Those Poor Pharisees

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Sometimes I feel bad for the Pharisees.  Yes, they are the “bad guys” in the Gospels, and they do end up conspiring to kill Jesus, but when I read some of the Old Testament, I can’t help but feel a little sympathetic.  I think if  I had no access to the New Testament and I decided I wanted to obey God fully, I would probably have done it like them.

Take, for example, the Sabbath.  If you are familiar with the Gospel stories, you will know that one of the things that enraged the Pharisees the most was Jesus working on the Sabbath.  There is an often repeated pattern where Jesus heals someone on the Sabbath, the Pharisees confront him for breaking the law, Jesus says something offensive, and the Pharisees plot to kill him.  To our compassionate eyes, we can’t help but wonder what is wrong with them.  Can’t they see that Jesus is healing people?  Why get all anal about the Sabbath when miracles are being done?  But then I read Jeremiah 17.  I’ll spare you the whole chapter, but let’s look at a few verses, starting with 21-23:

Thus says the Lord: Take care for the sake of your lives, and do not bear a burden on the Sabbath day or bring it in by the gates of Jerusalem.  And do not carry a burden out of your houses on the Sabbath or do any work, but keep the Sabbath day holy, as I commanded your fathers.  Yet they did not listen or incline their ear, but stiffened their neck, that they might not hear and receive instruction. 

Ok, well that’s pretty explicit.  But maybe it wasn’t that big of a deal.  I wonder what would happen to people if they didn’t keep the Sabbath?  Let’s check verse 27:

But if you do not listen to me, to keep the Sabbath day holy, and not to bear a burden and enter the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day, then I will kindle a fire in its gates, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem and shall not be quenched.

Yikes!  So scripture VERY CLEARLY tells them to not do any work or carry any burdens on the Sabbath, unless they want their city destroyed by fire.  Do you understand the Pharisees a bit better now?  If I took those passages literally, had no other context of understanding, and saw Jesus doing his thing on the Sabbath, I’m pretty sure I would join with the Pharisees and ask Jesus, “can’t you do these things on another day?”

How did Jesus deal with the contradiction? In Matthew 12:11-12, he says,

Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out?  Of how much more value is a man than a sheep!  So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.

  And in Mark 2:27, Jesus says,

The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.  So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.

This is powerful, and a complete departure from previous interpretations of scripture.  Before, scripture was seen as the value holder, with people deriving their value from their obedience to what it taught.  Jesus flips this concept on its head by restoring value to the person.  If something has to bend, he would rather bend the law in order to love/help/heal a person than try to bend that persons needs around the commandment.  That doesn’t mean that the old commandments are meaningless.  But the reason that the commandments matter and the new lens through which we view them are rooted in the revelation that it is humanity that holds the greatest value in God’s heart.

Jesus never says the Sabbath is bad.  He says that the Sabbath was made for man.  While it was written down in commandment language, what if we revisited it with our new understanding?  I think it would read something like this:

You work very hard, and your work is important.  Especially when you are behind on what needs to be done, it can be easy to put everything aside and just keep working.  But you mean so much more to me than what you do.  I know it can be difficult to slow down, but I want you to make time and space for yourself to breathe.  Rest in me.  Remember my goodness.  Enjoy your family.  Recharge.  Your work will still be there when you are finished, but you will be able to approach it with a new energy that will actually increase your productivity without enslaving you to the rat race.  Trust me, I know what is good for you.

What do you think?  If God’s primary focus is not the Sabbath, or the Law, or Scripture itself…if WE are the value holders that God is willing to bend heaven and earth to reconcile with himself, how does that change how we see ourselves?  How does that change how we treat other people?  How does that change how we read scripture?  I would love to hear your thoughts!

King in the Mud

It never gets old.  A King who acts like a Servant.  A God who loves the weakest.  A Saviour who welcomes children. 

An earthly person of importance thinks that they deserve to be treated with extra respect because they are important.  God lives out his importance by refusing the pedestal and staying down in the mud with his beloved.  The world thinks that the strong deserve control and dominance.  God uses his strength to empower the weak.

