To
establish whether a person is identified with a particular group, be it a
sports club a church or a political party one has only to listen to the
personal pronoun he or she uses when referring to the group. It’s a dead
giveaway: If its ‘we’, they’re identified, if it’s ‘they,’ then
they’re not; ‘us’ they’re on the inside looking out, ‘them’,
they’re on the outside looking in.
If we are
identified with a group, then we may share in its glory if the group or one of
its members does well, but we must also share in the distress of the group if
it does badly or its shame if even one of its members behaves disgracefully.
This was well understood in medieval times, for if the head of a family had
been born out of wedlock, then the crest of the family would include the
heraldic device of a Bend Sinister making this fact public and inclusive of the
entire family.
It is
natural to want to pull apart from a group which is doing badly and this might
be what the Lord requires:
However
this is not the soul and substance of the incarnation, for assuredly mankind
was doing very badly when Jesus ‘made Himself of no reputation’ and was ‘found
in fashion as a man.’ (Philippians 2)
Being incarnate in a messy, an ugly or a shameful situation confers on one the prerogative, the motive, and the urgency to speak and act constructively in that situation.
This is why
Nehemiah prays “We have sinned” as a prelude to his remarkable role in the
restoration of Jerusalem, its walls, its morale and its worship of the one,
true God.
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