TOM and the Goldfish Bowl, Part 2, C

15Jul/10Off

TOM and the Goldfish Bowl, Part 2, C

THE KINGDOM, THE CHURCH, AND THE TRADITIONS OF MEN

THE TRADITIONS OF MEN

A Fight

Here is the section of our book where it is acceptable to use references like Catholic, Protestant, Baptist, House Church, Mega-Church, Armenian, Calvinist, The Celtic Way, Anglican, Independent Charismatic, Missional Community, Organic, Reformed, Orthodox, Progressive, Emergent, Traditional, Liturgical, Evangelical, just to name a few. These are all the creative ways we—with feet of clay and minds of dust—have chosen to identify ourselves and divide ourselves from others who are following Christ. We have given these classes formal names. These are the well-financed ways we have divided ourselves from one another.

Congratulations, Church, for creating and sustaining the multiple personality disorder that has plagued us for generations. So, how has it been working out for you?

That was rhetorical.

I know that proposing mental disease seems awkward. Did I go too far? I know it can make us all very uneasy. Most of us have rationalized these divisions and we don’t dare question them anymore. When someone does question them and when someone might even propose that the system is sick, our instinct is to step back and say: Wait, aren’t you touching something sacred that we shouldn’t touch?

It is no wonder we get nervous. There are whole classes of book-writing, university-leading, and scholarly fraternities that have existed for centuries whose only purpose has been to prove the legitimacy of these divisions. This kind of human effort is designed only to make us feel justified in sustaining our disease.

It makes me sick.

It has been making us all sick.

Men who have been impressed with their own righteousness have been carrying out secret experiments in the petri dishes of doctrinal refinement, and they conduct the cloning of obedient leadership classes in the back rooms of seminaries and leadership summits. It doesn’t seem right that in a small paperback featuring goldfish and aquariums this not-so-secret-society would be challenged to a fight ... but here we go.

Put Family First

First, let’s take a moment together to hear Jesus’ own words challenging the traditions of men, and then, later, we will broaden our perspective with two clear statements from the writings of Paul. I make this commitment to you now: I have no intent of bringing harm or harsh words to anyone who is struggling with the tradition that surrounds their own journey. I want to help you, and I do not want to burn anything down that would hurt you.

In Mark 7 and in Matthew 15, this story is told of Jesus confronting the traditions of men and the Pharisees:

The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were “unclean,” that is, unwashed. (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.) So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with ‘unclean’ hands?”

At first reading of this passage, I am not sure why Jesus would take such a hard line with these leaders. The fact that the Jews observed certain rituals doesn’t really seem like a real problem. My mom always told me to wash my hands before dinner. What’s the big deal?

Well, the key is the foundational problem Jesus was pointing out. Jesus came to proclaim the Kingdom and the Kingdom as family. What these Pharisees were doing was harming the family and keeping people from receiving the Kingdom. Worse, they were teaching others to trust in things that were not Kingdom at all: their traditions. Jesus replies to the leaders and is painfully direct: “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’ You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men” (Mark 7:6-8).

Ouch.

Jesus took the correction beyond just an awkward moment and into the realm of serious rebuke. Jesus quotes Isaiah 29:13 word for word and sticks it right to these super-leaders. Remember, these guys may have already had Isaiah 29 strapped to their arms or foreheads as they were known to do to show their commitment to Scripture. They loved the Scripture. At least they loved what loving the Scripture gave them in terms of power and authority. It gave them a special place. But it was not a place in family. Jesus cut straight to the heart—their hearts—and accused them of double motives and of leaving God for the sake of tradition. He accused them of having a value system that was completely upside down.

Discerning their mistake was very simple. Jesus knew they didn’t really love Dad, because if they did they would show love and concern for all of his people. Instead these guys brought division and prejudice everywhere they went. They made others look less righteous and made themselves out to be more righteous because of their teachings and adherence to what they claimed to be God’s will. Their ultimate offense was not their pride but their work of dividing and confusing the people that God loves. We have learned that God’s will is for us to come close to him as family. These men were not interested in coming close to anything but more self-promotion inside of their traditions, and Jesus knew it.

Jesus went on in Mark 7 to give a specific example of how their traditions had been used to dishonor—yes, you guessed it—the family:

You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! For Moses said, “Honor your father and your mother,” and, “Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.” But you say that if a man says to his father or mother: “Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban” (that is, a gift devoted to God), then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that.

It is not a coincidence that Jesus brings his correction right to the heart of how they disrespected the sacred beauty of the natural family to prove his point. He says in essence: if you can’t love your natural family, then you can’t be trusted with spiritual family.

