Scripture text: Matthew 3:1-12
“Hindsight is 20/20” or so the old saying goes. But what if I told you that isn’t always true? Sometimes, looking back on the past gives us a more distorted view of life than if we had actually been there. I first encountered this truth when I was studying for my undergraduate degree in history. One of my professors was full of pithy little sayings, many of them full of great truths. One of them was that “history is not the study of what happened; it is the study of what is remembered.” Sometimes, you have to dig through a lot of distortion, perception, and just plain prejudice to get at the truth.
Take the Pharisees for instance. That “brood of vipers,” as John the Baptist calls them in our Gospel lesson today. The perennial villains of the Gospel story, the bad guys, the ones who are just chomping at the bit to do evil each day. You can almost imagine them having this Snidley Whiplash mustache that they can twirl as the scheme and plot. I mean, that’s how we’ve always seen them. They’re the enemy of Jesus, the enemy of God, and all that they stand for.
That’s how we remember them, in large part because that’s how the Gospel writers wrote them. But as I said, hindsight is not always 20/20 and I’m here to tell you that we’ve got them wrong. Oh, there’s no question they did some pretty bad things, but our image of them as rotten to the core is not even remotely accurate.
If you could go back in time and sit down with a typical Pharisee of the 1st century and if asked them what they believed and how they practiced their faith, you’d come up with a list that really isn’t all that different than what you and I might create if asked that same question. These were people who wanted to do what was right. People who wanted to be closer to God, wanted to do good. They wanted to be pure, they wanted to be righteous. And they tried very hard at it, as many of us do.
Why then did they end up at odds with characters like John the Baptist or Jesus himself if that was their goal? If these were truly people who wanted to genuine followers of God’s way, why were not among Jesus’ most fervent allies? Admittedly, some were, but for the rest who came to oppose him, it’s probably very hard for us to imagine why.
Many of you who are here are retired or have been in your chosen professions for a great long time. Imagine for a moment some hotshot kid walks into your job and proceeds to tell you that everything you’ve been doing at that job for all those years has been wrong. He tells you that you don’t know what you’re doing. He tells you that even the fundamentals of your skills are incorrect. THAT is what it was like for the Pharisees to hear the preaching of John the Baptist for the first time.
They thought they had the answers. They believed they knew what God wanted. And along comes this upstart, this wild man of the wilderness, who dares to tell them they’ve got it wrong and they’ve had it wrong for the whole of their lives. Their teachers had it wrong, several generations of wrong. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! That’s all they heard out of John’s mouth and it’s hard for us to imagine how shocking that must have been to them.
They were the experts. They were the ones who had poured over the Scriptures. They were the ones who supposed to have it right. They did have it right, or so they thought. How dare this madman tell them otherwise!
The truth is, the madman was right. The Pharisees did have it wrong. They had it wrong because all their piety, all their morality, all their righteousness was turned inward. It was all about being pure. Not eating this. Not touching that. Not associating with “those people.” But God isn’t interested in purity. What he’s interested in is compassion. And that’s what John teaches. Give to those in need. Sacrifice for the sake of others. True righteousness is not about the good that you are, it’s about the good that you do for others.
When Jesus shows up not too much later, he puts that very idea at the heart of his ministry. The sick, he heals. The hungry, he feeds. The rejected and outcast, he welcomes. The sinner, he forgives. If God was so concerned about purity, as the Pharisees believed, Jesus would never have gone near any of them. But time and again, we see the Messiah in the midst of the impure and unworthy. Again, how shocking must that have been for those who thought they had it right all along.
How shocking is it for us when we think we’ve got it right and the words of the Baptizer and the actions of the Christ challenge us to our very core? How many of us have come to believe in our own righteousness, in our own rightness? We are good people! How dare some upstart tell us otherwise!
The esteemed Bishop of Rome, Pope Frances, recently released his first encyclical, Evangelii Gaudium, in which he criticized the disparity between the rich and the poor in our world caused by unchecked capitalism. How dare he speak ill of our economic system! What is he, some sort of Marxist? A communist pope? No, a Christian one, one that sees that our economic system, like all human-created works, has its flaws and with those flaws come injustices that need to be addressed. It is we who have enshrined capitalism as an unquestioned good. We who may have gotten it wrong.
I hear Westboro Baptist Church is planning another protest surrounding the funeral of celebrity Paul Walker. Now most of us, I think, would not agree with that church’s extreme tactics, but many of us are convinced that homosexuality is a pretty egregious sin, one that the Bible concerns itself a great deal about. So much that it dedicates seven verses speaking to the issue. Seven...out of over 50,000. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that who a person sleeps with is not as big a deal to God as we make it out to be. Maybe we’ve got it wrong.
If you’ve read the newsletter, you’ve heard my thoughts on the so-called “War on Christmas” that comes into vogue this time every year and that nonsense about which greetings are appropriate and which are not. For one month a year, we turn Christmas into a bludgeon with which to hammer people whose beliefs and practices are different from our own.
The most Christian time in our society, a time of peace, goodwill, charity, and kindness and we are seeking to transform it into a time of anger, animosity, distrust, and outright hatred. It’s not them who are waging war on Christmas. It is us. We’ve got it wrong.
So how many of you are feeling a little uncomfortable in your seats? How many of you are angry with me for saying what I just did? If so, you’re beginning to understand what it was like for the Pharisees to hear the words of John the Baptist. Now you know why they sought to kill him and also the one who came after him.
Truth is, my friends, we are often the Pharisees of this day and age. It is not comfortable or pleasant to have our long-held beliefs challenged. But that is what the Baptizer does even now across the ages, reminding us that it’s not about purity. It’s not about how good we are, it’s about the good that we do for others.
When we remember that, the Pope’s criticisms make sense. We see the truth of them. The LGBT community becomes human again, just people like us. And maybe it’s not such a good idea to lambast some poor underpaid store clerk for not giving us the proper Christmas greeting. But even more important than these examples is how we start to understand the mind of Christ.
It’s not about purity. It’s about compassion. If it was about purity, Christ’s mission here on earth would have been pointless. None of us lives a sinless life. None of us are pure enough. None of us righteous enough. None of us good enough. If that was to be the heart of our salvation, then there would be no salvation.
Christ is pure. Christ is righteous. Christ is good. But that’s still not what matters. What matters is the good he can do for others, for us. And in that compassion, he did come down to earth. He was born of a virgin in a stable on Christmas night. He grew up and then went to the cross. He died a bloody impure death because that was what was necessary to save us. He did the ultimate good for our sake. He showed us what righteousness really is. What goodness really is. A life given for others. A life given for you and me. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment