voice of the shepherd and federal agents

Everything about the revolution for the Kingdom is based on Jesus and the aspects of His face. I cannot help but smile at the perfection of Jesus of Nazareth as the foundation of a revolutionary movement. Everything the useless activists of today lack, the Lord Jesus has.

Today, I will focus on Jesus of Nazareth as the shepherd of revolutionaries, one who protects them from the wolves.

For the minority of political idealists who move into the real realm of community and action, a common disease that infects them is infiltration by informants and saboteurs whose paid work is to minimize the community’s effectiveness. Even if the revolutionaries are obvious poseurs who are not taken seriously by anybody, there might be voices within the group who flatter themselves by obsessing about Security and making paranoid accusations concerning Who Is A Fed.

In truth, worldly revolutionary groups of whatever ideological disposition, the Marxites and the Hitlerites and, I don’t know, the Avakianites: they all seem so easy to infiltrate. If I were a federal agent assigned to implant myself within a communist group, I would step out of the boss’s office feeling swell.

Because what would someone have to give up to become a fake communist revolutionary?

Would they have to give up basic comforts? No; most communists go to their little meetings and then, when the night is done, they return to their tastefully furnished apartments in an up-and-coming part of town. They return to their full-size beds, their “partners”, their computers, their air conditioning, their video games, their refrigerators stocked with their chosen goodies, their privacy. Outside of meeting-time, outside of “actions”, their lives look very similar to any other patriotic law-abider.

But what about painful initiation rituals or difficult trials that they’ll need to undergo to gain trust?

None of these with the Communists! The fed was worried he’d have to infiltrate a drug cartel or something where the initiation might involve someone else’s murder or his own internal bleeding. Maybe the communists will expect him to read all those boring pages of Capital… but probably not even that. I suspect that even among the “serious” communists, Wikipedia-level knowledge is the norm.

This lucky federal agent doesn’t need to sacrifice, doesn’t need to suffer, hardly needs to be inconvenienced in any way, really. All he needs to do is learn the lingo, pass on any violent talk he hears to the boss, and get that sweet Direct Deposit notification every two weeks. He’ll probably get some funny stories about delusional leftists that he can share and laugh about well into his government pension days. It’s a dream job, to be honest.

The Lord’s revolutionaries, however, will look very different. The only ones who will be able to enter into that group will be those who can say to the Lord,

See, we have left everything and followed you.

With these revolutionaries, there will be no comfortable home to return to at the end of the day. There will be no private space. No sex will be had. No hours will be spent scrolling or watching HBO dramas. The agent will need to spend twenty-four hours a day trapped in the companionship of Jesus Freaks, working the whole time to keep up the act.

Moreover, he will have years of intensity to look forward to before he can expect any deliverables for his government. Years of physical training, years of study, years of instability, years of hard work, years of deprivation. Years of being completely in with no time off. Years of dying, dying away.

Will there be tools willing to put up with this annoyance if there is a big paycheck promised at the end of the road? Yes. Will any of those tools be competent enough to pull it off, to successfully fight through every trial, faking a deep love of God for the whole stretch? Maybe. I will not be anxious about it, though.

Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber. But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.

The federal agent, the communist revolutionary, the fascist coup-plotter: despite their quibbles, they are all countrymen. They all come from the same World. They don’t have to work too hard to fool each other. This is one reason why the future and the revolution will not be theirs.

Christians come from a different place. We are foreign invaders. We have our own culture and our own shibboleths. Our leader has an absolutely distinct Look; he has an absolutely distinct Voice, which the sheep recognize. We’ll stay vigilant for spies and infiltrators, but peace is very much a part of Heaven culture. I will not be anxious about it.