He caught them on a technicality in their interpretation of the original command in order to arrest their attention, but he indicted them on a sweeping heart crime: they had twisted the very words of the Scripture to justify abusing their own families.

Listen: Any tradition that we practice that brings harm in any way to our natural families has no place in the heart of God. This includes obsessions over meetings that replace quality time with our children. It includes replacing the value of family rest with a constant need to be available to the needs of the institution. It includes ignoring certain age groups in an effort to be super hip and trendy. If we choose to preserve our tradition to the neglect of our natural family then we, too, are hypocrites.

Why? Because hypocrites are people that say one thing and do another. What really was the Pharisees’ hypocrisy? Was it just a technical loophole they created in a single teaching? Was it their inability to understand Scripture?

No.

The Pharisees said they knew the heart of God, but they taught things that did not build the family of God. We have clearly seen the heart of God is family, but they did not. This was their crime, and this was their most offensive spiritual hypocrisy to Jesus.

We need to stop and take account of our own traditions in this light. The Pharisees had bought into some mental and doctrinal real estate that had become so important to them that they could no longer see beyond their own fences and hear the words of the Father. They could no longer see his family. They could not, therefore, receive the Kingdom.

Nothing is more dangerous to the Kingdom than men who must hold to, promote, and defend their traditions above all else.

Jesus continues in Mark 7 to explain to the disciples and everyone standing around how these traditions had turned the will of God upside down, or, more literally, inside out:

Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a man can make him ‘unclean’ by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him ‘unclean.’”

After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him ‘unclean’? For it doesn’t go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods “clean.”) He went on: “What comes out of a man is what makes him ‘unclean.’ For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unclean.’”

The Pharisees and even the disciples struggled to understand, and Jesus was frustrated at this point that his own men were still not getting it. Here it is in two points:

First, all righteousness comes down from God alone and never from our actions. It is a gift. Period.

Second, righteousness is evidenced in the lives of people when they love one another! !

Do you see, dear reader, that putting bacon in your body does nothing to harm the family of God? Do you also see that all these things that Jesus listed: evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly, are all direct attacks on the sacredness of relationship? Can you see that these sins are are a direct attack on family health? They are the opposite of Kingdom life.

If we camp out in a tradition and build fences around it in order to find our safety there, it will soon limit our ability to see the heart of God. We should not look for righteousness—the feeling of being okay—in traditions. God’s heart is to give us our righteousness as a gift and to help us love him and love one another. These simple requirements are boiled down to the heart of love: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Deuteronomy 6:5; Leviticus 19:18). Somehow the heart that does not rest in the love of God will always turn to the creation of traditions and begin to trust them, love them, and live completely inside of them. It is sad and destructive, and it is still the rule today.

In the very next passage in Mark 7 Jesus heals a woman’s demon-possessed daughter, a foreigner not in line to receive any blessing from God according to Jewish tradition. He says again to those who cling to tradition and do not have a heart for the family of God: Your priorities are not the same as mine. Jesus was about every sacred person, but they were about preserving divisions and promoting their superiority. Jesus was about his family, but they were about forms and ideas.

We are called to make a choice.

Worship What is Worthy

In Matthew 12 another story is told of how Jesus took on the traditions of men as they relate to observing the Sabbath:

At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick some heads of grain and eat them. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, “Look! Your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath.”

He answered, “Haven’t you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God, and he and his companions ate the consecrated bread—which was not lawful for them to do, but only for the priests. Or haven’t you read in the Law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple desecrate the day and yet are innocent? I tell you that one greater than the temple is here. If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”

Remember, Jesus is well aware that he is proclaiming the Kingdom and that he is the King. When he reveals the Kingdom it always creates an opportunity to show that he rules everything, and that ultimate reality is in his wake. Many who trust in tradition continue to find this hard to swallow because for them, ultimate reality is found in conforming to a system created by men. Many actually worship their traditions before they worship God.

Jesus commands us to get our worship pointed in the right direction.

When the King is in our midst we don’t bow down to his photograph—we bow down directly to the King. When the Lord of the Sabbath is in your presence you don’t try to prove to him that you rest in a more righteous way than others—you lay down and rest directly toward him. You rest in his presence and worship him.

The Pharisees’ tradition had blinded them from seeing Jesus, just as ours can blind us today. Even if a tradition was created with benevolent hearts and helpful aspirations, we can’t lean on it and expect it to provide for us. We can only lean on God. To lean on tradition is to lean on a pseudo-reality, and when Jesus shows up he will tear it down every time. He does this not to prove an intellectual point. He does this because he desires us to lean on him. He wants to be near to us.

