This is part 3 of my journey through the Bible, as I seek out passages that can encourage us in our collective efforts toward Christlikeness, highlighting the idea that God is less interested in our behavior and our talk and is far more interested in our hearts and our maturity. Read the thesis statement here.

WE ARE not too far into Matthew before we get our first hints that Jesus is a dangerous threat to power. The king of the realm, Herod, attempts to murder the young Jesus after hearing that the prophesied King of the Jews had been born in Bethlehem. At this point in the story, it is still political power that people feared (or hoped) the Messiah would wield.

Reading this passage today, it seems like a horrific and entirely preventable tragedy — after all, it was never Jesus’ intention to directly challenge Herod for this throne. There was no need for such violence. But Herod was right to be afraid, just as the Pharisees were right to be afraid as Jesus began to threaten their power structures: the religious, tribal, and familial systems. It was not his intention to directly take over their seats of power — not even abstractly, through a changing of the guard to more spirit-filled leaders. God leaves many corrupted and feckless leaders in power. Instead, it was Jesus’ intention to liberate people from the need to suck up to authority.

Every means of control that authority has — from the ability to grant status and comforts, to the ability to take away support and means and even life from a person — is only granted to the leaders by the people who buy into their system of thinking. A boss has power only if you are afraid of losing your job, or if you desire promotions or accolades. A teacher has power only if you are afraid of failing, or if you desire a particular grade. A dictator has power only if you are afraid of dying, or if you can work the system to your or your family’s advantage. The same goes for pastors, for parents, for reporters, for police officers, for the rich, for bullies, for the fashionista, and on and on. We confer their status on them only insofar as we are under their sway.

What Jesus does is he comes in and says: “Do you need someone to grant you honor and respect? I call you children of God. Do you fear losing your means of support? Trust in me for everything. Do you fear death? I will be with you in paradise. Do you desire joy in life? Walk alongside me. Whatever the authorities are asking you trust in them for, trust instead in me. Whatever they are threatening to take away from you, I will give you.” Life lived in Jesus is a life of freedom, a life secure in the knowledge of who you are, a life not spent chasing after the approval and praise of leaders.

But make no mistake, as we see from the life of Jesus, if you boldly live your life with no dependence on authority’s ability to confer status, praise, comfort, or respect upon you, then you are a threat to its power. You cannot be coerced or controlled, and that scares them. Not everyone around you will be happy with you, because you undermine the illusions that they still cling to. Following Jesus is not just subscribing to a different authoritarian system than your neighbor, but an entrance into a new reality, into a freedom so complete and untethered to normal social conventions that we live as strangers and aliens in this world.

So what is left of authority when you take away its power? Human beings still have to live together, in a variety of structures, in order to function as a society, and certain individuals must take the responsibility to make sure things run smoothly. Jesus wasn’t advocating anarchy; that’s why he tells us to follow the laws of the land insofar as they don’t conflict with God’s law of love. Earthly authorities are still necessary, but robbed of the power to coerce and frighten and control, they are left only with the ability to serve, to nurture and advance the people they have been entrusted to care for. The political leader becomes the public servant; the enforcers of the law try to ‘protect and serve.’ Absent unchecked power, positions of authority become positions of servanthood.

This is the way that Jesus came into the world: he who had all authority gave up authority in order to become a servant. He did not swoop in, as Herod and others expected, on chariots and in purple robes. He came as one who feeds, one who instructs, one who listens, one who knows no favorites, one who shows mercy, one who calls us beyond ourselves. Jesus came as a river of life, active and flowing, that burst through rigid and solidified power structures and let the renewal of dignity and honor wash over everyone.

We willingly subject ourselves to him because he makes no effort to try to control or coerce us. Jesus never hardens, never clamps down, never imposes, because he does not fear. He loves. And through his unrelenting grace toward us, we also do not have to fear authority. We can be confident that serving him and serving people is where the true power lies; the humble servants of Christ have had an overwhelming effect on the course of history as power structure after power structure has fallen and disappeared. We the ordinary have more of an influence than the institutions lead us to believe; the question is: will we find our identity in God rather than in people? And will we, in whatever roles of authority we have — as parents, as church members, with our wealth, with our freedoms, with our wisdom — be strong enough and bold enough to act always as Christlike servants?

— by Steve Lansingh

Photo courtesy of leonardo buitrago on stock.xchng

This is part 2 of my journey through the Bible, as I seek out passages that can encourage us in our collective efforts toward Christlikeness, highlighting the idea that God is less interested in our behavior and our talk and is far more interested in our hearts and our maturity. Read the thesis statement here.

