The Hostility of Identity – 2/2/25

Have you ever wondered why Christianity was uniquely offensive in the Roman world? Uniquely offensive. Because in some ways it’s confusing. The Romans had gods for everything, so why not just add more? Add the Christian God to their pantheon? But that didn’t happen for a number of reasons. Here are a couple big ones.

1.  Exclusive worship

Christians refused to worship any of the Roman gods because they exclusively worshiped Yahweh, the God of the Bible. The Romans viewed this as seditious, treasonous. And the reason is because the Roman gods were connected to every part of Roman culture. You couldn’t eat a meal, couldn’t work your job, couldn’t have a family, couldn’t travel, couldn’t go to a gladiator contest without encountering the Roman gods. Scores and scores of Roman gods. So the Romans viewed the refusal to worship their gods as being non-Roman. You guys are anti-Roman. And they also use the interesting words, you’re “superstitio,” which is interesting spoken by a culture that has countless deities to call Christians “superstitio.”

However, Michael Kruger, in his excellent book, “Christianity at the Crossroads,” which is addressing 2nd Century Christianity within Roman culture, writes,

“Christianity was deemed to be a threat. Refusal to worship the gods, and to potentially invoke their wrath, was viewed as recklessly endangering the Roman people. For Christians to do so was viewed as a blatant disregard for the welfare of their fellow citizens. This is why, no doubt, Christians were charged with ‘hatred of mankind.’”

Tacitus was the Roman historian who essentially said, “Christians are haters.” Nothing new.

1. Exclusive worship

2. Inclusive ethnicity

One of Christianity’s fiercest opponents was Celsus, a Roman philosopher who derided Christianity because,

“[Christians] show that they want and are able to convince only the foolish, dishonorable, and stupid, only slaves, women, and little children.”

I’m quoting Celsus. Besides being a massive misogynist, Celsus is convinced that it’s wrong — what Christians are doing — and if you could read the whole section, he’s against what Christians are doing because Christians are inviting what he views as inferior groups to choose to believe what they hadn’t previously believed. And the reason Celsus believed this was wrong is because, in his view, inferior groups should not be deciding what they believe. They should be told what to believe.

A husband should tell his wife what to believe. A master tell his slave what to believe. Your family tells you what you believe. Your ethnicity is inseparably linked with your religion. Romans worshiped Roman gods. Egyptians worshiped Egyptian gods. Greeks worshiped Greek gods. Phrygians worshiped Phrygian gods.

And where we sometimes get confused about that is, don’t the Romans worship pretty much anything? Yeah. Whenever they conquer a people, they tend to steal their gods and add them to their pantheon just to cover their bases. However, what they never do is deny their own gods. It’s okay to add more, but if you deny your own god as an Egyptian, or Phrygian, or Roman, you’re denying who you are. You’re rejecting your ethnicity.

Larry Hurtado in his brilliant book, “Destroyer of the gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World” writes,

“The aggressively transethnic appeal and spread of early Christianity, however, gave it no such character…”

I’ve got to set a little context. What does he mean, “no such character?” He’s contrasting here the Jews who worshiped exclusively Yahweh with the Christians. Why did the Romans view them differently?

Well, the Jews were being Jews, what he calls ethnic particularity. They’re worshiping their own God as they should. The Christians are messing things up because they might be Roman and worship Jesus, or they might be Egyptian and worship Jesus. They might be Phrygian and worship Jesus. That’s where the problem is. So let’s keep going.

“however, gave it no such character and made Christianity seem much more ‘in your face.’ Other religious movements of the time had their oddities too, but early Christianity was not simply odd; it was deemed dangerous to traditional notions of religion and, so it was feared, also for reasons of social stability.”

What will happen if slaves begin to believe what they in their conscience believe? What will happen if women have faith based on their own conscience, not their ancestors or ethnicity? What was feared as social instability became the foundation for religious liberty.

