My longing for all of us at this time of year - at whatever time of year really - is for three things: one, that we receive the adoption as sons that he wrote about; two, that we be known by God; and three, that we stay faithful and do not turn back again to the weak and elemental things. So follows my seasonal message - with love.
۞
The whole point of what religionists have corrupted into Christianity and the Christian Religion – the whole point of what is celebrated at Christmas time – is that people can be in right relationship with God without keeping the ancient laws. You do not have to be a person of the law to be a child of God. That was the true message of Jesus and of the first disciples of Jesus. That is the whole point of the story that is given to us in what we call the New Testament. Testament means Covenant. The Old Covenant meant you had to keep the law of the ancient fathers; the New Covenant means you do not.
In the Old Covenant, you demonstrated you were a person of
faith by being a person of the law. The
law is not what ‘saved’ you, faith was.
But the law put limits and perimeters on behaviour in order to keep
people on the right track – until the New Covenant. The inaugurator of the New Covenant was
Jesus. That is what the religionists of
Jesus’ own day did not accept; they insisted that faith had to be faith in the
law to give and maintain their right relationship with God.
That is what got Jesus killed by his own religious
leaders. They could not and would not
accept his central message: you can be a person of law but not a person of
faith – in which case you miss the mark.
But just as clearly (in order to embrace those who do not trace their
ancestry to Abraham), you can be a person of faith but not a person of law. And for “sons of Abraham”, they had to be
sure they moved their allegiance from law to faith, because it was quite
evident that law is incapable of saving a person. To Jesus, you demonstrated that you were a
true person of faith by realising that the law was good but that it could not
and would not deliver you to right standing before God.
The whole point of Jesus – the whole point of what we
sometimes call Christmas – is that you no longer have to have religion to have
God; you no longer need to keep any code of religion or law to please God. That’s the scandal of it all that prompted
the hatred. What he asks of us all – no
matter who we call our earthly father – is that we move from faith in law and
religion to faith in Jesus. Why? To religionists and law-keepers, Jesus was a
nuisance, a heretic, and an infidel (an ‘unfaithful one’); to God, Jesus was
and is the ultimate man of faith. When
the religionists had Jesus killed, they thought they had won; to God, Jesus had
won and his New Covenant was now in place – by faith in Jesus, you have right
standing with God, and neither the law itself nor death that results from
breaking the law hold any fear for people of faith.
What are popularly understood as heaven and hell are now
just childish sideshows. Faith in Jesus
not only grants one right standing before God, it empowers us to actually do
what the law demands without having to be a slave to it. And that is precisely the message the
religionists of Jesus’ day hated with a vengeance. You can live a righteous and virtuous life
without having to be a slave to law – any law, or religion, or creed.
If you read the story in chapter 15 of the book of Acts in
the New Covenant, you will quickly see this point. The scandal of the real message of Jesus
provoked a hatred and a vengeance in the hearts of the religionists and they
pursued Jesus to his death and then went after his followers until they were
all gone – mostly murdered, which they saw as righteous killing. Jesus’ disciples were doing what Jesus
instructed them to do; and while they were doing it, the religionists came
right into their gatherings and told the people not to believe them and
insisted that they must keep the “law of Moses” (the Old Covenant mandates) in
order to be right with God.
The religionists lost that battle – but they won the
war. Today, if you actually follow the
message of Jesus and insist that you don’t have to keep the law – any law – in
order to be right with God, you will be not just harassed, you will be ignored
– the ultimate indignity. In some parts
of the world, you, like Jesus and his disciples, will be murdered. And you don’t have to be ‘preaching’ the
message; simply believing it is enough in some places to get you killed. There is a lot at stake in moving from faith
in law and religion to faith in Jesus.
And that is precisely why many choose to combine the two and corrupt and
pollute the faith with all sorts of law and religion.
The world cannot tolerate free people. Freedom is a scandal. People do things I don’t like and that’s not
right. They should be punished for doing
things I find offensive. My religion
says such-and-such is wrong, so if I have the power – or I can steal it – I can
make laws to punish it so I’m not offended any more. We don’t seem to stop and think if maybe the
punishment is more offensive than the crime; if perhaps anger at being offended
is more important to me than concern and love for a fellow-human.
All of this is what drove the Crusades of a thousand years
ago. Raging and raving men and women,
who completely misunderstood Jesus and his story, took the law into their own
hands and raped, murdered and plundered whole tracts of the world. And they still rave and rage today. They put their faith in law and religion and
wage war on any who disagree with them.
They see themselves as Ambassadors for God – doing his job for him. They are so important to God that God turns a
blind eye to their hatred and atrocities believing, as they do, that God is on
their side and “the end justifies the means”.
Or so they think. The US has
become an incestuous breeding ground for this.
It never seems to occur to them that if God is God, he can
and will do what needs to be done, without our interference. They think they have to help God out. They misread the Old Covenant scriptures that
describe the battles and wars of history as giving them permission to carry on
with those same battles and wars; without ever stopping to ask if the history
might have been written to prevent further atrocities rather to encourage and
empower them.
The entire New Covenant story in the second part of the
bible demonstrates what happens to those who love and live the freedom of
Jesus’ message. And the majority of the
hatred and vengeance comes from the hearts of people whose only aim in life
seems to be to take over from God in ordering ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ and
determining who goes there.
I am deeply, deeply ashamed of the Crusades. The scriptures have a saying that goes, “The
name of God is blasphemed because of them/you” – because of the arrogant and
presumptuous religionists and people of the law who obviously know more and
better than God, and who feel the need to act when God seems to be far away and
inactive in protecting their interests.
Why are we so outraged when the shoe is on the other
foot? Why are we so angry when we reap
what we have sown – especially when our faith teaches us that that is a central
principle of life: you reap what you sow?
Is it because we think we are so right, and more important, and more
righteous, and ‘on God’s side’? What if
God doesn’t have a side but instead looks into our hearts to see what is
there. Perhaps he sees what Jesus saw in
the hearts of some of the religionists and lawyers of his day: he called them
“whitewashed tombs”; nicely painted on the outside but full of death and
corruption on the inside.
As far as I am concerned, our “way of life” is not worth
protecting when it is like what Jesus described: a whitewashed tomb. God sees the heart; and when the heart is
corrupt – because of religion or law or the lack of either – we can make no special
claim to God because of our history or our polity. We all reap what we sow. Sowing rapacious capitalism and so-called
democracy – and the religion that supports it – will come back to haunt us, if
it hasn’t already. At its core is a
rampant superiority complex, and we need to get down off our high horse and
think again about our unmitigated hubris or we will die by that with which we
killed others: swords, guns, bombs, disease, famine and bitter hatred.
We are so hell-bent on demanding that God is on our side
that we fail to see that God’s concern is who is on his side; who is more
interested in being right with Him than in being faithful to some law or
religious code. It seems to me that God
is more interested in our having a personal relationship with him than a
relationship with an ancient book purportedly about him. What most people don’t seem to get is that
that is entirely possible. We don’t need
a book or a law code or a religion or people acting as go-betweens. That is the message of the New Covenant; that
is the message of what happened at what we call ‘the first Christmas’.
Best wishes,
Kevin.
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