SIN > Unmasked: Dystopia

Religion Vs Relationship

Now if you combine self-righteousness and hubris, the outcome is often a rather nasty – even narcissistic – attitude towards our relationships.  Over and over again, this is what Jesus was up against from the Jewish religious leaders around him as he sought to navigate his mission.  The classic chapters 5, 6 and 7 of Matthew’s gospel point to this, as does Matthew’s chapter 23.  The message of Jesus and what became known as ‘The Way’ (the movement that sought to live as disciples of Jesus) were incredibly divisive.  Indeed, it tended to polarise people: some – like those in the room at the first post-resurrection Pentecost – lived and died entirely devoted to Jesus and his way; others lived and died fully dedicated to seeking the end of that way of life.  Has much changed?

Jesus had some incredibly hard, even harsh, words for those religious leaders whom he saw as doing great harm to their people.  At times, Jesus’ approach to them looked and sounded very much like what their old prophet Ezekiel (chapter 34) records concerning God’s attitude towards the supposed ‘shepherds’ of that day.  And even among the Scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees of Jesus’ day, there were both believers and unbelievers.

Jesus was scathing of the hubris of those religious leaders.  Remember hubris: “actions of overbearing pride or presumption with an excess of ambition.”  Furthermore, he accused them of being “whitewashed tombs”: painted to look nice on the outside, while on the inside, full of dead people’s bones and all sorts of uncleanness.

He taught those who bothered to listen that they should do what the religious teachers said, but not what they do – thus indicating their duplicity: say one thing but do another; have one set of rules for everybody but another, more convenient set, for themselves; speaking with forked-tongue.  Thinking about our time and place today again, little has changed.

Then there was this commentary on his persecutors’ habit: “They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on people’s shoulders but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger.”  Again – what’s changed?  The world is littered with pharisaical politicians.

In another place, he spoke to the religious lawyers – referencing their history – accusing them of making mausoleums for their dead prophets (to honour them), yet it was their fathers who killed them – and they continued the tradition of killing prophets they didn’t like in Jesus’ time.  Indeed, one of Jesus’ laments was “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those sent to her!  How often I wanted to gather your children together, just as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not have it!”

Even today, a popular political mantra (many politicians are lawyers) is: ‘always retain control of the narrative’.  Another way of expressing it is: never let the truth get in the way of a good story.  Honour the ‘prophets’ if you must, but first they must be dead and gone and their prophecies the subject of interpretation and interpolation.

Another classic is Luke chapter 6 – especially the later section where he asks rhetorically “How can you say to your brother, ‘brother let me take the speck out of your eye’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye?”

Yet ironically, Jesus taught his disciples that it wasn’t the laws that were the problem [after all, laws are made for man, not man for laws]; it was the sanctimonious and duplicitous preaching of the law – coupled with the failure to live it – that was the real problem.  He taught his disciples that “unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of God.”

In other words, one cannot look at religious leaders’ disregard or flouting of the law and justify one’s own lawlessness.  Or, inside out, one cannot justify lawlessness by appeal to some religious preacher’s hypocrisy.  Jesus holds his disciples to a different – and higher – standard than those who simply practise religion as a matter of form and dogma.  This much is evident among the first thousands of disciples in the first century AD: it’s about relationship; not about religion.

This teaching raises the fundamentally critical subject of righteousness: the state of being in the mode and direction of ‘right’ – that is, right as in true and correct against an objective measure or ‘canon’; as things ‘ought to be’.  And as with sin, righteousness is both nature and product.

Now, in this context, Jesus inserts an astounding concept – which we often carry around as a question: is there a sin which cannot be forgiven?  Is there an ‘unpardonable’ sin?

Next: the unpardonable sin.