Hurtado makes an amazing statement when he says that Tertullian, who was a Christian author around 212 A.D. was, in Hurtado’s view, “the first [ancient] reasoned defense of religious liberty…” Think about this. This is over 1500 years before Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers. And Tertullian, a Christian, writes this:

“It is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that everyone should worship according to one’s own convictions… It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion… A Christian is enemy to none, least of all to the emperor of Rome, who he knows to be appointed by God, and so cannot but love and honor.”

And that formed the basis of a transethnic religion which was threatening to the Roman world.

Third example of why Christianity was uniquely offensive, its

3. Distinctive morality

Christians connected worship with ethics. When you worship Jesus, he begins to change the way you live. Many today fail to realize that a lot of the trendy lifestyles that seem so novel today were all in Rome. All of them. Open marriages, gay marriages, polyamorous marriages, spousal “abuse.” And I put it in quotes because in the Roman world, it was ubiquitous. It was everywhere, but it wasn’t viewed as abuse. It was viewed as normal. LGBTQ+. All those various lifestyles were all there. Different names, all there. Fraud in business, greed, abortion, etc.

Jesus, though, calls his followers to love their neighbors — Christian and non-Christian — to honor marriage. One man, one woman, covenant life. Can you imagine how controversial that was in that day, as it is in this day, to reject all forms of immorality (sexual intimacy outside the covenant of marriage), to conduct business honestly? The Christians refused to go to the gladiator games. Why? Because they argued, here are image bearers slaughtering each other and people are cheering as blood is flowing. And Christians boycotted the gladiator games. Or the big one, that valuing children in the womb, out of the womb. Christians argued, life is valuable.

The lifestyles of the Christians were distinctive and could be extremely costly, not just from government persecution, which did eventually come, but also, as Dr. Hurtado gives some examples here, just from ordinary relationships.

“For example, you might receive harassment and ostracism from family members, friends, and associates [who view you as non-Roman]. Christian slaves of pagan masters might well have suffered corporal punishment, and wives of pagan husbands might well have received verbal and physical abuse. Scrupulous Christian members of professional guilds who demurred acknowledging the guild deities would have found themselves the object of scorn and worse.”

What is that? To do business in Rome often required you to be a member of a guild, and the guilds and the gods were inseparably linked. Christian business people had a hard time navigating how do I worship God alone and yet actually do business to feed my family?

“Indeed, these and other social costs were such that it prompts the question why people chose to become Christians in that period.”

How in the world did Christianity surge from being a nothing to pervading the Roman Empire when it cost so much? Jesus is preparing his followers for exactly what we just talked about in Matthew 10. He said, as we saw a couple of weeks ago, or as we’ll get to today, Matthew 10:34,

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

Now, does this mean that Jesus intended to establish his kingdom through violence? I thought Isaiah 9:6 called him the “Prince of Peace.”

I thought the angelic multitude in Luke 2:14 said, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”

I thought Jesus taught in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”

We need a little context, and so now let’s go back a few weeks to verse 16 of Matthew 10,

“Behold, [Jesus said] I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves.”

The culture I’m sending you to will at times reject you, hate you, arrest you, and maybe even kill you. So the sword he’s talking about a few verses later is the antagonistic response of many to the gospel of Jesus. Notice who has the sword. It’s not Jesus, and it’s not his followers. It’s a picture of the division, the antagonistic response of many to the gospel of Jesus. Jesus is saying my coming will elicit, at times, a sword-like response, not a hug, a division. Why? Why will so many be so hostile?

Well, I mentioned a few reasons at the beginning of the message. But Jesus focuses in on one specific reason in this passage we’re looking at today, verses 34-39. And the way you can see the main reason he’s focusing on is to see the movement in the passage. Look where he begins.

He starts global.

Verse 34, “I have not come to bring peace to the earth…”

He’s starting with the earth.

But then verses 35-37, he moves a little more local. Man vs. father, daughter vs. mother, daughter-in-law vs. mother-in-law, enemies in your own household. And then he moves even more to personal in verses 38-39.

“Whoever finds his life will lose it.”

