When the Pharisees confront Jesus over the failure of His disciples to follow their traditions, He points out how traditions often en up being used as an excuse to not follow Go’s commands. Then a little later in the passage, Jesus compares such traditions to yeast. It just takes a small seemingly harmless tradition but which can be used to avoid taking responsibility for doing God’s will to undermine the good intentions of people. One other important point regarding this: what we say influences whether we do God’s will, while what we eat does not. Therefor we should put more effort into choosing our words than we do into choosing what we eat and how we prepare it.
I love these parables. Love is not the right word. These parables speak to me, often times as a challenge. Today I will focus on the one which I usually skip over, the parable of the wheat and the weeds. We want to uproot and remove the weeds, those who do evil and cause harm to others, from the world, but Jesus warns us that if we do so we will also destroy some of the wheat, those who do good. As Jesus explains, we cannot remove the weeds without damaging the wheat. Additionally, we do not have the ability to clearly distinguish between who is a weed and who is wheat. So, to mix the parables a bit, let us sow the seeds of God’s love to all around us because fertile soil can be found in the most unlikely places (and sometimes a plant growing in fertile soil next to that packed down can loosen it enough for crops to grow there as well).
When Jesus fed the five thousand, He gave us an example of how we should use the power which God has given us. When Peter walked on the water to Jesus, we see the dangers in using that power. We do not often take note of the importance of the fact that when the disciples came to Jesus asking Him to send the people away to get food, He told them to feed them. It was only when they responded by saying they did not have enough food for everyone that He took steps to feed the people. This suggests to me that the disciples could have called on God, just as Jesus did, to make the food they had stretch enough to feed everyone. This is supported by Peter walking on the water, just as Jesus did. The danger occurs when we start thinking, that we are doing it. At that point, we stop focusing on God, stop looking to Jesus, and begin to realize that what we are doing is impossible. At that point we have two choices. We can turn once more to Jesus and cry out “Lord, save me.” Or, we can drown in our sin.
I cannot cover all of the things Jesus says in today’s passage that I think we should take to heart. So, I will focus on just a few things. One of the things which I often hear from those who do not want to impose discipline in the Church is, “We need unity in the Church. We need peace.” There is truth to that, and we should strive for unity and peace with those who also seek to follow and serve Christ. However, Jesus tells us that He did not come to bring peace. If we do not love Him more than we love peace, we are not worthy of being His. On the one hand there are those who lack humility and bring about conflict because they will not accept that others may follow Christ and see things differently. On the other hand, there are those who will do anything to avoid conflict. We need to be willing to draw others’ attention to the acts they commit which harm themselves and others even if this leads to confrontation.
I would like to make a nice neat segue between the previous paragraph and this one, but I am not really sure how to do that. When John the Baptist sent his disciples to ask Jesus if He was the Messiah, Jesus did not give them a direct answer. Instead He told them to go back to John and tell him what they had seen and heard. In the same way, we should not have to tell people that we serve and follow Christ. They should know by looking at what we do and by what others say about us. Yes, we need to spend time telling people what Jesus expects of those who follow Him, but if they wander about our faith they should be able to see it by our actions.
Today’s passage begins with Jesus saying, “Do not judge others.” However, just a few verses later He says, “As you can identify a tree by its fruit, you can identify a person by their actions.” Once again we see the sort of paradox to which my college Bible professor referred. Fortunately, we can resolve much of this conflict by looking at context. Just after telling us not to judge others Jesus tells us that we will be judged by the standard we use to judge others. Jesus further clarifies what He means here when He tells us to treat others as we would like them to treat us.
So much of this passage touches me in a way that I want to write more about it, but I only have so much time today. So, I am going to tie together two last pieces (I find it interesting that I so often write about things in two in my blog). First Jesus says that not all who call out “Lord, Lord” to Him will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Then at the end of today’s passage He tells us to pray to the Lord of the Harvest, to God, to send more workers. If we are praying for more workers, it should be because we are doing as much as we can and we can see that there is more work to be done. Of course, even if we are doing as much as we can, there is more to be done. I don’t think I am doing all of the work God has that I could be. So, I pray that God will get me moving.
Today’s passage forms the centerpiece of my understanding of what it means to follow Christ. I want to start with, in my opinion, the central point that Jesus makes about what it means to worship, obey, and seek God: if you look for loopholes in God’s commands, you have missed the point of those commands. What He says about anger and lust show us this. If you allow yourself to get angry enough at someone that you want to kill them, you have allowed anger to override love and broken God’s commands just as badly as if you had actually murdered them. If you look at someone and think about how much you would like to have sex with them you are guilty of sexual immorality. Part and parcel with not seeking to take advantage of perceived loopholes in God’s commands is Jesus instruction to love others, even those we perceive as our enemies. If we truly love others we will seek what is best for them.
