Exiles- Living Missionally in a Post Christian Culture

In Chapter 2 of this book Michael Frost looks at "Jesus The Exile" ...

Jesus is the ultimate in exiles. He allowed Himself to be "exiled" on earth. So our own missional activity springs from our personal relationship with Him.

Unfortunately the church consistently moves from a close relationship to the person of Jesus to an ever more theoretical, doctrinal or philosophical position.

Frost says: "So Jesus defines the first missionaries totally. His lifestyle, his teaching, his passion became the template for the actions of the first Christians... We can never remove the historical Jesus from the foremost place in our thinking and actions."

There is a tendency to make Jesus more "marvellous" than He really is. This can be seen in artistic depictions through the ages, but it can also be seen in the Nativity scenes where a baby who never cries is surrounded by cows who never poop and the wise men's camels parked neatly nearby.

This would be harmless except for the fact that they make Jesus seem more unreal, more impossible to imitate and therefore irrelevant to our lives in the daily grind of being an exile.

The fact is that the gospel writers go out of their ways to show us how utterly ordinary the Son of God is, but at the same time the utterly extraordinary claims He makes for Himself. Often these interactions take place in the context of meals- highly social events in the lives of the Jewish people.

Michael Frost concludes the chapter with these words: "We are then freer to follow Jesus' example as He models for us the profound power of sharing a table with the marginalised and the despised. This surely is the locus of missional activity- grace, love, hospitality, generosity. With Jesus at the centre of our imaginations, such elements are nor optional for modern-day exiles but unavoidable."

It's all about Jesus... not Jesus as we would like Him to be, but Jesus as He really is. The challenge is to separate our imagined Jesus from the real deal and set about following Him passionately and resolutely- all the way to the cross.