Is Your Patriotism Distorting the Gospel?

I don’t particularly like talking about politics.

There is enough political commentary around us already, and I have little interest in turning the gospel into another political argument. But there is something I have been noticing that bothers me, especially because I have sometimes heard it from pastors and ministries whose teaching I have respected.

Political loyalty can become so important that things we would ordinarily recognize as wrong suddenly receive an explanation, an excuse, or silence.

Sometimes the justification is patriotism. We are told that the good of our country requires difficult choices. We must protect our people, preserve our culture, defend what belongs to us, and put the interests of our nation first.

There are legitimate responsibilities that governments have toward their citizens. Loving your country isn’t inherently wrong either. I am thankful for many things about the countries in which I have lived. Respecting your country, appreciating its history, and wanting it to prosper are perfectly understandable.

But for a Christian there has to be a line somewhere.

Our country cannot become the lens through which we reinterpret Jesus.

Jesus must remain the lens through which we examine everything else.

Paul Had an Identity He Could Have Boasted About

There is an interesting passage in Philippians 3 where Paul lists the things that once gave him status:

“Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews…”

Paul had ancestry. He had heritage. He had religious credentials. He belonged to a people with an extraordinary history.

Yet Paul says that he no longer places his confidence in these things. Compared with knowing Christ, the credentials in which he could once have boasted were loss.

His point wasn’t that being Jewish was evil. Paul remained deeply conscious of his Jewish heritage.

The issue was where his confidence and identity ultimately rested.

That distinction matters.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with saying, “I love my country.”

Something has gone wrong when following Jesus becomes subordinate to protecting my country, my people, my culture, or my political tribe.

The New Testament continually pulls the Christian toward a larger identity.

Paul writes:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek… for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
— Galatians 3:28

Paul isn’t pretending ethnic or social differences have ceased to exist. His point is that these distinctions no longer determine our standing and unity in Christ.

Christ has created a family that crosses the boundaries we naturally use to separate ourselves.

“But God Created the Nations”

Acts 17:26 is sometimes brought into this conversation.

Paul says that God made the nations and determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation. And that is certainly in the text.

But we shouldn’t stop reading halfway through Paul’s sentence.

Paul begins by saying that God made every nation from one man. Then, immediately after mentioning their times and boundaries, he explains the purpose: that humanity might seek God and find Him.

The sermon is about the God who created all humanity. It isn’t a command to Christians to elevate national interest above mercy.

In fact, Paul’s argument begins by stripping humanity of one of our favorite reasons for superiority. However different our languages, histories, borders, governments, skin colors, or cultures may be, we came from the same human family and live before the same Creator.

Borders may tell governments where their jurisdiction ends. They do not tell Christians where compassion ends.

Then Jesus Told a Story About a Samaritan

This is where I keep returning to the Good Samaritan.

A lawyer asks Jesus a remarkably convenient question:

“And who is my neighbor?”

It is the sort of question human beings are still asking.

How far does my responsibility extend?

Who exactly am I required to care about?

Where can I draw the boundary?

Jesus answers with a story.

A Jewish man is attacked, stripped, beaten, and left beside the road.

Then a priest comes along.

He passes by.

A Levite comes.

He passes by too.

Those details are striking. These were the people one might have expected to understand the things of God.

Then Jesus introduces the Samaritan.

That would have landed differently on the original audience than it often lands on us. Samaritans and Jews had deep religious and ethnic hostility between them. Yet the Samaritan sees the wounded Jewish man and has compassion.

He treats his wounds.

He puts him on his animal.

He takes him somewhere safe.

He pays for his care.

Then Jesus turns the lawyer’s original question around.

The lawyer had asked, “Who is my neighbor?”

Jesus effectively asks, Which man became a neighbor to the wounded man?

The answer was unavoidable:

“The one who showed him mercy.”

And Jesus said:

“Go and do likewise.”

That changes the question completely.

Christian love isn’t primarily occupied with discovering the boundary beyond which I am permitted to stop caring.

It asks whom I can become a neighbor to.

The Priest Was Closer. The Samaritan Was the Neighbor.

There is something almost uncomfortable about the characters Jesus chose.

The priest had more in common with the wounded man.

The Levite had more in common with him.

The Samaritan was the outsider.

Yet shared identity did not make the priest a neighbor. Mercy made the Samaritan one.

That should trouble us whenever Christianity becomes too closely tied to tribal identity.

Because it is possible to talk constantly about God, morality, heritage and religious values while walking past the wounded person on the road.

Jesus deliberately made the religious men pass by.

And He deliberately made the outsider stop.

Perhaps one reason the parable remains so powerful is that every generation finds new ways of asking the lawyer’s question.

Who counts?

How much do I owe them?

Are they one of us?

What if helping them costs us something?

Jesus doesn’t give the lawyer a geographical radius for compassion.

He gives him a Samaritan.

The Earth Has Never Been Equally Distributed

Look at the world for a moment without immediately turning the observation into an economic ideology.

A child can be born in one part of the world surrounded by extraordinary opportunity, food, education, healthcare and security.

Another child can be born somewhere else into hunger, war, instability or crushing poverty.

Neither chose where to be born.

The earth belongs to God. Its resources ultimately came from Him. Yet through geography, history, governments, economics, war, human decisions and countless other factors, human beings experience radically different circumstances.

Recognizing this does not require adopting socialism, capitalism, or any other political program.

It simply requires eyes.

The Christian question cannot end with, “Is this person one of ours?”

The Samaritan could have asked that.

He didn’t.

He saw a wounded human being.

When Christianity Becomes a Tool of Politics

This is what concerns me when the language coming from Christian pulpits begins sounding more like the preservation of a nation, culture or political movement than the teaching of Jesus.

Politics will always ask us to choose sides.

Jesus sometimes disrupts the categories on both sides.

Political movements naturally emphasize their own interests. The gospel keeps introducing us to people whose interests are not ours.

The stranger.

The poor.

The unwanted.

The person from another ethnic group.

The person on the other side of an old hostility.

The wounded man lying beside the road.

And sometimes the person who stops to help him turns out to be someone our tribe taught us to distrust.

That is the scandal of the Good Samaritan.

There Is a Kingdom Above Every Nation

Christians can be grateful citizens. We can respect laws, pray for rulers, participate in civic life and desire the welfare of the place where we live.

But Christianity becomes distorted when national identity begins deciding which teachings of Jesus we take seriously.

Our deepest allegiance cannot belong to a flag, political movement, ethnicity or culture.

It belongs to Christ.

And the family He has created is astonishingly international.

A Christian born thousands of kilometres away, speaking a language I cannot understand, belongs to the same body of Christ as I do.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek.”

That doesn’t erase nations. It tells us that something greater than nationality has arrived.

We are one in Christ.

Who Am I Becoming a Neighbor To?

Maybe that is the question worth carrying away from the Good Samaritan.

Not simply:

Who is my neighbor?

But:

To whom am I willing to become a neighbor?

Would I stop if the wounded person spoke another language?

Would I care if he came from another country?

Would I help if my culture disliked his culture?

Would mercy survive if compassion became inconvenient?

The priest had religion.

The Levite had religious heritage.

The Samaritan had compassion.

And when Jesus asked which one behaved as a neighbor, there wasn’t much room for debate.

“The one who showed him mercy.”

Then came three simple words that are much harder to live than to preach:

“Go and do likewise.”

Perhaps the church needs to hear them again.