I had a Bible professor in college who liked to talk about the paradoxes of Christianity. Things where we answer a question by saying “yes, but no.” We actually have an example of what he was talking about in this passage. Jesus says that we should be like a lamp and put out righteousness up on a stand so that our light can shine for all to see. Then, a little further down, He tells us not to perform our acts of righteousness for others to see. This sounds like a contradiction, and it is a sort of paradox. Jesus tells us that we should not try to hide our faith in Him, nor the fact that we seek to live righteous lives. He also tells us that we should not do good things to get praise from others. In a way, He says that we should be publicly righteous when it will cost us and keep others from seeing our acts of righteousness when it would benefit us to be seen doing good. I am slightly exaggerating. It really comes down to the idea that you should do good things because they are good things and not because it may benefit you.
Matthew starts his account of Jesus’ ministry by establishing the prophetic basis for believing that Jesus is the Messiah, the Chosen One of God. Matthew also makes the case that God revealed Jesus’ Divine mission in other ways (that is the purpose of including the account of the wise men). Actually, all of this passage up until Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness serves the purpose of placing Jesus’ ministry in the context of God’s working at the time. First, Matthew establishes that Jesus is descended from David. Then he shows the divine nature of His birth. He follows that up by showing how God revealed Christ to those who worshiped Him who were not Jewish, and the threat which Jesus was to those in political power. The account of John the Baptist and Jesus’ baptism by him ties Jesus to the Jewish religious revival movement of the Essenes (perhaps the only Jewish religious group of the period without a strong hint of hypocrisy about it). There are other things we can learn from what Matthew wrote here, but his primary purpose in including these elements was to thoroughly establish Jesus’ ministry in Jewish religious traditions.
Even Matthew’s account of Jesus calling His first disciples fits into the Jewish religious context of the time. However, as I understand how someone normally became a rabbi’s disciple in First Century Judaism, Matthew is using this to show that Jesus was a different sort of Jewish religious teacher. Normally, someone who wanted to study with a rabbi requested to be taken as his student and the rabbi would accept only the best of the applicants. Jesus, on the other hand, chose His disciples. They did not choose Him.
This is the last Old Testament passage for the year, today on October 2. Until the first time I did this blog using this system I never realized how much of the Bible is the Old Testament. Before I get to my thoughts on the passage I want to point out that Malachi means “messenger”. So, it may be that the writer of this passage was someone named Malachi. Or, it may be that the writer of this book had a different name and styled themselves as God’s messenger, which they were.
Malachi challenges us on two fronts. When we make sacrifices to God, are we truly sacrificing? Or are we just giving what we can spare or don’t really want anyway? And are we faithful in the commitments we make? In particular our commitments to our wives or husbands. When we make offerings to the Lord we should take them out of our earnings up front, not after we have paid all of our bills (especially not after the bills for things which were wants and not needs). When we marry we need to make a lifetime commitment and keep it, even if our wants and desires change. Of course, if we keep to our commitments, our wants and desires will change in accordance with the changes in those to whom we are committed.
There is little in today’s passage which speaks to me today. The main thing I want to focus on is what Zechariah writes about evil shepherds of God’s people. From time to time, God appoints leaders over His people who are evil. Such leaders do not rise to prominence in opposition to God’s will. Rather, God appoints them to lead His people as punishment for their sins. When the people of God are led by wicked, selfish people it is because they have become wicked, selfish people.
However, I want to point out what Zechariah writes a little further on. Yes, when God’s people allow themselves to fall into wickedness He will appoint over them wicked leaders, but in time He will pour out His Spirit on His people and draw them back to righteousness. Revival comes about when each one of us is led by the Spirit to look at our own lives and allow the Spirit to cleanse us of our sins.
Zechariah asks an important question. When we take part in religious activities and events, both celebratory and mournful, are we doing so for God, or for ourselves? How we feel about and treat others who also take part in such activities will tell us the answer to that question. God calls us to show mercy and kindness, and to love justice. Let us not snark at those who are not “up to our standards” at a worship service or other religious activity. Let us not do anything to make them feel out of place. Instead let us honor them for their attempt to serve and worship God. That does not mean that we do not instruct those who act inappropriately, but let us make sure that we do so out of love for them and not out of our own selfish pride. There is a lot more to be learned from this passage, but I am going to stop here for today.
This passage contains two sections which influenced, and are often connected with, the description of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation. At one point Zechariah has a vision of a man on a red horse with other riders on horses of various colors behind him. The number of riders is not mentioned, but one could easily read it to indicate a total of four riders (I think the passage suggests a larger number than that). Then later Zechariah has a vision of four chariots, each pulled by horses of separate color from the others. Both the horsemen and the chariot riders were sent out to patrol the earth.
Zechariah puts most of his focus on showing how God has blessed the two men most responsible for rebuilding the Temple after the Exile: Jeshua, the high priest, and Zerubbabel, the governor of Jerusalem. These two men were blessed because they strove to do God’s will in rebuilding the Temple and to lead others to be faithful to God. We can learn a lot from what Zechariah says about these two men. God took away the dirty rags of Jeshua’s sins and dressed him in robes of righteousness. Jeshua did not make or buy these robes, they were given to him by God. The same is true for us. Any righteousness we may have is not our own doing, but a gift from God. Zerubbabel did not succeed by might or power. He rebuilt the Temple by the Spirit of God. We, also, will not accomplish the tasks God has given us by our power, might, or skill. We will only do so as we allow God’s Spirit to work in us.
