Rigid Religiosity

RIGID RELIGIOSITY

Archdeacon John Motis

2nd Sunday after Pentecost

June 2, 2024

Are people spying on you? Is the government? If so, is it legal? Laura and I like to watch FBI night on Tuesday evenings. Our favorites are FBI and FBI International. It’s always quite intriguing how quickly with just a tiny bit of information they are able to find people. Traffic cameras, sidewalk cameras, social media accounts, or by pinging a cell phone, which then opens the door to a floodgate of information! The pieces come together, and they find the person that they are looking for, amazingly, anywhere in the world!

I recently read an article in POLITICO, entitled “The Government Really is Spying on You – and It’s Legal.” The government has data that has been collected through legal channels and digital means: mobile phones, computers, social media, banking, and more ways than we can imagine. As I have told my children, grandchildren, and many others, “Be careful what you post on the internet, it will remain there forever, and it very well may resurface again.” Before we all get too paranoid, it probably doesn’t make a whole lot of difference whether they have it in some digital file or not. For most of us, it doesn’t matter, unless we aspire to run for a political office, where some dirt from our forgotten past will make media attention! Nonetheless, information is being gathered!

Is this the kind of picture that we might think of when we find the Pharisees spying on Jesus and His followers in our Gospel today? I wonder, where were they hiding to catch the disciples? I’m trying to picture them hiding among the stacks of grain. I wonder if their spying could be considered work on the Sabbath.  I know that there were rules about how far a person could walk as well. Did the disciples know? Were they even aware that what they were doing could be considered working? What we do know is that the Pharisees had made it their business to gather information and evidence. Evidence to be used at a later time.

Here’s the thing that we need to know; the Pharisees were not in any way an official secret police force, in Jesus’ day or any other time. They were an unofficial party. A party that had been active as a religious group and a political pressure group for nearly 200 years by Jesus’ time. The Pharisees were self-chosen and had no authority to make laws or enforce them. So, where is the power? Their power was in their considerable influence on ordinary people, people who respected their expertise in Israel’s ancestral laws and traditions. Since they weren’t like the secret police, who were they? Some were wise, devout, holy men. Some behaved like our modern-day journalists, looking for a scoop. Setting themselves as the self-appointed guardians of public morality and spying on people who are in the public eye. I think that is what’s going on here. They probably could have cared less about a small group of ordinary people walking through a grainfield on the sabbath. Except, Jesus was with them as their leader and He was no longer an ordinary person, and His followers were no longer just ordinary people. They were making quite a stir. They had drawn attention. Jesus was doing things and making very implicit claims about His Identity. Jesus and his group needed watching. The unofficial keepers of the law had made it their primary focus to determine the answers to questions like were Jesus and his disciples even loyal Jews? What are they to do about the miracles and Jesus’ claims?  How can we discredit Him? Don’t we see this kind of thing going on in our time? Perhaps this is the reason many won’t even consider running for positions of public trust.  It seems the very moment a run for public office begins journalists will start digging. There is now a great deal of interest in their private behavior, digging back into their past; recent and distant, is there any mud that might stick? Isn’t there a sense of perverted pleasure when someone gets what we might judge as their just rewards? Reputations are ruined by unproven accusations.

Jesus’ growing reputation and popularity was attracting their attention and rapidly becoming a threat to their unofficial position of power. Furthermore, He was challenging them on the validity of their statements and rules.  

As far as the Pharisees were concerned, the disciples were harvesting, doing one of the 39 activities strictly forbidden on the Sabbath. They were breaking the law of God! However, I can’t find anywhere in scripture where God wrote these rules!

Jesus answered their accusation wisely; in such a way as to turn their attention to the real, decisive issue-that is, Himself. As we just heard in the Gospel lesson. Jesus responds to the Pharisees questions and criticism with scripture. Then challenges them with His authority and identity.  

