discipleship.
Arguably the most influential Irishman of letters of the 20th century, C.S. Lewis, in a little essay called The Inner Ring, analysed how we set about making friends of the right people. He noted that whenever we are part of a group, we are concerned to get to the inner circle, to be close to the people who provide the group's inner dynamic or leadership.
Having got that far, we discover there is a circle within the circle and we try to enter that, and then the circle beyond that. Lewis contrasted that wrong desire with the attitude of God, who did not set up little exclusive circles but reached out beyond the ultimate inner circle of the Godhead to embrace people who otherwise would have had no hope of being included.
In the second chapter of his epistle, James addresses this issue of favouritism or exclusivism and he is so pointed and blunt that there can be little doubt he was criticising what he had seen in the church at Jerusalem where he was a leader.
"My brothers, as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don't show favouritism. Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, `Here's a good seat for you,' but say to the poor man, `You stand there,' or `Sit on the floor by my feet,' have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?" (James 2: 1-4.)
Few things in the New Testament are more disregarded in Christian life and ministry than this principle of not respecting persons, which simply underlines the truth that the human heart does not change. Believers in the Lord Jesus Christ are still prone to differentiate between rich and poor.
The temptation to think of the rich as potential sources of money for the work of the church means undeserved attention and flattery is lavished on them while the less well-heeled are treated with scant courtesy.
The first person to be affronted by this deep unpleasantness is God himself. After all, if the work of the church is God's, is he unable to provide for it from his own limitless resources? Does he not repeatedly, in Scripture, urge his people to call on him for the supply of all their needs? Jesus added his own totally distinctive dimension to the relationship between God, his people, and their needs: we are invited to call him Father, and as the prototype of the best kind of earthly father, he knows his children's needs before we ask.
Thus the sight of clergy, especially, bowing and scraping before possessors of money, power and position is very distasteful indeed. James goes on to warn that those very people frequently have scant regard for the Lord or indeed his work; they have reached where they have by climbing on the backs of the poor, and he has already observed ominously: "the rich man will fade away even while he goes about his business." (1:11.)
The latter half of the 20th century saw a theological reaction from Latin America to the incredible wealth of the Western world, saying the Gospel was primarily for the poor. The thesis was inevitably overstated, some of its proponents concluding the Gospel was for the poor only. It became the vogue to call socio-political liberation "salvation" and social activism "evangelism", which was a gross theological confusion because the Gospel is for all, rich and poor alike, simply because God is no respecter of persons and Christ died for all. If he were concerned solely for the poor, not many in the West would be in the kingdom of heaven! It is harder - very hard, in fact - for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God because they tend to be self-sufficient and proud. But that rich people do humble themselves, turn to the Lord Jesus for forgiveness and new life, in exactly the same way that poor people also must, is beyond dispute. Very wonderfully, the cheque books of the well-heeled are also converted and the work of the Lord is provided for, sometimes on a lavish scale.
Numbers of Ireland's practising Christians have recently been blessed with undreamed-of wealth through land sales, information technology coups and the like. They continue, without ostentation or flamboyant, in-your-face changes of lifestyle, to humbly serve in their local churches and are likely to provide for the advancement of Christ's cause in this country via significant long-term initiatives.
These folk, it seems, are on St James's wavelength. They see that from the Lord's perspective all are poor, all are underprivileged, all are nobodies and only by his grace do we become somebodies in responding to the Gospel. It is all a variation on James's recurring theme: living a life which matches one's Christian profession with no yawning credibility gap intervening. He asks: Does your lifestyle correlate to the things you say you stand for, and, in particular, does it match up in this very important area of choosing who are to be your friends? Are your criteria the same as those of the God who chose you as a friend?
G.F.