And the word life there is “psyche,” we get our word psychology from that. Here it means soul or self. Life. The movement is clearly from global to personal, from external to internal. And it’s the key to understanding the antagonism that Jesus is specifically addressing in this section. And you could summarize it this way:

Jesus is the ultimate means of identity formation!

In other words, you won’t really know who you are unless you know who you are through him. He is the ultimate means of identity formation. Look at verse 39, where he states this clearly,

“Whoever finds his life [he finds himself] will lose it, and whoever loses his life [loses who he thought he was] for my sake will find it.”

No wonder he is eliciting a sword-like response. Can you think of anything more controversial? Someone coming to you saying, you won’t know who you are unless you know who you are through me. That’s quite the statement. So in order to see this, I want us to do three things: look, love, live.

Look, love, live.

1. Look

We want to see something. We must see, recognize, that every culture has identity-forming assumptions. Every culture has built — in you’re going to know who you are this way. And in order to illustrate that, we’re going to go on a massive field trip through history. We’re going to go back 5000 years and then jet through history to see five ways to know who you are. A quick history of identity formation.

And the purpose is not to say, oh we do that or don’t do that. The purpose is when we step out of our own cultural context, we can begin to see ourselves more clearly than when we are just swimming within our own world.

• The family self

And to see this, we’re going to go back to 3000 B.C. to 1000 B.C. The Greek and Roman families. And the best image that might help us understand this is Bernini’s statue. This is a statue that was actually made in the 1600s, but it illustrates the value of the period we’re talking about.

There are three key figures in this statue: Aeneas, who is the guy in the middle, he is fleeing Troy. Troy, his city, is burning and he’s carrying his father, Anchises. And then, you can’t really see, but at their feet is the son — we’ll move closer in a minute — Ascanius.

And the statue depicts the value they put on male relatives. Your identity, your very survival, was linked to your relationship with your ancestors, passed down through your male relatives. But notice what they’re carrying, because the objects they’re carrying are windows into how they self-identify and worship. Aeneas is carrying his father. Anchises is carrying, the father, is carrying the household gods.

Larry Siedentop, a professor at Oxford, has written a book called “Inventing the Individual.” It is not an easy read, but if you want to do a deep dive into all of this, it’s a good place to start. But he writes this:

“As each family had its own gods, from whom it sought protection and to whom it offered sacrifices, separation from the family worship involved losing all personal identity.”

You’re fleeing a city that’s burning. You’ve got to grab something. What do you grab? Big screen? Xbox? Back then, they grabbed father, son, and household gods. Because if you lose your gods, you lose yourself.

The son, Ascanius, is carrying the household fire. You can see that little thing in his hand. In that day, the family hearth or the household fire was the center of worship. It could not be allowed to stop burning because it linked the family to the ground where the hearth was and through the ground to the spirit world where your ancestors were.

Now we’re jet touring from a Western perspective, there are Asian versions of this as well.

The family self.

• The city self

]We’re moving forward to 600 to 300 B.C. The aristocracy of Greece is evolving into a democracy, but there are still no rights for an individual. Individual rights means participation in the public with those who have the power.

One of the best images that captures this is the Spartans when they are returning from the battle of Leuctra. This was a major battle where the Thebans defeated the Spartans, and the Spartans were returning home, and the families who lost sons in the battle were required by the city to dress as if they are celebrating. And the families whose sons survived the battle were required to dress as if they are mourning. Now, it may have been a myth. It may have happened, it may not have happened. But either way, it illustrates the values of the culture very powerfully.

The point is, your identity rising or falling is not linked to how well you as an individual are doing. It’s linked to what is good or bad for the city. Your individual life is inseparably linked to the well-being of the city. Your civic duty is your identity. City self.

• The conqueror self

Now we’re moving up to the Enlightenment. Reason is becoming utilitarian or instrumental. The goal is to master yourself and conquer the world. The best image that might capture that is the conquistador. Through self-discipline, you master yourself and then through knowledge and courage, you conquer the world. You are what you accomplish. The conqueror self.

