Journey to the Common Good
Seeking the common good is something that most Christians, at least in theory, consider integral to the faith. But what does it actually look like? Where do we find inspiration or instruction for the journey? And where will the journey take us?These are the questions Walter Brueggemann explores in Journey to the Common Good (Westminster John Knox). As a world-renowned Old Testament scholar, he sets out to locate the answers in three places:
Exodus, which sheds light on the journey from anxiety to neighborliness;
Jeremiah, an invitation to choose life over death; and
Isaiah, which helps us move from loss to restoration.
I won’t attempt to do justice to his arguments here, but each of the three is an important way of understanding the journey to the common good.
I found the section on the Exodus particularly meaningful. In the Exodus, we see how those living lives dominated by anxiety and scarcity aren’t likely to seek the common good; they’re going to be too busy simply trying to survive. After God uses Moses to lead his people out of “the anxiety system” of Egypt, God miraculously provides manna (or “wonder bread,” as Brueggemann calls it), demonstrating divine generosity and abundance.
But as the biblical narrative makes clear, the people of God didn’t find it easy to move from the culture of scarcity to the culture of abundance overnight. That’s because having left the anxiety system of Pharaoh, they found themselves not in an ideal place of safety, security and comfort, but rather in the wilderness. Brueggemann writes:
“Wilderness” is a place, in biblical rhetoric, where there are no viable life support systems. “Grace” is the occupying generosity of God that redefines the place. The wonder bread, as a gesture of divine grace, recharacterizes the wilderness that Israel now discovered to be a place of viable life, made viable by the generous inclination of YHWH.
Brueggemann goes on to argue that for us today a similar “departure” is required — if not from a literal Pharaoh, then from adherence to whatever twenty-first century anxiety systems we find ourselves in. If we buy his argument that living in a culture of anxiety and scarcity all but precludes the pursuit of the common good, then the flip side is that when we experience God’s generosity and abundance (“our daily bread,” you might say) and recognize it for the grace that it is, we are freed up like never before to be good neighbors and to seek the common good.
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy,” says Jesus. “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
The journey to the common good takes us from scarcity to abundance, and from abundance to the practice of neighborliness. The challenge for all of us, then, is to cultivate lives of neighborliness right here in the wilderness. It may not be a place entirely to our liking, but it is a place of viable life, “made viable by the generous inclination of YHWH.”
Do we truly believe that the wilderness in which we live can be a place not of scarcity but of abundance? How does that shape our understanding of the journey to the common good?
