Privilege on the Cross

I am privileged.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked hard to get where I am.  There are countless times I would have loved to cuddle up with a book or television show or go out on a Friday or Saturday that I spent in the Engineering Quad with my work on a Saturday night after the library had closed.  I will spend the next three years of my life reading countless legal texts to try and

But, thinking again, what a privilege that I could, in complete safety, swipe in to a beautiful computer lab, and work as much or as little as I wanted in a quiet place with constant access to caffeine that I could buy on a prepaid food plan.  

No one likes to talk about privilege, and that makes sense, but the mere fact that I was raised in a loving family willing to sacrifice for my sake, that I have had an education and other resources that so many lack. I did nothing to deserve that, and I have only my family’s generosity to thank.  

What privilege.

What grace. 

But that’s okay, because there is nothing wrong with privilege.  Nothing wrong with grace.  My accomplishments are not diminished by my privilege, by me having “built that” through grace I did nothing to deserve.  However, there is something wrong with me denying that privilege is there, or using that privilege improperly.  I cannot say a token prayer of “thanks, God” and using that grace merely to “get ahead” and “be successful” without appropriating for my own what simply isn’t mine.  For every luxury I was given, there are countless others who undeservedly did not receive the same privilege, the same grace, and have nothing.

Using my gifts to get myself ahead is no better than the servant who buried the talents his master gave him instead of using them for his master’s greater glory (Matthew 25).  That is not the way of the Cross. In words reminiscent Uncle Ben, the more grace I was given, the greater responsibility I have.  Indeed, it is written that the disciples decided “according to ability, each should send relief” to other believers in a time of famine (Acts 11:29).

This is the Cross: God empting himself, “taking the form of a slave,” and humbling himself “becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross” (Philippians 2:7-8).  The Cross is the subjugation of power to the powerless.  It is Bryan Stevenson turning down a $160,000 annual salary starting salary at a big law firm to defend the lepers of our society—those we deem so irredeemable we condemn them to death.

This perhaps seems unreasonable for anyone to ask.  Our society allows us to put ourselves first, no matter how many more resources we have. But, “the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor 1:18).  

Christ does not teach us to be ashamed of privilege.  Indeed, Christ had the greatest privilege of all—divine privilege.  Christ’s life shows us the ultimate purpose of this privilege.  His ultimate privilege—divinity—was fulfilled in becoming the most limited slave, subjugating himself to sinners who tortured him to death, in order to grace us all with equally undeserved salvation.

It is only on the Cross that privilege can be transformed from arbitrary reward into a vehicle for God’s love and redemption.  It on the Cross that privilege becomes grace.