In Joshua, we read how with the guidance of the Lord our God, the Israelites drove out and slaughtered the inhabitants of a variety of villages, towns, cities and kingdoms. They were acquiring the territory and resources that God had bestowed them. And part of this process often entailed purifying the places by burning and destroying all that breathed and lived in them. It was often through this process of purification that the lands had rest from war. The violence constituted a peace.
Amid all this divine violence and the re-establishment of the Jewish community, there are also and very importantly, pockets of otherness that continue to exist amid the community of sameness. For instance, one of the earliest examples of others in our midst is Rahab. She was a pagan prostitute that aided spies from Israel by hiding them from officials from Jericho. In return for her act of loyalty, they gave their word to her that no harm would be done to her or her family so long as she marked her house with a red cord. According to the Bible, “she lives among the Israelites to this day.” Or take another instance. Through a bit of trickery on their part, the Gibeonites got Joshua to sign a treaty with them, which served to save them from annihilation. Joshue made them into woodcutters and water carriers for the community. And the “whole assembly of Israel,” as we learn when Joshua reads (just as Moses had done) the Book of the Law, includes “the women and children, and the foreigners who lived among them.” In other words, not everyone living among Israel were Jewish or necessarily believed in our Lord God. Take the case of the Geshur and Makah, who Moses had defeated but the Israelites did not drive out of the community. Judah couldn’t push the Jebusites out of Jerusalem and in areas around Gezer, the Ephraim tribe lived among Canaanites—although the Ephraim required the Canaanites to do forced labor.
The pattern is clear, however. Amid the community of Israelites lived others that did not necessarily believe or live as the Jews. Limited plurality seems to be the condition here, where a great community of sameness is marked by pockets of difference.
In Acts, as God’s promise is extended to include gentiles and believers are given a Great Commission by Jesus to carry forth the good news, we see over and again that others become an increasingly salient feature of the unfolding story of our Lord God. The community of our Lord God is no more a clearly bordered territory of Israelites living with a few foreigners in their midst. Rather, in some sense, the story has been inverted. The act of carrying the good news to gentiles reconfigured the community of our Lord God. Like seed blown across a highly varied transnational terrain, followers of the Way of Jesus are spread far and wide and not settled into a single defended territory.
Under this new condition, attempting to live in the Way of Jesus is a contextually dependent path that is anchored in locally situated interpretations of the common sacred text—the Bible. There is certainly overlap among the various believers living in different contexts, but just as during Paul’s day there is also disagreement and discord among some of the various sub-communities of believers. Baptists and Roman Catholics, for instance, are part of the larger cloth but also are divided by seams that mark them in their own idiosyncratic ways. Not only do followers of the Way contend with other foreign gods and lords that surround them, but today the great size and variety of the whole assembly of believers makes internal differences among believers even more salient sources of debate, conversation, forgiveness and exclusion.
We’ve always had others in our midst. There is no One Way to respond to others—inside or outside our community. Discerning how to respond to today’s Canaanites and learning how to live with today’s Rahabs and learning how to debate today‘s Stoics and learning how to rebuke and be rebuked by fellow believers, is part of the journey. The Great Commission calls for a continual encounter with others, with our fellow believers and with our neighbors and with our Lord God, where community is by grace and not a matter of defended territory and starkly drawn borders.
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