Month: May 2015

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Judging and Being Judged

Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you . . .  (Luke 6:37-42)

The most-quoted passage of scripture is not John 3:16 or Genesis 1:1.  It’s this right here: Judge not.  Smug unbelievers hurl it frequently against smug believers, typically with scraps of tacked on theology like, Who are you to speak for God and You’re not acting very Christ-like are you?  What would Jesus do, you hypocrite?  In other words, judging. We all judge.  We all have some sense of moral hierarchy, and the real question is not, Who are you to speak for God? but Who is God to speak to me?  The point here is not that we can’t make any judgments about anything ever, because we do that practically every time we open our mouths.  However screwed up our morals may be, we are still moral creatures.

The point is, Where does the judging start?  If my judging doesn’t start with judging me—always—I’m in danger of making myself the judge.   judging

To understand Judge not, we must take the Jesus’s previous words in one hand and his subsequent words in the other. “Children of the Most High” who are “merciful as their Father is merciful” (vs. 36) will not reassure fellow sinners that their sins are okay with the Big Guy.  They will not tie blindfolds over their eyes and proceed to lead the blind (vs. 39).  If the Lord has opened your eyes, what do you see?  You see Him and his commands—and most acutely, you see how you’ve broken them every day of your life, both carelessly and willfully.  You see how he’s held on to you while you were pulling away from him.  You see how his mercy reeled you in, whether little by little or all in a rush.  When tears of remorse have washed all the crud out of your eyes, you can see how that friend or relative or fortuitous stranger is making the same dumb assumptions you once did.

What would Jesus do?  He would pay for all those dumb assumptions and willful flaunting and innumerable offenses, because somebody had to.   Judge not doesn’t mean there’s no judging going on, only that we’re not the ones who pronounce sentence.  Someone does, someone will, and someone pays.  See to it that it isn’t you.

For the first post in this series, go here.

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Love Your Enemies

But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.  To  one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either.  Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods do not demand them back.  And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.  Luke 6:27-31

I wonder how many listeners got past the first three words: Love your enemies?! What kind of teaching is this?  No wonder he began with a warning note (I say to you who hear sounds like, “Listen up!”).  This is explosive stuff:

Love your enemies

Do good to those who hate you

Bless those who curse you

Pray for those who mistreat you . . . .

But if we’re really listening, we might understand that it’s not a new teaching.  We might even catch a few echoes from the past:

They despised his pleasant land, having no faith in his promise . . . Nevertheless, he looked upon their distress when he heard their cry  (Ps. 106)

They forgot the LORD their God . . . But when the people of Israel cried out to the LORD, he raised up a deliverer, who saved them (Judges 3:7,9)

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.

The more I called to them, the more they ran away, sacrificing to the Baals and burning offerings to idols.

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to talk; I took them up by their arms, but they did not know that it was I—

I led them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love;

I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws; I bent down to them and fed them . . . (Hosea 11:1-4)

All we like sheep have gone astray.  We have turned—every one—to his own way . . .  (Is. 53:6)

The echoes go back and back, all the way to, Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?

How would you define the word “enemy”?  Someone who doesn’t like you?  Maybe, but if that person keeps his distance, you can live with that (and besides, you may not like him much either).  An enemy is someone who opposes you—not accidentally, like the driver who changed lanes and forced you to stamp on the brakes and lay on your horn–but deliberately.  The committee chair who shoots down all your ideas, the supposed bff who spreads lies about you, the rival contractor who underbids you, the woman who leads your husband astray—that’s your enemy.

But what about the wife with the wandering eye, or the child who runs away while you’re calling him to come back–runs right into the street?

The Lord’s own children opposed him.  They ran away deliberately, right into the street.  They made themselves his enemies, disregarded his words, gobbled up lies about him and squandered his blessings.  Have you ever held a rebellious child while she’s in the throes of self-destructive rage, thrashing his arms and legs and screaming, “I hate you!  I hate you!  I HATE you!”  What’s your reaction?

angry boy

Can God feel like a battered husband or a rejected parent?

Listen: Anyone can love somebody who makes them feel good.  Anyone can return a favor or make a loan when the collateral is up front.  Kindness can be its own reward, if it earns you a warm inward glow instead of a kick in the teeth.  Like you’d get from an enemy.

But the Kingdom again turns our world on its head.  Our reward is not a result of loving enemies, it’s the cause of loving enemies.  It’s the very reason we can love, and do good, and lend with no expectation of return, even a murmured “Thank you,” from the objects of our largess.  If we are children of the Most High, our account has already been paid into:

For he is kind to the ungrateful and the unjust.

If the ungrateful and the unjust don’t say it, the angels will: Look at that.  Loving their enemies–just like their Father.

For the first post in this series, go here.

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The Great Reversals

Luke 6:17-18, 20: And he came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon who came to hear him . . .   And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said . . .  