This is why Jesus so emphatically tells the best and the brightest in Jerusalem who had learned to lean on the greatness and sacredness of Herod’s temple, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days” (John 2:19). Can’t you hear him saying, “You can lean on this nice building if you want to, but I want you to lean on me. When I am resurrected you will see how foolishly temporary earthly temples really are.” Jesus just had no sense of humor when it came to men turning their backs on the God who created them in order to worship and trust in things they built with their own hands.

It was because he could see the way it hurt them: It kept them from receiving the Kingdom of God.

You see, we destroy sacredness when we assign it to earthly things. Jesus was the most sacred element in all of the world, but these professional religious folks could not see him. They had assigned sacredness to things. They could only see what they had learned to trust in— namely, their own tradition.

Why do you think that the arrival of Jesus in any supernatural manifestation like healing, tongues, and prophecy is so threatening to staunch tradition-worshipers today?

It is because these and other spiritual manifestations are a direct threat to their positions of safety inside of their non-spiritual traditions. Every vibration of the Holy Spirit’s power is a promise to tear down man-made sacred things—the sacredness of “this is how we do it.”

Lord, please shake it.

Make People the Priority

Matthew 12 continues and we see just how twisted the minds of the religious can become. When you read this passage, think on how little value they gave the crippled man as they put Jesus to this foolish test:

Going on from that place, he went into their synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, they asked him, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” He said to them, “If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a man than a sheep! Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” So he stretched it out and it was completely restored, just as sound as the other. But the Pharisees went out and plotted how they might kill Jesus.

The priority of the Kingdom is the beauty of people—the people of God’s heart. Those who trust in the traditions of men are those whose priorities are on something—anything—other than caring for people. Isn’t it is just ludicrous that Jesus would even have to say something as obvious as men are more important than animals? Fair warning: People that have conflicted feelings about a cripple man being healed are not safe people to be around.

The mind that turns away from God and begins to trust in its own creation is a sick mind that believes in an upside down world. Its sickness becomes a mental disease which destroys. It first destroys the eyes so that we cannot see the truth of family, and then it destroys our hearts and takes our very life. The blackness that follows sounds like this: “But the Pharisees went out and plotted how they might kill Jesus.” This kind of disease was deadly for Jesus, and it will certainly be dangerous for us.

This upside down mindset is still working in our world today. We still lean on and trust traditions to make us feel okay about ourselves instead of leaning on Christ alone. We even prioritize things like style, human governments, and the environment as more important than people. Our traditions have brought division, judgement, and prejudices that divide the family of God.

It is time to repent.

We must put an end to it. We must at least put an end to it in our own spheres of influence. We must make people the priority.

Avoid Radicalism

At this point, I would like to treat some of the thoughts I suspect are already surfacing in your mind about burning down buildings or raging against denominations. I want to pause and make sure we understand what kind of revolutionary Jesus was before we decide on a hot course of action.

It is true that in Mark 2 Jesus seems to be doing everything in opposition to the traditions and expectations of men. For example, he sees the faith of a man who was lowered through the roof and he pronounces his sins forgiven and heals him. The traditionalists were appalled at the very idea that he would forgive a man’s sins. Also, he goes down to a lake and calls Levi, a tax collector and the last person on anyone’s list to become a disciple of a Rabbi, to follow him. Furthermore, he has dinner with Levi and his friends who were all, according to traditionalists, unworthy types and “sinners.” Yet he gives these men honor and says, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17).

On yet another occasion, he turns to the Pharisees and tells them that the tradition of fasting does not apply to him or his disciples because fasting literally belongs to him: “‘Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?’ he answered, ‘Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.’ Then he said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath’” (Mark 2:24-28).

Again, the Sabbath belonged to Jesus, but the Pharisees wanted to belong to the Sabbath.

So we know that Jesus was definitely radical. Jesus did not go with the popular flow. But let’s make sure we understand why:

Jesus was reordering the nature of things. And this new order was the Kingdom of God. He was taking the time to redefine for these religious men what was really true—what was truly real. He was making clear the Kingdom reality.

Please take this to heart. Jesus did not rock the boat just to watch people scramble for lifejackets. He did not act like an non-comformist just to prove he was a revolutionary. His goal was not to create shock in the minds of traditionalists. Nor was he just trying to wake people up with radical words and actions. This is very important to understand or you, dear reader, might take flight on a journey that was never intended for you. His interest was not in offending anyone. He loved even the Pharisees without prejudice.

Jesus may have been a radical, but he did not suffer from radicalism. Radicalism is the commitment always to be radical. This commitment is weak, and it is not in the heart of Christ. It is not to be our hearts, either.

