In Jesus' Sights

By Matt

I listened to a bunch of Matthew (from the transfiguration to the railing against the Pharisees)

There really is something to listening to the Bible. I'm not sure what the difference is for me but it is definitely a very different experience. I think I test as a primarily visual learner but maybe the constant podcasting for the last year has made me into more of an auditory learner. But for whatever reason I feel that listening to the Gospels have given me a wide view of the form of Matthew and its themes and contours are much more visible than when I read chapter and verse.

Condemnation is pretty heavy in the chunk I heard today but all of it, and I mean all of it, is aimed at the Scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees and pretty much everyone who ought to know better. I am struck more and more how it's sheer faith and not your religious resume that gets you into God's graces. More specifically, it's faith in Christ that does it. Healing after healing, miracle after miracle, they all follow one simple pattern: the afflicted comes to Jesus knowing in his or her heart that he is the messiah, the son of God, and has the power to heal or restore or resurrect or free. He or she verbalizes their desire, Jesus recognizes their great faith and, because of that faith in him and what he can accomplish, something miraculous happens. And it's not the religious leaders getting these favors, it's everyone else. In fact, the one person Jesus lifts up as having the most faith is a Roman soldier. The oppressors, the occupiers. That's unthinkable. But he does it, Jesus calls it like it is.

Through a multitude of parables Jesus makes it very clear for whom he came. And it wasn't the ones who believe they have the monopoly on messiahs. In fact, he goes as far as to say that they're going to be the ones left out of the wedding party, the ones thrown out of the vineyard. Also unfortunately is that if there is one group of people I can identify with in the Bible, it's these guys. Born into a Christian family, baptized in the Presbyterian church a few weeks into life, and then raised in the church the rest of my life and only straying away for a few weeks here and there, I have a lot more in common with these religious know-it-alls then the prostitutes and tax collectors and Roman centurions and sick and possessed. They're the ones in Jesus' sights for his love and compassion and mercy. I'm right there with the Pharisees and Sadducees and Scribes and Herodians and all those guys. The ones who should know better but still, through heardened hearts and skulls, just don't get it.

Thank God it is as it always is with God: there is hope for all of us. In the midst of this condemnation of the religious higher-ups stands a man who embodied everything that they are but who was called by name to serve him as a witness to the resurrected Christ: Paul. As Paul himself puts it, "If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless." No one is more religious than Paul and he has the credentials to prove it. But here's what he follows up with:

But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

Paul, like the whores and the traitors and the diseased and the hated, figures out what saves: not the Law, not anything we could ever hope to do, but the ridiculously simple act of turning to Christ and realizing that nothing else really matters.