• The expressive self

Here we’re picking up speed. In the 1700s, Rousseau popularized what he called the “autobiographical self.” His writings reveal a deep distrust for anyone or anything outside of himself, a heavy reliance on his own feelings. The self creates the world and is the final arbiter of what is right and wrong, meaningful and valuable. Freedom is found in shaping yourself.

Freud took this and plunged deep, went public and plunged deep within the soul. He and some of his followers began to realize that the deeper you go into the self, the more you realize this black hole of self where fantasy and reality can become indistinguishable. And that leads to finally,

• The fluid self, which is malleable, untethered.

And this is something brand new in contrast to all other forms of identity. Robert Bellah writes,

Western culture now believes in “a socially unsituated self from which all [moral and meaning] judgments are supposed to flow.”

Look at these five ways of knowing who you are: family, city, conqueror, expressive, fluid. And we could list another hundred, but those are five big ones. Notice the shift, if you look at family, was inseparably linked to your biology. Your bloodline tells you who you are.

But if you go all the way over to fluid, it’s biologically detached. Your DNA doesn’t even tell you any more, according to a fluid interpretive of self, who you are. You tell you who you are completely detached from biology.

There’s a massive shift. If you were to ask an ancient Greek, “Who are you?” He might say, I” am the son of Aeneas.” If you ask someone who has embraced a fluid mindset, “Who are you?” “I am gender queer.” Well, how do you know you’re that? And that individual may begin explaining a myriad of attractions and experiences that they have labeled on themselves to tell who they are.

Why does this matter? And this is a really important statement.

You won’t understand the conflict Jesus is describing, this “sword,” if you are unaware of the cultural assumptions he is confronting.

You won’t understand the conflict Jesus is describing with this sword language if you’re unaware of the cultural assumptions he is confronting.

All five of these and myriads of others are alive and well in America today. We often cobble together different means of knowing who we are. There are conservative versions of these, and there are progressive versions of these. Each of us naturally tend toward one or the other.

The first thing we’re doing is we’re looking to think about the cultural assumptions that have always helped shape identity formation and continue to do so in our day.

1. Look

2. Love

We find in Jesus a love like no other. In August 1740, Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon to the children of his church in North Hampton, Massachusetts. His text was Matthew 10:37.

“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

His main point is this: “Children ought to love the Lord Jesus Christ above all things in the world.” And he gave six reasons why. Let me show you the first one.

“There is no love so great and so wonderful as that which is in the heart of Christ. He is one that delights in mercy; he is ready to pity those that are in suffering and sorrowful circumstances; one that delights in the happiness of his creatures. The love and grace that Christ has manifested does as much exceed that which is in this world as the sun is brighter than a candle. Parents are often full of kindness towards their children, but that is no kindness like Jesus Christ’s.”

In response to that point, Dane Ortlund explains how different all of our experiences are. Many of us have had bad parents, or we might be struggling in our relationship with our parents, or we might have or have had amazing parents. But regardless of our experience, Ortlund says,

“The best parent in the world does not love you anywhere close to the way Jesus loves you.”

Let me say that again.

The best parent in the world does not [know you or] love you anywhere close to the way Jesus loves you. You say, what does that have to do with identity formation? You will not go where Jesus goes next if you don’t believe that he loves you. Where does he go next?

1. Look

2. Love

3. Live

We find ourselves, our true lives, as we die to false identities and follow Jesus.

Verse 38, “And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

If I spend my whole life trying to figure out who I am, whether it’s through my family, or through my nation as a good patriot, or through my accomplishments, or expressions, or diving deep within my attractions and dysphorias, I will end up losing my life. Jesus is saying that there will always be parts of me that allude me, that escape my notice, that present falsely, experiences, whether ecstatic or traumatic, that will define me. As Alexander Maclaren says,

“I suppose that there is nothing else that will wholly dethrone self but the enthroning of Jesus Christ. That dominion [that self-rule] is too deeply rooted to be abolished by any enthusiasms,”

All the sincerity in the world cannot break me free from the chains of what so falsely identifies me.