We could go around telling people, “God is really important!  He is worthy of your worship.  You must worship him because he is glorious!”  But our God’s glory is so humble!  His importance so practical!  He doesn’t mean for us to get caught up in abstractions and worship him because we know he is the biggest and the best.  He is too busy living out his nature by loving his children.  He is a comfort to the brokenhearted, hope to those in despair, a light to those who have lost their way.  Absolutely he is glorious, but it is his nearness and humility that display his glory better than a crown!

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“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them.  It shall not be so among you.  But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”  Matthew 20:25-28

Seeing The Face of God

Jesus is not an anomaly in the nature of God. He is the revelation of who God really is. As John said in his gospel,

“No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he [Jesus] has made him known.” – John 1:18 (ESV)

Keep in mind that John said this after the Old Testament had been completed and accepted as scripture. According to John, in the entire Old Testament era, no one had ever seen God. They may have heard his booming voice or seen miracles that he had accomplished, but the face of God remained veiled. Before Jesus, man inferred who God was from incomplete information. These inferences became doctrines, and these doctrines became the litmus test against which all other ideas about God were compared.

When the face of God came and revealed himself to those with the purest doctrine, they almost unanimously condemned him. Jesus failure to affirm their religious hierarchy, his insistence on doing good at religiously improper times (the Sabbath), and his willingness to associate with those deemed “unclean” all failed the litmus test of what God was supposed to be like, so those who most diligently looked for God ended up being the ones who most viciously opposed him.

Unfortunately, bad doctrines about God continue to obscure our understanding, even within the Christian faith. The most common failure has been in our attempt to reconcile the pre-Jesus concept of God with what Jesus revealed. Instead of recognizing that who Jesus is both precedes and supersedes all other ideas about God, we turn God into a divided character, with “God” still maintaining his wrathful distance and his inability to exist in the presence of sin. In order to fix God’s problem (This God has a real conundrum. “I love them so I want to rescue them, but I’m holy so I want to destroy them…”), Jesus came to stand in-between man and God, so that God wouldn’t see nasty people he wants to destroy, but Jesus who he loves.

Thank God (the real one!!) that the truth is much, much better than that! Because Jesus didn’t come to fix a confused God’s problem as if God was the one who needed saving!…He came to deal with man’s problem.

God has never had an issue with being around sinful men.  Do you remember in the Garden of Eden how God came out to walk with Adam and Eve, and it was Adam and Eve who hid from him?  It is mankind in our guilt who can’t stand to come before God. We just know that we’ve blown it, that we don’t measure up to all of the perfection that God represents, and the idea of approaching such perfection only reminds us of the areas that we have been imperfect. We are terrified to expose ourselves to the all-powerful God, so running and hiding is our only alternative. Believing that the intimacy we crave is hopelessly out of reach (and yet by design being incapable of being satisfied by anything less) we look for everything and anything else that promises to fulfill us. We are like a starving person who only has toxic garbage at his disposal.  He crams his mouth full with food that will alleviate his hunger for only a moment, but which leaves him vomiting, emaciated and even more desperate for food than he was before. In the self-hatred that we lavish on ourselves for being so weak as to be endlessly seduced by things that demean and never satisfy, we project our feelings onto God, imagining that he views us through the same lens that we view ourselves.

The Good News is that Jesus reveals what God is actually like…and it turns out that God values you entirely apart from your messed up behaviour! When confronted with sickness, old god would have said “you sinned, so you deserve to be sick”, but the God Jesus reveals says, “be healed!”. When a person is caught in adultery, the old god would publicly humiliate you and have you stoned to death, but the God Jesus reveals stands by you and says “I won’t condemn you. Now go and sin no more.”. When judgment time came and it was time to deal with all of the world’s sins, old god would have tortured and destroyed the guilty, but the God Jesus reveals says, “Forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing!”. And when old God would have gladly punished sin from a safe distance, the God Jesus reveals took all of mankind’s sin upon himself and died in our place! That’s what God is actually like! Jesus has shown us! He is not the magical potion that obscures us from God so that we can somehow get close, he is the Message God most urgently wants to communicate to humanity…that all of the wrong we have done has been utterly powerless to remove us from his heart. He loves us as much as he did when he first dreamed us up! While we have grown distant in our hearts and minds, he has never been far from us! We are, in fact, his temple…his favourite place to live! He is pleased to dwell in us!

