Steven Hovater

Tag: christianity

  • James K.A. Smith on Discipleship, Love, and Worship

    “Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it’s a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly–who loves God and neighbor and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love. We are made to be such people by our immersion in the material practices of Christian worship–through affective impact, over time, of sights and smell in water and wine.”
    ― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

    We could hardly have a better modern guide to Augustinian spirituality than James K.A. Smith. His entire project orbits the thought and heart of the ancient Bishop of Hippo, and I think he’s talking about St. Augustine even when he’s not talking about St. Augustine.

    One of the things I think he does that is urgently needed in some circles of thought that I swim in is to connect Discipleship with Worship.

    Some thinkers, being rightly compelled to help the church reinvigorate intentional discipleship practices, wrongly dissociate dissociate what happens in worship from discipleship. Smith helps illuminate the formative power of worship—particularly in a world where alternative worship practices relentlessly sculpt us to be people whose capacity to love well and rightly is degraded and corrupted.

    Setting up a dichotomy between “worship churches” and “discipleship churches” takes what must be a “both/and” situation and makes it not just “either/or” but “neither”.

    There is not worship without discipleship. Nor is their discipleship without worship. Both are about love. Loving God and others well is the point of both discipleship and worship.

    Or to put it in Augustinian terms, both worship and discipleship are about a rightly ordered life of love.

  • Rejected

    “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” -Mark 8:31

    That the Messiah suffered is something that we grasp—Jesus’s suffering, as brutal as it was, could perhaps be comprehensible or even regarded as noble. Bonhoeffer notes the possibility that it could be celebrated as that tragic form of suffering we sometimes regard as having its own honor and dignity.

    But the cross was not just suffering alone, not just a physical attack, but was suffering accompanied by vicious rejection. Christ is not only physically victimized, but it comes at the hands of those who reject him. They reject his messiahship. They mock his authority as a king. They humiliate him, stripping away not only his clothes, but also his human dignity.

    The great irony of the cross is that Jesus, who had already acted in humility in taking human likeness, is then dehumanized through cruel humiliation. They seek not to just pierce his body with nails, but his soul with insults. They not only ravage his back with the flail, but they ravage his humanity with shame. He’s not only beaten, but spat upon.

    Spat upon!

    The Lord of the cosmos is spat upon!

    It is this mockery, more than the physical brutality, that Mark takes great pains to emphasize. It first shows up in the account of Jesus before the high priest. The trial there, full of false witnesses who can’t get on the same page finally builds to this conclusion (14:60-65)

    Then the high priest stood up before them and asked Jesus, “Have you no answer? What is it that they testify against you?” But he was silent and did not answer. Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” 62 Jesus said, “I am; and ‘you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power,’ and ‘coming with the clouds of heaven.’” 63 Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, “Why do we still need witnesses? 64 You have heard his blasphemy! What is your decision?” All of them condemned him as deserving death. 65 Some began to spit on him, to blindfold him, and to strike him, saying to him, “Prophesy!” The guards also took him over and beat him.

    Jesus is taken to another trial, this time before the Roman Governor Pilate. The trial deadlocks, and Pilate seems ready to release Jesus. He’s even given a chance to release him when the crowd calls on him to practice his custom of granting mercy to someone at the time of passover.

    • Jesus us calls us into rejection.
    • just like death ives way to resurrection, so does rejection lead to new community.