“however noble they may be, except the one that kindles its undying torch at the flame of Christ’s own love.”

That is the power of an expulsive affection, as Chalmers says. Christ’s love does what we could never do on our own. His love is the only force strong enough to hold us while he peels our grip off of the things we think will identify us, but actually suck the life out of us. If I try to find life in what is lifeless, I will lose my life. It’s like tying yourself to a millstone. But if we lose what we think is life for Christ’s life, we will find him.

Do you see how offensive this is? You literally can’t get more offensive. Jesus is coming to each of us and saying, you will not know who you are unless you know who you are through me. That is a sword. It is a sword on earth, it’s a sword in families, and it’s a sword in self. Why? Because my life feels like my life. Get away from my life. I know my life. I’ve been with me for most of my life. But as Richard Bauckham writes,

“To live one’s life as though one owns it and can use it and keep it for oneself is an illusion that death will brutally destroy.”

This is why Christianity is uniquely offensive. Just like in Rome, nobody in America — well, there are a few — but most in America don’t mind you adding Jesus to your life. You can be a conservative and, oh, and I worship Jesus. Or I’m a progressive, and, oh, I follow Jesus. Or I’m a man, woman, single, and I am a Christian.

But that that’s not what Jesus is saying. Jesus is not saying you can, like the Romans, add to your pantheon. He is saying die to all the other false identities and deities that are seeking to identify you and follow me.

That doesn’t mean we’re not a man, or a woman, or a father, or mother, or we don’t love our country. Paul was a Roman citizen, and he was Jewish. And he would talk about those identities, but they were never primary. As he says,

“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh [as a man, as a Roman, as a Jew] I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

That love that fills me in a way that nothing else can. Rome comes and Rome goes. America will come and go. Jesus will never come and go. Tie your identity to the one who will never forsake us. Nothing can separate you from his love. He alone is worthy to give your life to, in this life and forever.

Colossians 3:1, “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.”

What does that mean, seek and set your mind? Are we supposed to think about heaven more? Yeah. It’s not bad. That’s not the main point. How do we know? Look at verse 3,

“For you have died,”

That is, you died to everything you thought you were.

“And your life”

That you’ve lost for his sake

“is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”

So he is saying seek, set your mind on, your real life. Well, where’s that? In Christ is where you will find who you really are, in all the creativity God has made you, with all the gifting and the beautiful diversity. He’s not going to clone you. He made you beautifully different. Broken by sin, redeemed by his Son. And we find who we really are in him.

We are not primarily identifying ourselves by our family, our city, nation, accomplishments, feelings, attractions. All of these can be gifts. They can’t be gods.

“Whoever finds his life will lose it. Whoever loves loses his life, for my sake will find it.”

So a couple questions to ponder now as we move into the Lord’s Supper. Look, love, live.

1. Look.

Would you take a few minutes just to think about, what tends to define me? And if you say, I have no idea what you’re talking about there, okay, back up a little.

What tends to get you anxious, fearful, angry? Often, if you follow that trail, you’ll find out how you want people to think of you, how you want to think of you. And that tends to point you to how you’re identifying yourself. Take a few minutes. Think about that.

1.Look. Be aware of those assumptions that we often ignore.

2. Love.

Meditate on the love of Jesus. There is no love like his love. If you can find someone in your life — think about someone who has loved you well, and then multiply that love by millions — you begin to just taste a portion of his love for you. Meditate on his willingness to give himself for you, to set you free from the bondage of sin, and fear, and death.

3. Live.

Will you follow Jesus and find a life that never ends?

Father, we thank you for this time to sit under the words of Jesus. To look through history and learn so that we can see ourselves more clearly.

We don’t want to be blinded by our own cultural assumptions and personal experiences and online deceptions, Lord, we want to follow you.

Spirit of God continue ministering in our midst. Pour out your love in our hearts so that we can let go of what is fake and follow you to what is real. We thank you in Jesus’s name, amen.