Jesus as Prophet

Matthew 23

August 17, 2008

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

So, do you think Jesus was angry? This is one of those times that those sweet shepherd paintings of “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” seem like wishful thinking. Other than the scene at the Temple where Jesus rampages through the tables of the moneychangers, this is one of the times we see Jesus at his most irate. In fact he gets so upset here that he ends, according to other gospel accounts, by weeping, his anger morphing into despair.

At whom was Jesus angry? Well in this instance, it was not primarily people like you. No, it was people like me. Well, I hope not like me, but people like me who were in positions of leadership in the religious community. Jesus was mad at the clergy, and at the religion professors. He was angry because he perceived that they had taken something beautiful and life-giving – the worship of God, the building of a relationship with God, and the service of God in the world—and made it into something burdensome and complicated, and they had used their positions to lift up their own importance at the expense of God’s. Did you hear what he told them? “You make people’s lives difficult by all the rules you place on them, rules which you happily ignore by virtue of your position. You pay more attention to outside appearances than to the condition of hearts and spirits. You teach the scriptures, but you have not embedded the scriptures in your hearts.”

Now lest I, and we, get all self-congratulatory about how Christianity, and perhaps more specifically Protestantism, has fixed this problem, understand that I talk to people all the time (and you probably do, too) who would not walk into the doors of any church for worship or anything else “religious” because they still perceive the church as full of hypocrites, nitpickers, “thou-shalt-not-ers,” who are irrelevant to the daily lives they live and the problems of the world they inhabit. They perceive “religion” as a burden rather than a blessing, and may even declare themselves “spiritual” but reject the church as an appropriate or welcome place to live out, develop and express that “spirituality.”

That very large group of people is of concern to us, but there is an even bigger picture here which relates to why Jesus got so mad. The Hebrew Bible tells us, in historical narratives, in poetry, and in prophecy, that God had chosen the Jewish people to come into a special relationship with God, to receive instructions on a new way of being a community and a nation in the world. That’s what “the law” was to be, a new way to create human society different from how tribes and nations had organized and ruled themselves in the past. God did this, the scriptures are clear, not because Abraham’s descendants were any better than anyone else, not so they could go off and be away from the rest of the world, pure and righteous and protected, but so that they could be a model, a “light to the nations” as Isaiah reminded them. The hope was that by this light, all the nations of the world would be transformed into peaceful, productive, just communities, so that people would want to be like them! Instead of wiping out all life as God had done in the flood, God would now try to inject into the world a virus, as it were, a healthy, life-giving virus that God hoped would spread from the little wilderness that was Israel just as human life itself had spread from nearby Africa to populate the whole of the Earth.

By the time Jesus arrived on the scene, that project had completely broken down. While there were still many people of deep faith, who lived and taught as God hoped, the system and its institutions had such deep flaws that other peoples did not often look to them as a model for how to live. Jesus expressed God’s understandable anger that the leaders, who had studied the scriptures and spent the bulk of their lives in worship and prayer, had so lost touch with God’s original intention that they were doing more harm than good, both to their own people and to the greater world which so badly needed a new, just, healthy way of being community. Jesus’ greatest anger is always reserved not for corrupt politicians or the Roman oppressors, but for those who ought to know better and don’t; the leaders of religious institutions. “You know all the minute details of tithing, down to how much of the crop of the smallest herbs need to be brought to the temple,” Jesus said to them, “but you have completely neglected the big picture of justice, mercy and faith. You are so focused on doing the right ritual acts that you have forgotten about compassion and mercy, and those are the centerpieces of the new society God wants to create.”

The apostle Paul and the earliest Christians understood themselves as standing in that same tradition of being called out to be a light to the nations, not to hide our lights under bushels, but to shine so that a whole city, indeed a whole empire, might see the light of God.

So here we are, a couple thousand years later, with the project still on the table. We’re here in the city of New Haven, which has at least a hundred religious institutions representing the Abrahamic faiths: Christianity, Judaism and Islam, all of whom have the same call from God to be those who put justice, mercy and faith at the top of our agenda. We live in a city which has deep polarization between races, socio-economic groups, people of different educational levels or national backgrounds, and a city where those religious institutions have trouble sitting at the same table with each other to work. I’m the new president of ICM, the closest thing New Haven has to a Council of Churches, and I’ve been involved in the work of the successor organization to ECCO which attempts to organize religious institutions to work together for the city. Both organizations have trouble getting black and white churches to sit at the same table, trouble getting Catholics and Protestants to overcome their differences for the common good, trouble convincing churches, synagogues and mosques that we have more in common than we have differences in terms of what we hope for this city. The Mayor touts that we are called an “All American City,” and therefore a model to other cities, and in some ways we are. Yet our streets are full of gun violence, our school system has deep inequities, we are about to enter a winter where homeless shelters will not be fully funded and our social service agencies are strapped to deal with the number of folk in New Haven who have no home, no adequate employment, no access to health care, who are dumped out of prisons without resources or relationships, who suffer abuse at the hands of their own families.

Don’t even get me started on the problems that this, the wealthiest country in the world, faces in the streets of cities, suburbs and rural communities, let alone what the nations of the world are doing.

I can hear Jesus saying to us, “How has human community remained so messed up, and what is your part in that failure?”

And, quite frankly, I can hear him saying it to me, more than to the rest of you, although I think Jesus intends for you to listen in. I hear him saying that it’s not that he expects me, or all clergy, or even all church folk, to solve all of these problems, local, national and global, tomorrow, or even to take responsibility for all of them. That’s not what he said to the Pharisees, or to his disciples, or to the crowds to whom he preached.

What Jesus tried to tell the Pharisees and the crowds was that in focusing on what people should or should not do, they missed the focus of the scriptures on who God invites us to be. The long-term solution to the deep problems of our city or world may, or may not be, in a new “program” or “activity,” but rather in how people can connect with God and one another from the inside out, on communicating God’s vision in such a way that people can’t wait to learn more and enter into community with others who are seeking to live into this vision. The solution may be in helping people to see that being in relationship with God and other people of faith is not burdensome, but rather relieves the many burdens we all carry, that what we have here is a source of joy and hope much deeper than any political campaign or social movement, in modeling here the kind of just and joyous community we believe the whole world can be like.

That is the unique role of religious communities, in partnership with but distinct from government or social service agencies. That is why we worship, sing and pray, why we teach our children and adults the Bible, why we work on relationships with one another. Because the rather tenuous hope, still hanging by a thread after several millennia of human history, is that love, compassion, mercy, joy, generosity of spirit, and justice as ways of being in the world might, as they say on YouTube, “go viral” and so result in the kinds of actions God yearns to see transforming the world.

Just before Jesus began telling the hard truths about the failures of his religious community, he answered a question from a Pharisee about what the greatest commandment would be. By some counts there are over 600 commandments in the Hebrew Bible. He responded that all of the life of a faithful person or a joyous society hung on two commandments: Love God with all your being, and love your neighbor as you love yourself. Not a real detailed business plan for making over human societies. But I think Jesus gets most angry with me when I forget those two commandments in getting caught up with the details of my life and work of religion. He’s angry because I’m not doing God’s project any good when I work or live without those as the basis for who I am and what I do. And I think God gets angry at us as churches when we do the same thing.

August is halfway over; the Fall approaches for all of us with lots of plans. As we plan here, as we imagine here, as we work here, let us keep in mind what it is that God hopes will “go viral.” Let us not get so bogged down in the little things that we forget the big picture. Those of us in leadership in religious institutions need your help to keep us from making Jesus angry. Let us outdo one another this week, this year, in finding ways instead to give God delight. Amen.