whom shall i fear? Ilona Clayton
C
laire knew she was late for her friend’s party, but she couldn’t decide what to wear. The dress she had on was clingier than she had expected. Everyone will see that I’ve put on weight. Her hand hovered over a flowy skirt. But what if they think I look frumpy? She considered a pair of leather trousers instead. They’ll think I’m trying too hard. Plus, I wore these the last time we took pictures and we’ll definitely take more tonight. She sighed and frowned at the mirror, close to tears. It shouldn’t be this difficult. Without realising it, Claire has become enslaved by the opinions of others. She fears what others will think of her. While this is a trivial example, the ‘fear of man’ is far from uncommon, as Edward Welch lays out in his book, When people are big and God is small. Other examples of ‘fear of man’ he cites are: being over-committed, experiencing jealousy, telling lies, seeking affirmation from others. 1 Who can claim that they haven’t at one point or another experienced at least one, and most likely all, of those things? Yet we don’t have to be afraid of others – our rescuer came two thousand years ago. In Luke 4, Jesus goes to the synagogue and reads out his manifesto from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”2 While his contemporaries assumed he would
32
do so in a very specific context, by acquiring their independence from Rome, God’s plan for Jesus’s rescue mission was far bigger. Sometimes it’s easy to think that Jesus “only” saved us from hell by dying for us. But his death impacts our lives and how we live our lives now too. Despite our continuous struggle, we have been saved and we have been freed. From death, but also from the dependence on idols - regardless of whether they are objects, or dreams, or people. Jack Miller said ‘the devil’s great strategy is to get us problem centred rather than Christ centred’; this applies to being people centred too. Even if it doesn’t feel like it at times, we’ve been given what we need to escape the pressure of having to conform to unrealistic expectations or others’ opinions. Christians are called to live only for an audience of one and thankfully our audience is the One who not only desires purely what’s best for us, but also embodies love, grace, and forgiveness. Tim Keller’s short booklet, The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness, explains that the solution to fearing what other people think isn’t to set our own standards but rather to find our identity and purpose in Jesus. Keller argues that because Jesus, being the beloved Son of God, brought his followers into God’s family
