Clarence Jordan and the Consequences of Resurrection

Clarence Jordan and the Consequences of Resurrection

Southern radical Clarence Jordan said that when the Apostles, per the story-telling of the book of Acts, went out proclaiming the Gospel, they did not go out and preach the ethic of Jesus. Instead, they preached the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.¹ As anyone who knows Jordan’s story knows, this was no clever way to avoid a call to Christian discipleship, for Jordan’s adult life was an intentional pursuit of the “God Movement,” inaugurated in Jesus of Nazareth. In founding Koinonia Farm, for example, Jordan insisted upon taking seriously the communitarianism exemplified in Acts 2 and 4, the enemy love taught in the Sermon on the Mount; and the inclusion specified in Paul’s teaching on baptism. Jordan’s vocational mission was no small matter, founding a racially inclusive, property-sharing, non-violent intentional community in 1940’s Georgia.

So I find his observation fascinating: Acts does not proclaim first and foremost the ethic of Jesus, but the resurrection of Jesus. In other words, Jordan’s sort of “radicalism” was no mere call to a do-good Christianity. Indeed, Jordan claims that the problem with liberalism “is that it accepts the life of Jesus, but shuns the inevitable consequences of the Jesus Life, which is crucifixion, and is thereby denied the power of the resurrection.”²

Indeed, Jordan’s community experienced its own sorts of crosses, its own set of persecutions. He had reason to know fear, in the cross burnings, the drive-by shootings, and the bomb threats. And fear, he insisted, is grounded in self-preservation. Ultimately, death is the great enemy of fear. Fear will keep us from acting in faith so long as the spectre of death remains anywhere on the horizon. Thus the importance of the message of resurrection—death has been defeated, and thus we cannot be beaten, even by death. When we realize that the power of the resurrection is ours, then our fear will be vanquished, and we can live in faith. This is the claim of Hebrews 2:14-15 (NRSV): “Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.”

For my part, at least, I have found that, like pride and greed and lust, fear never simply goes away. Fear, and pride and greed and lust, requires a daily taking up of the cross, a daily surrender to the potential and real threats of difficulty or suffering which come as a consequence of Christian discipleship. In my experience, it helps to combine Aristotle—one becomes courageous by doing courageous deeds—with pneumatology—“I am powerless, Lord God, to do this courageous deed, because of my fear, and I humbly ask thy power to do Thy will.”

But Jordan did not limit the significance of the resurrection to psychology and personal transformation. The resurrection does not merely signify an individualistically appropriated historical factoid. It is, instead, the very turning point of the history of the world. Thus Jordan goes on to note that the resurrection is not to be equated with the claim that we can be raised and go to heaven when we die. Instead, the resurrection is God’s response to us after we insisted we did not want God messing in our affairs. That is, when Jesus shows up on the scene, we insist we will have none of it, and kill him. But God did not take that “No” for an answer, and raised him up.

So the resurrection of Jesus was simply God’s unwillingness to take our No for an answer. He raised Jesus, not as an invitation to us to come to heaven when we die, but as a declaration that He Himself has now established permanent, eternal residence on earth. . . . He is standing beside us, strengthening us in this life. The good news of the resurrection of Jesus is not that we shall die and go home with him, but that he has risen and comes home with us, bringing all his hungry, naked, thirsty, sick, prisoner brothers with him.³

The resurrected body of Christ—then carried on in the church—continues the work of preaching, healing, proclaiming, challenging, caring for the sick and the motley outcast.

Thus Jordan’s recounting of the resurrection ends in a different sort of apologetic, quite unlike the modernist foundationalism that was still in vogue in his day. His apologetic was much more like that of many of the early church fathers: one of the greatest arguments that the risen Jesus was indeed the Messiah is the faithfulness of the church. “The proof that God raised Jesus from the dead is not the empty tomb, but the full hearts of his transformed disciples. The crowning evidence that he lives is not a vacant grave, but a spirit-filled fellowship. Not a rolled-away stone, but a carried-away church.”⁴

If the Lord be resurrected, what then?

We may love,
for Mars and Mammon are vanquished.

We may speak truthfully,
for the Truth has been raised victorious.

We may share,
for God’s Jubilee has triumphed.

We may make music,
for the humorless powers are unmasked.

We may embrace liberty,
for the power of death and bondages is undone.

We may live,
for the glory of God is a human being fully alive.

Lee C. Camp is the author of Mere Discipleship: Radical Christianity in a Rebellious World, and the host of Tokens, online at www.TokensShow.com

 

 

1 Clarence Jordan, The Substance of Faith and Other Cotton Patch Sermons by Clarence Jordan, ed. Dallas Lee (NY: Association Press, 1972), 46.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., 28.

4 Ibid., 29.