Again, Jesus’ actions were simply to bring Kingdom order wherever he went. The reality of the Kingdom of God he proclaimed was so opposite from the reality of the religious that it stung them. For these leaders the rebuke had to be a hard correction because they were 180 degrees off course.

When he taught he simply re-organized the world around him according to the rule of the Kingdom of God. If that seemed upside down and revolutionary to traditionalists, then that was just the result of their backwards minds. Jesus proclaimed the ultimate authority of the Kingdom of God as the eternal reality and the temporal nature of everything else, exposing that men had developed ideas that were contrary to the Kingdom. He flowed gracefully on the power and truth of the Kingdom when he worked miracles, and it shook the world because the world was off balance, not him. So let’s be clear: We are not called to shake up or destroy traditions in any way. We are called to proclaim the Kingdom of God. In this way we follow Jesus.

Some people we meet will be very close to the Kingdom, and some will be living in opposition to it. Whether or not they practice a particular tradition may have no bearing on their agreement with the Kingdom. We can’t generalize our discernment for each person on whether they go to a certain fellowship or whether they were raised in a certain tradition. That kind of spiritual profiling doesn’t work.

Everywhere we go as sons of the Kingdom we will, like Jesus, re-order the values, the priorities, and the very tone of the spiritual atmosphere by proclaiming the Kingdom of God. It is our nature as sons to do so.

Under a Spell

Our call in God has never been to protect and promote the traditions of men. The apostle Paul identifies this fork in our collective road when he says in Galatians 1:14, “I was advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews of my own age and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers, but when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not consult any man.” Paul is saying that our future in God is not handed to us from history or tradition, but that it comes when we encounter him personally. The fork in our road is the decision to cling to tradition or to cling to God.

I think we can say, then, that any tradition or teaching that says to us “trust me for your future” instead of “trust God” is going to be rebuked by the Kingdom instincts that are alive in us. In Colossians 2:8 Paul writes with some force, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.”

This deceptive human tradition is one that leads us away from his admonition in the verses preceding: “just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness” (Colossians 2:6-7). We know that we can add nothing to our present walk with him that does not reflect how we began in him, and we began with a childlike faith! We received him by faith. Now we walk in him by faith. We are to continue on in him alone, trusting that he began our transformation and he will complete it. We do not need anything else added to this simple truth. The things we try to add to our faith are called “the traditions of men.”

Paul goes on to make this rejection of the principles of this world very specific when he adds,

Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ. Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you for the prize. Such a person goes into great detail about what he has seen, and his unspiritual mind puffs him up with idle notions. He has lost connection with the Head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.

Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belonged to it, do you submit to its rules: “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? These are all destined to perish with use, because they are based on human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence. (Colossians 2:16-23)

Our ultimate reality is found in Christ alone. He alone is our Real and Lasting. This is the reality of the Kingdom of God—the way it really is.

Why build on shadows and earthly reflections of rightness when we can embrace the one who is our righteousness? Whenever we turn from our trusting relationship with Jesus, we have fallen from the grace—the grace to live in the Kingdom and share in his righteousness. As Paul says, this is like a body losing connection to its head: oh, how absolutely awful to think of it. The result would be instant death. Why do we think the consequences in Christ’s spiritual body would be any less severe? We should not make light of the horrible fate of giving ourselves over to the traditions of men instead of nurturing a simple, unwavering love for Christ alone. I can hear the passion of Paul’s watchcare over our souls when he says to the believers in Galatia,

You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort? Have you suffered so much for nothing—if it really was for nothing? Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law, or because you believe what you heard? (Galatians 3:1-5)

We know that the principles of this world that Paul speaks of can affect people in many different ways. People of other eras and certainly in other religions have certainly tried to find their lives and meanings inside of these earthly principles. It is nothing new, and it is not in any way confined to Christian history. I have seen first-hand the principles of this world when I watched Russia deteriorate in the early nineties because of how Communism had shaped the grey hearts and faces of those people over generations. I have seen and smelled human tradition in central India as Hinduism and all of its earthly rituals and man-made beliefs diminished the worth of the individual and therefore the dark shape of society on the entire Indian sub-continent. I have also seen how the traditions of men have reduced the self-image and dreams of this present generation of Christian believers who struggle with who they are in God and who they are together as his people. Many of us really have been bewitched. It is as though the height of our organizational cathedrals—especially under the banner of great benevolent works—have, indeed, put us under a spell.

Breaking Free

Deliverance ministry anyone?

Seek first the Kingdom of God (Matthew 6:33).

This is the same vaccine we use to overcome our foolish obsessions with building the perfect Church and the subsequent diminishment of the very thing we thought we could perfect. We establish our main priority and never let it move.