John Howard Yoder often referred Matt 20:25/Mark 10:42/Luke 22:25 which speaks of the difference between the domination of the powers and the mode of power-in-servanthood that Jesus calls his disciples to embody:
When Jesus said to His disciples, “In the world, kings lord it over their subjects . . . Not so with you”; He was not beckoning His followers to a legalistic withdrawal from society out of concern for moral purity. Rather, His call was to an active missionary presence within society, a source of healing and creativity because it would take the pattern of His own suffering servanthood. . . . The call to those who know Him as Lord ad who confess Him as such is not to follow the fallen world in the kind of self-concern which He must overrule, but to follow Him in the self-giving way of love by which all the nations will one day be judged. (The Original Revolution, 174, 75)
What is striking about Yoder’s reception of this scriptural imperative is the way in which he recognizes that the calling to the community of disciples to manifest a distinctive way of life is not out of concern for cultic purity or their own secure establishment in blessedness, but rather out of concern for mission to the world in the mode of self-giving service. Surely Yoder is right that the calling of discipleship could never be a call to any sort of “self-concern,” whether individualistically or corporately conceived. Rather “the self-giving way of love” must always be be directed towards the world in a mode of “active missionary presence.”
After all, who could be the object of “the self-giving way of love” other than the world if we confess that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor 5:19)? Not surprisingly this is another section of the New Testament to which Yoder consistently returned.
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