I pray that your eyes will be opened to see Jesus as he is, and in seeing Jesus that your eyes will recognize the true nature of God himself! Then you will boldy approach him, enjoy him, and receive all the help you need!

The Orchard

There once was an orchard filled with all kinds of trees.  The Master assigned one person to each tree with instructions to grow excellent fruit on each tree.  So they set about working.  Many worked long hours laboring anxiously over their trees, hoping to make the best fruit.

Prophet walked through this orchard, and saw many strange things.  One man was standing at the end of a sickly branch, massaging the bud.  Prophet asked what he was doing, and he said to him, “My Master asked me to produce the Fruit of Holiness, so I am working to make that fruit.”  He walked on to the next tree where he saw a woman standing over a small runt of a tree.  She repeatedly pulled on each branch as if trying to stretch them.  Prophet asked what she was up to, and she replied, “My Master has charged me to grow the Fruit of Obedience, so I am working to make that fruit.”

As Prophet continued through the orchard he saw many more strange spectacles, with each tree being tugged on, pushed, squeezed and prodded.  Some creative workers had even purchased building supplies and were hard at work, building and attaching artificial fruits of Wisdom and Kindness to their trees.  Prophet finally couldn’t stand it anymore, and asked the crowd, “When was the last time you watered the soil?”.  The man trying to produce Holiness stood up and said, “I haven’t had time to water the soil.  You see, my master places a very high value on Holiness.  It isn’t as easy to make as you would think, so I have devoted all of my energy to making this fruit.  Perhaps after I’ve made my fruit I will have time for water.”  Prophet found this laughable, so he said loudly for all to hear, “Your Master isn’t impressed with your Holiness or your Obedience….and you sir, can’t you see that your Wisdom isn’t even real?  I tell you, if you will give up on your efforts, and simply water the soil, all of your fruit will grow with ease!”

This speech stirred up a great debate among the workers.  Some were greatly offended, and said, “You just don’t see the value in Holiness and Obedience, in Winning Souls and Self-Control, and in all the other fruits.  Our Master values these, so clearly you are not from him since you think our labor is a waste!”  Others were not so much offended as they were confused, and asked, “If all we do is water the soil, how is it possible for our fruit to grow?  Don’t you see, we have to stretch the branches and form the leaves?  We must massage the fruit, and flick off the flies, and……we just have so much to do!”  There was another small group who seemed more excited by the idea, and asked, “If all we do is water the soil, what will we do with all our free time?”  To which Prophet responded, “your Master wants you to rest and enjoy the fruit you have grown!  I also get the feeling that he wants to just hang out with you sometimes.  Have you noticed him touring the orchards?  I don’t deny that he is inspecting trees, but have you seen the way he stops and looks at each of YOU?  He really seems more interested in you than he is in your trees if you ask me.”

Needless to say, the debate continued on for some time.  Some dismissed Prophet’s crazy notion out of hand and continued to work very hard on building fruit.  They formed committees to discuss new ways of making fruit, talked about the 7 Effective Habit’s of a Good Fruit Maker, and warned each other lest they should be found lazy and out of touch like those strange “Water People”.  Still others decided that some water really was a good thing, but also continued with their old work.  They saw a remarkable increase in their productivity, and were very please with their pulling and massaging, constructing and flicking….and with the marginal help the water proved to be.  Finally, we come to the group that abandoned their work altogether, save for one thing.  Every morning and every evening they watered the soil.  During the rest of their day, they enjoyed the shade provided by their broad, leafy trees, ate the delicious fruit that hung from the branches, and spent time with each other and their Master (who it turns out was far more interested in them than in their trees).  As they continued to water the fields, grass began to spring up between their trees, and flowers started to grow.  As time went on the orchard began to look more and more like a beautiful park, and it was not uncommon for visitors to the area to not even realize it was, in fact, a harvest-producing orchard.  They simply enjoyed the shade of its trees, smelled the flowers, and enjoyed moments of rest.  Some enjoyed it so much that they too joined in the harvest labor, and the orchard-turned-garden continued to expand forever.

The End

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“but one thing is necessary…..”

Luke 10:42