| Free At Last; Free At Last, Part 8: Freedom from Indignity |
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| Written by David Lawrence |
| Sunday, November 08 2009 00:00 |
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It will be obvious to all our readers that I borrowed the title of this series of devotionals from Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” address that he delivered at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. My wife and I stood on that spot last May when we visited our nation’s capital. People are often reduced in value in the eyes of others for various reasons. We call it discrimination, but it really is a diminution of the very value of the human as a human. It relegates him to an inferior position in some way. Dr. King borrowed the phrase from an old spiritual used by slaves at the time of the Civil War. Slavery deprived the person of his dignity as a human being. In Paul’s day that problem existed in the attitude of the Jews toward the Gentiles. They considered them as dirty, corrupted, and unworthy of their association. Jews would not enter the house of a Gentile lest they were rendered unclean. They viewed the Samaritans in the same way, as mongrels who really weren’t Jews, but because they claimed God as their God, they were treated shamelessly. Jesus showed them respect and upheld their dignity. James addressed the discrimination against the poor on the part of Christians. His point is to insist that such refusal to recognize the dignity of a person is unworthy of a Christian. Women were not recognized with dignity in the ancient world and were often no better than slaves. Discrimination against women continues into the modern age. Paul insists that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Just as African-Americans had the right to insist, as they did in their pulpits, that in Christ we have the same dignity that white people do, just as women have the right to insist that they be treated with equality, so every minority group has that right in Christ. Paul’s point is that all circumstances that result in worldly differences among people do not count in Christ, for we are all one in Christ. Christ has set us free from indignities imposed on us, whether social, gender, economic, ethnic, racial or whatever, because Christ, in setting us free from sin, has elevated our position to the highest in terms of honor and dignity, even raising us to sit with him in heavenly realms! No greater dignity could be afforded to a human being! |
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