Blessed are the poor . . . Woe to you who are rich;

Blessed are the hungry now . . . Woe to you who are full;

Blessed are you who weep now . . . Woe to you who laugh now—

His mother spoke of this: “He has toppled the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly.  He has satisfied the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty” (1:52-53).  This is how it begins: on a level place, with the hungry and lowly crowded around and power coming out of him, “healing them all.”

If you were a disinterested observer tagging along you might wonder what all the fuss is about.  Or just where this great teacher is.  He doesn’t stand out: you might think the tall muscular fellow listening indulgently to a sorrowful woman might be the one, or the attractive youngster spiritedly arguing with a couple of Pharisees.  But when the crowd sorts itself out and grows quiet, he appears in the middle of three concentric circles: the crowd, the disciples, the twelve, and . . . You blink your eyes: that’s him?  He doesn’t shine, he’s not dressed in white, and he’s not especially handsome—so ordinary, in fact, that you won’t be able to visualize him tomorrow.

But you won’t forget the voice, or the words.   His words shake and remake the world you know.

Kings are not visibly falling from their lofty thrones, nor are the rich seeing their wealth melt away before their eyes.  Instead, here’s another way to understand riches and poverty, power and weakness.  Matthew calls it the Kingdom.  Luke doesn’t use that term as often, but he’s talking about the same thing.  It’s the alternate world, the real-er world.

Alternate universes are all the buzz in theoretical physics.  What Jesus introduced 2000 years ago is the alternate world.  Real, not theoretical.  The Kingdom.  Beyond his startling reversals that level the rich and raise the poor stand a shimmering outline of gates, turrets, and towers any materialist would classify as illusion.  But is it?

This place we live now—it’s real.  He never said it wasn’t.  Hunger, sorrow, lack and want, all real.  The doordifference is not between real and illusion, but between “now” and now: a time bound by walls of circumstance, and a time set free.  It’s like we’re living in the anteroom, or even the coat closet where we wait in rags and muddy boots.  You can start taking those off now, he says; all your disappointments and deprivations are to be left here.  Don’t mind the walls—anticipate the door.  Are you poor, hungry, sad?  A joyful feast waits behind that door.  Do you come well-fed and expensively dressed?  Those designer labels and fast cars are worthless in the Kingdom.  There’s a whole other currency, didn’t you know?  And your accolades and reputation won’t carry over.  They speak a different language there; try to boast in your own achievements and all you will get are puzzled frowns.

He makes it sound so . . . well, so real.  So certain.  While he speaks the gates of the Kingdom grow taller, thicker, definite, as though an angel were beside it with a measuring rod, marking off the cubits.

But I say to you who listen . . . Keep listening!

Up next: Love your enemies!?

For the original post in this series, go here.

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New Wine

On a Sabbath, while he was going through the grainfields, his disciples plucked and ate some heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands.  But some of the Pharisees said, “Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?”  Luke 5:38-6:2

Holiness is all about prayer and fasting, right?  And scrupulous observance of holy days . . . right?  It’s not about weddings and bridegrooms and more mundane matters like eating.  Of course we have to eat, nobody denies that, but we have this thing called the Sabbath—ever hear of it, Jesus?  With your reputation as a potential star rabbi let’s say we’re very surprised to see you allowing your disciples to harvest grain on the Lord’s day—

apostles

What’s that?  They’re hungry?  So what?  They have six days to set aside a snack for the seventh, and if they don’t do that it won’t kill them to go without food for twenty-four hours.  We Pharisees do it all the time—excellent discipline.  And don’t bring up David, he’s irrelevant.  It’s not like you’re another David, after all.  If you can observe the most basic of the commandments—

What?  “Lord of the Sabbath”?  Lord of the . . . Who is this Son of Man?  You don’t mean you, do you?

. . . We can’t keep up with this man.  One minute he’s flaunting revered customs and the next he’s flaunting us.  Right in the synagogue, did you hear?  Elias was there, he with the paralyzed hand that wrecked his pottery business.  Tough for him and his family, but they get their share of contributions from the treasury and besides, if Jesus had wanted to heal Elias he could have stuck around till sundown.  But he had to make a case of it.  A cast against us.  Against the law, I mean, not just us.  He’s against the law, and therefore—

Yes, Elias’s hand was cured.  Of course it’s good for him, but he’s just one man.  There’s something rather large at stake here, sonny, something bigger than parlor tricks and snack cravings on a Sabbath afternoon.  It’s called righteousness, or getting right with the Blessed One, and that’s not easy to do, you know.  It takes old-fashioned discipline and effort and listening to the right people.  So my advice to you, Jacob ben-Alphaeus, is to stay close and mind your own business.  No good will come of chasing after Jesus of Nazareth; he’s trouble.

Jacob?  Jacob!  Come back here!

All night he continued in prayer to God.  And when day came, he called his disciples and chose from them twelve, whom he named apostles: Simon, . . . and Andrew his brother, and James and John, and Philip, and Bartholomew, an Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Jealot, and Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot . . . Luke 6:12-16

For the original post in this series, go here.

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