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In What’s So Amazing About Grace?, Philip Yancey encounters many Christians who feel strongly about about their Faith and what it teaches us for how to live. Growing up as a child, a family friend of Yancey’s wrote letters to people all over the world letting them know how they failed to live up to teachings of Christ. He even “courageously” left his home for another country after seeing how morals continued to fall. Yancey went to an institution that had rules for all the students to follow based, as they claimed, on the teachings of the Bible. Yancey even, at times, has found passionate Christians writing him in order to help him see the true path God has laid out for him in his life and work.
The thing is, all of these situations all had a dark side. Yancey’s family friend, it turns out, was a hypocrite who after spending years sending angry and hateful letters to others telling them how they have gone wrong, including to Yancey himself, ends up getting caught committing a crime and being arrested. Instead of being humbled, his friend continued to spew hate in his writing.
Yancey’s school gave so many rules that were supposedly based on Scripture, but as Yancey points out the Bible doesn’t speak to all the issues they tried to cover, like rock music. In fact, the school said men must have short hair and no beards, which Yancey realized was contrary to the hairstyle Jesus Himself would have had. The school couldn’t admit its own hypocrisy in caring more about making its benefactors comfortable instead of actually living up to Jesus’ standards, and the students suffered for it.
Finally, the people writing to Yancey wrote rude, crude, and hateful letters, all because after interviewing a 90s politician, and one he did not agree with, Yancey wouldn’t condemn this person as the antichrist.
Yancey’s point with these and all the stories in What’s So Amazing About Grace? is that none of these people are actually living into what our Faith, as Christians, is truly about. Yes, we are called to live well, but we do so in order to share the same love Jesus showed us. Our Faith tells us that we cannot do any of this on our own. Our Faith tells us we need Jesus. It calls on us to be humble and recognize our own faults and failings. Our Faith calls us to show others Grace and Forgiveness, the same we were shown. So, as Yancey often asks, why aren’t we?
This mistake of legalism is what all of our readings really speak to today. Moses in the ancient past as well as the author of James looking forward to our future as members of the Body of Christ both call on us to follow the path that God has laid out for us in our words and deeds. This is an admirable road for us to walk on, yet many mistake what it actually means.
The leaders of the Pharisees and Scribes that Jesus and His Disciples encounter are these sorts of people. Throughout many of the Gospels and their stories, we see these leaders ramping up their disapproval of the Disciples. These people, in their eyes, don’t act the way the followers of a great teacher should. They act like what they are, small town fishermen, instead refined religious legal experts.
Before this moment, the religious leaders get mad at the Disciples for plucking heads of grain on the Sabbath. But that was the point of this grain and why they were they. These fields were constructed specifically so that those who needed this grain could grab them at any time they needed food.
At this point in the Gospel today, the leaders of the Scribes and Pharisees don’t care about others with the Disciples actions. They weren’t living in a pandemic where washing your hands can protect and save lives. They care about the optics. They care about what makes them look good over and above the Disciples.
But as Jesus points out, their understanding of the Law itself is faulty. They are focused on making sure the little things are followed and have forgotten the spirit of the Law. Specifically, as Jesus shows in the part of this passage we did not read, the leaders of the Pharisees and Scribes fail to honor their fathers and mothers. That word “honor” in Hebrew is literally “make your parents heavy.” It means taking care of those you love and making sure they have the sustenance they need. It means what we said at the start of this service: “love your neighbor as yourself.”
Again, for us, washing our hands is about showing our love for others, but that is not what the Pharisees and Scribes were trying to do so. They cared more about how they appear, not what they are inside.
It is then that Jesus tells us it is what comes from inside us that defiles us, not what goes in. We see that in the stories Yancey tells. It is the hate and scorn that defiles ourselves and others. It is spreading love and forgiveness that heals us.
If we are to be good Christians in the world, we aren’t called to judge others harshly for what they do. Instead, we are called to share love and forgiveness. We are called to be humble, knowing our own failings. We are also called to teach others that we need Christ Jesus to move beyond our failings into healing. If we are to follow what Jesus actually says today, as well as in all of our readings, our actions need to be centered in the Grace of Christ Jesus, not on judgement or hate.