We are terrible at interpreting
scripture. Seriously. Terrible. The Pharisees remind me of this every time they
come into the picture. I get this sickening sense that I am one of them most of
the time—this feeling that I see exactly what is convenient in the Bible and
ignore anything that is not. I do it. You do it. The TV evangelists do it. We
are all Pharisees who see and hear exactly what we want.
I
figured I would get the bad news out of the way. There is good news here, but
it’ll have to wait a minute.
In today’s reading
the Pharisees have a problem with Jesus—well, you can say that about pretty
much every story in John’s Gospel— and, in this case, the problem concerns his
hometown. He isn’t from the right place.
The Pharisees scoured their scripture and found no account of a prophet coming
from Galilee, therefore, being the good
teachers of the law that they were, they informed Jesus that he could not be a
prophet. Their Bible said it; they believed it; that settled it. Like so many
of us who take the Bible seriously, the Pharisees had laid out all the rules
about what a future Messiah would look like. They had the Torah in one hand,
the prophets in the other, and a clear certainty that God was bound to the
written words he had given.
Never would it
have crossed their minds that they could be wrong because they understood
scripture to be the end all-be all for religious belief. We
should be careful not to pile on, because the honest truth is that the
Pharisees assumptions made sense for their situation. For the Jewish people
prior to Jesus, a person’s place of origin was important because it had
everything to do with purity of blood. Prophets didn’t just arise out of the
blue; they were born to prophetic blood. If you want to begin to understand the
laws of the Old Testament you have to
understand the Jewish concern (you could even call it obsession) with purity. Laws in the Old Testament that seem
laughable now—laws against things like wearing two different kinds of fabrics
or eating pork or shellfish—were incredibly important for a Jewish minority who
was extremely concerned with keeping their cultural and religious distinctiveness.
Purity mattered so much because there was an ever-looming threat that they
would become absorbed by the dominant cultures of the day.
In
Jesus’ day, the Roman government lorded their political power over their Jewish
subjects. The Jewish religious elite—some of whom we refer to as the Pharisees—were
charged in part with keeping the Jewish people pure from the pagan rituals of
Rome. This is why they were so concerned with a man claiming to be a prophet
and not being born in the right place. Things like that could really upset the
Jewish status quo that they were supposed to be protecting. In fact, in a
similar situation today many of us would be quite happy to have our church sanction
those who radically reinterpret our prevailing understanding of scripture.
But
the problem for the Pharisees is that laws come to an end when they encounter
God. Then, everything changes. The whole way we read, think, and interpret
scripture has to change in light of the incarnation. And this is
the good news: the Bible is not really an instruction book; it’s not, as some
have said, “basic instructions before leaving earth.” Instead, it is the cradle
that holds Christ. Its primary purpose is to help you encounter the God who
created you, died for you, and rose again to pave the way for you to eternal
life. It makes absolutely no difference where Jesus was from if those things
are true, which should give us some pause as we consider the way we interpret,
because it means that God is not bound to act as scripture tells us. God is
always capable of doing surprising things, even things that contradict the written
word of God, and, because of this, every one of us has expectations for God that
probably are not true.
Nevertheless,
the Bible is also our most reliable testimony to this God we know in the person
of Jesus Christ. So, we find ourselves in this position where we desperately
need scripture because without it we would believe all sorts of crazy things,
and yet we need to remember that it is God we worship and not the Bible, and
God is fully capable of doing whatever it is that God wants—biblical or not.
Odds are sometimes
in your life you are like these Pharisees, ironically telling Jesus what
scripture expects of him, but probably at other times you are the person who
needs that promise from the Bible just to get through the day. This is the
trouble with preaching, teaching and reading the Bible. Sometimes the one who
needs to hear the hard side of the law hears exactly the opposite, while the
one who needs to hear the good news of the gospel hears instead the only the law, missing the good news entirely.
A
professor of mine who was a pastor once upon a time tells about a particularly
scathing sermon he gave one day directed at one person in particular in the
congregation who had really teed him off (this wouldn’t necessarily be my
approach, but I can tell you that there are days…). After the service the lady at
whom he was preaching came up to him and said, “Thank you, pastor. Some
people around here really needed to hear that today.” That’s preaching, ladies
and gentlemen. But it didn’t end there. Some time later in the receiving line,
another lady, one of the nicest, gentlest, most humble people in the
congregation, broke down in tears and said, “I heard so much of myself in that
message, pastor. I know you were speaking to me.” This is reason #1 not to do a
scathing sermon directed at one individual. You just want to tell the nice lady
for whom it wasn’t intended, “It’s not you. It’s that vulture over there,” but this
is just how we—human beings—work. The people who see themselves as lowly already
are much more open to being condemned, and the people who puff themselves up are
much more open to hearing that which will puff them up even more.
Such is life. We
carry on and try another day. The great thing about Jesus’ ministry is how
rarely he is understood for who he truly is, and yet how universal is his
saving grace. It doesn’t matter if you have this figured out on the first try;
in fact, if you do you’re probably doing it wrong. Interpreting is hard work.
Reading the Bible is hard work. Believing in God is hard work. Because all of
it involves humility and meekness and uncertainty and doubt.
John tends to
paint two groups of people in the gospel: those who see Jesus for who he is—the
Messiah and Son of God—and those who are blinded by their zeal for the law and
want Jesus crucified. I tend to think that most of us are bipolar enough to live
in both categories. We profess Jesus Christ as Savior and God, and yet we cling
in certainty to the standards of the law that Jesus came in part to abolish,
and so we miss what the Holy Spirit is up to.
And
that’s really where this lesson hits the ground running for those of us living
in the year 2014. We don’t have Jesus preaching in our midst, but we do have
the Holy Spirit leading us and renewing us every single day. The Holy Spirit
tends to be the person of God we talk about the least, though it is the person
of God who is most intimately present with us in our daily lives. Like the
Pharisees with Jesus, we are forever cheapening what the Spirit is doing,
suggesting that the word of God is limited to pages in a Bible, and that we
know for certain because of our dutiful study how and why God is doing what God
is doing. And when we do acknowledge the work of the Spirit it is so often
self-serving; like playing the God card that trumps everybody else’s opinion.
It’s a tricky road to walk, and this is why our faith is best lived in
communities that strive together to see what God is up to. On our own we are
Pharisees and zealots, but together we are better; we are able to look through
the crap—the unfiltered opinions and the spiritual power plays—and to actually
discover God at work in our lives.
I’m
sure that’s not the only lesson the Pharisees teach us, but it is a good one.
We see God more clearly the more diverse we are, we are stronger in our
disagreement, and we are wiser when we admit that we haven’t got God all
figured out. Well, that’s a start. Now, please nobody come up and tell me that
some people needed to hear this today.
Amen.
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