Excerpts from: Inside Out What really matters in your life? If you boil it all down, what are those few things that are of most importance to you? In our text today, Jesus is arguing with the Pharisees about what is really important in life. They have a basic theological difference because the officials think that obeying the complex rules for piety are what it's all about. Proper washing of the hands, kosher eating, and ritual observances were the key things for the Pharisees. Jesus makes the point that these things don't really matter at all. It's what comes out of you that counts, he says. It's what you say and do to others that matters. As we well know, Jesus and the Pharisees never got it worked out because the rift was too basic and too deep to be bridged in just three years of wrangling. We Christians have been on Jesus' side for a long time -- for so long that we've lost most of the respect we might have had for the Pharisees. In the Gospels I think of them the way I do the teams that play the Harlem Globetrotters. They're not supposed to win. They are just there so the real stars can show their stuff. To the Gospel writers, the Scribes, Sadducees, and Pharisees were that kind of cannon fodder for Jesus. But the leaders of Judaism were not dummies. They came to their conclusions in faith and with reason-- but they were wrong . I would like to tell you a little of their story and then look at how the basic differences between the Jewish leaders and Jesus are still being played out in our own day. To understand the leaders of Jesus' day, you have to start more than 500 years before Jesus was born. Our spiritual ancestors, the Jews believed that they were the chosen people of God and that God would never let them down. They believed that God was based in the temple in Jerusalem and that, therefore, God would never let anything happen to Jerusalem. There could be hard times, of course, but ultimately God would save them. If we admit it, most of us have something in our mind or heart that we feel God will certainly protect. For many of us it is our life after death. For others, it is a more vulnerable hope such as the well-being of our children or even the traditions of our churches. The point is that to our ancestors God's care for the temple in Jerusalem was the one sure thing of their faith. But 587 years before the birth of Christ, the unimaginable happened. Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians and the temple was destroyed. The Babylonians took the leaders of Jerusalem away into exile, and no one was allowed to return for 50 years. An incredible blow! So, when they got back, they had some serious thinking to do. Some, of course, gave up on God altogether as many people we know give up when their assumptions about God are overturned. But most of them stayed with it and tried to figure out what all of this meant. What had gone wrong? They figured they had failed God in some major way.... To do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God. They had missed the point so they were left wondering what the real point might be. Stated somewhat secularly--what are the interests of God, what does God think is important about the way we live our lives? There were many theories.
It was not an easy debate nor was there a quick resolution. The debate still goes on today because each side has a piece of truth to it:
Just what is the proper relationship between the people of God and nonbelievers? People of faith and reason can make good points on all sides of those questions. The Ezra and Nehemiah folks carried the day. Judaism decided that God wanted them to be separate from the world. God wanted them to be pure and spotless. The word Pharisee means literally "separate ones." Over the years the idea of separating the good folks from the bad folks got a little out of hand. The more ritual you observe the more you were different from others, and therefore the holier you were. That is the world into which Jesus was born. And when Jesus began his public ministry in the synagogue in Nazareth. Do you remember the passage of scripture he decided to read from? Right! It was Isaiah--one of those on the losing side 500 years before. Jesus chose the passage that says he is sent to preach good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, preach to the captives, restore sight to the blind, and set free those who suffer. It is exactly opposite the view of the Pharisees who said that good people should be separated from the world. He was basically saying that the community made the wrong choice when it chose purity over involvement, ritual over service. After 500 years of looking at it one way, you can see why the Pharisees and others had trouble understanding things differently, but we have had 2,000 years of Jesus' point in the argument, and we still struggle with it. I do not want to take up the ancient argument of faith as a call for separateness or a call to engagement. You can do that on your own. I would like to try to state what I understand to be Jesus' side of the argument with the Pharisees in a little different way so that we can perhaps get a better grip on it. The basic question has to do with the interests of God. What does God expect from us? If we would serve God, what service does God want? That was the basic question that got the Pharisees off on the wrong track, and it's the question that still must be answered by people who want to be faithful. As I read the scriptures and as I have come to know Jesus, I have three observations:
Jesus and the Pharisees were arguing a very basic point. What do faithful people do to be faithful? What are the interests of God and how do we serve them? Ritual is important and so is the manner and the degree to which we are distinct from the world around us. There can be no doubt about that. The Pharisees have a good point. But Jesus seems to be saying that engagement with the world is even more important. Each of us still has to figure out what that means in our own lives. Someone said words are priceless-yet we string them along often enough without thought. It isn't so much what we consume, it's what we give out that counts. Jesus' teaching is both comforting and startling. The things that put us in the greatest danger, he says, are not the things imposed on us from the outside - not the trends or the traditions, not even the influences and manipulations. The gravest danger, he says, lies in what comes from within us. There may be wars and rumors of wars raging all around us - war may be what we've always done - but when war comes from the heart, then is the warrior truly defiled. There may be degradation and abuse and idolatry on every screen - but when they seep into the heart and displace the upwelling there of Godly love, then the disease can be life-threatening. What is led out of us - what is e-ducere from the heart and soul and mind - has the greatest power to distort our lives, or to redeem them Dietrich Bonhoeffer, puts a finger point on it. Good people, he says, are more likely to be tempted by what is best about them than by what is worst. In a world that badly needs change, how many times have we good people let the warm glow of our acts of charity shield us from the disturbing risk of the change we need to make? In a church that badly needs to demonstrate its integrity, how many times have we good people wounded each other with the opinions and judgments we wield? In the wilderness, Jesus had to struggle for the strength to resist Satan's invitation to make himself comfortable by an act of generosity: turning stones into bread. But we don't live for the satisfaction of our own appetites or the wielding of our own self-righteousness, Jesus said. We live for the invitation of the Word to go beyond our own gratification. |