“Yet I say to you that in this place there is One greater than the temple. But if you had known what this means, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” The key here was the affirmation Jesus made about Himself. He is saying, “in this place there is One greater than the temple.” The Son of Man the Lord of even the Sabbath.” He was saying that the reason for His freedom to do as He did, as well as those with him was found in who He Himself is. He is the One that the temple served. He is the One to who the Sabbath law pointed. The commanded “rest” of God had its ultimate fulfillment in Him.  As the book of Hebrews says, those who believe on Him “do enter that rest.”

We have confrontation and criticism and a response from Jesus that they could not debate.

In the second part of our Gospel, we find the Pharisees openly seeking to trap Jesus so that they could accuse Him of sin. While our first story has Jesus making an assertion about who He is in relationship to the Sabbath, the second story has Him proving it before His accusers in a bold, public demonstration of His divine power on the Sabbath. In that healing giving them what they were looking for. The first story ends with the Pharisees frustrated and perhaps humbled, the second story ends with them plotting together to kill Him.

In these confrontations:

Jesus makes a far deeper claim. He claims that the Pharisees, with all their religiousness, and hedging restrictions, originally designed to avoid any possibility of infringing the sabbath, had ended by making the sabbath an intolerable burden. They had forgotten that the Sabbath in origin was God’s merciful provision for His people.

How far they have gone from God’s original purpose!

Sadly, aren’t we capable of doing the same thing?

Whether the rules are written or in our heads don’t we find ourselves becoming the self-appointed keeper of proper behavior, dress, language, and religiousness? As if salvation can be obtained by following the rules. And then what is even worse is to what extremes we might go to enforce them. Very much like the Pharisees. I worry, how many times searching people are chased away from a life giving, lifesaving relationship with Jesus Christ by unofficial, self-appointed keepers of the rules! Simply because they didn’t know them!

 I read an article recently with a quote from Pope Francis, “Holiness does not come from following rigid rules. Redemption is the work of God, not human beings, so be careful and do not listen to “fundamentalists” who claim holiness comes through following certain laws. The belief that holiness comes by observing particular laws “leads us to a rigid religiosity, a rigidity that eliminates that freedom of the Spirit which Christ’s redemption gives us. Beware of this rigidity.” God’s saving grace is received through faith in the Gospel message of Christ’s death and resurrection. God invites His people to rejoice in the righteousness received through that faith in Christ!

I will close by looking back for a moment at the second part of our Gospel and the truth that was taught: Jesus’ healing of the man’s hand on the Sabbath day was not necessary to save his life. Jesus could have told the man to go home and come back the next day so that He could heal him. But it’s important to notice the truth that Jesus was teaching in all this. He clearly affirmed, “Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” There was no breaking of the Sabbath in acting in mercy toward the poor man. It was, in fact, in perfect keeping with the intention of the Sabbath day. It would have been the keeping of the true spirit of that day, rather than keeping the strict letter of the law.

When God gave His good commandment regarding the Sabbath, it was to reflect His own pleasure over His rest from the work of Creation. He saw it all, and rendered the verdict that it was “very good” and so, on the seventh day, He rested and took pleasure in His work. And so, in that spirit-that is, in the spirit of taking rest and enjoying that which is “good” God commanded that His people also rest.

It's not a day that was meant to be a burdensome thing. It was meant to be a blessing for the good of people and for the creatures that serve them.

Jesus’ actions were a threat to the position of the Jewish leaders. Their authority was being undercut. They no longer had control over the practices of the people. Their holiness was now seen as what it really was. Outward conformity to a religious ritual, and that they were not “more holy” than everyone else. It meant that people should look less to them and more to Jesus.

What is truly important to our Lord Jesus is that grace and mercy towards people be placed over mere outward rituals and religious observances.

In other words, Jesus cares more about the condition of our hearts than our rigid religiosity.

Let’s be honest. How many of you have pulled into a Chick-Fil-A parking lot on a Sunday before remembering that they are closed on Sundays? 

Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy, “Closing our business on Sunday, the Lord’s Day, is our way of honoring God and showing our loyalty to Him. To let employees rest – and worship if they choose.”

AMEN