MATTHEW 1:21 is another instance where the original hearers would have had a far different understanding than we have today.

The angel tells Mary, “you are to name him Jesus ['The Lord saves'], for he will save his people from their sins.” But remember, at the time this was written, the Jewish people were not crying out to be saved from their individual transgressions before God; they were receiving God’s forgiveness through the regular animal sacrifices that the Old Testament required. They would have instead understood it as being saved from their collective sin as a nation, which were so great that God allowed the nation of Israel to be taken over by occupiers. They yearned for their sovereignty, their independence, the restoration of their nation. That is how their readings of the Messianic prophecies slanted: expecting either 1) a military hero who would lead an uprising, or 2) a moral taskmaster who would purge the unworthy from the ranks of society and make the nation once more pleasing enough to God that he would restore them.

Jesus ended up turning those expectations on their head: instead of taking up arms, he laid down his life in selfless sacrifice. He did not reject but reached out to the unworthy of society, and included them in his vision for a new kingdom. It was spiritual freedom that he came to bring, not national freedom.

But I think we miss something about this verse if we don’t understand that ancient yearning for restoration, sovereignty, and regaining the place in the world God intended for us.

In modern Christianity, we read the idea of being “saved from your sins” primarily as the key to entering heaven. But is that all that sin keeps us from, a future destination? Doesn’t sin also keep us in bondage in this world as well? Think of a relationship you’ve had that blew up and you haven’t restored it yet. Doesn’t that harm you? Doesn’t that burden you with guilt, regret, and even timidity in forging new relationships? Doesn’t it harm God’s witness in the world that you cannot reconcile with a brother or sister? Being forgiven of our sins is not just a matter of comforting us personally, but of granting us freedom in that situation so that we can go and make it right again. Being freed from sin has to do with healing, with being remade, with living a life of newfound courage. We are slaves no longer.

Let’s say that a rich man had an avid gambler for a son, who amassed huge debts, more than he could ever hope to pay. The rich man then decides to pay off all the creditors. Do you think all he is hoping for is that he and his son can now have a relationship again? Clearly he also wants his son to turn his back on his vice, to forge a new and different life, one that reflects better the stature of the father. In the same way, God saves us not to wipe the slate clean, but to build us toward something better, toward our full selves, toward the mature and Christlike sons and daughters that he intended us to be.

— by Steve Lansingh

Photo courtesy of ramzi hashisho on stock.xchng

This is part 1 of my journey through the Bible, as I seek out passages that can encourage us in our collective efforts toward Christlikeness, highlighting the idea that God is less interested in our behavior and our talk and is far more interested in our hearts and our maturity. Read the thesis statement here.

THE FIRST 17 VERSES of the New Testament, detailing the ancestral lineage of Jesus of Nazareth, sound much different to our ears today than they did to the original readers of the book.

To us, it seems like appendix material, an interesting footnote, not something you’d start off with when introducing a person. But at the time, one’s place in the world was almost exclusively inherited, and one’s pedigree was the place you had to begin. The statement here is that, as a direct male descendent of Abraham and David, Jesus is the inheritor of both God’s promises and Godly authority. Matthew’s audience was a Jewish one, and he wanted to set the stage of Jesus’ arrival by showcasing his legitimacy in Jewish eyes.

By the end of the gospels, and the New Testament, of course, we will discover that the transformational life of Christ has rendered such claims to legitimacy through lineage to be unsubstantial. Jesus could tout these rights, but sets them down and chooses not to. What God cares about is not status or family or pedigree, but the heart — our character. We are told to abandon our families if they keep us from following Christ, for together in Christ we have a new family. In Jesus, the apostle Paul writes, there is no male or female, no Jew or Greek, no slave or free. We are all equal in the eyes of God, and we must each, on our own, examine our beliefs and actions rather than simply inherit them. This is good news for humanity.

So if the beginning of Matthew 1 comes across as patriarchal, or pretentious, or dull, it is simply setting the stage for its own reversal of importance. Matthew is working to change minds, reaching out to skeptical inquisitors through arguments that they would understand before revealing how Jesus transcended his qualifications.

So while there is no verse here we can point to that says God is specifically interested in our hearts, or our maturity, the passage is important in understanding the mindset of the time in which God will be working. The context in which they lived was one where your interior self was of little concern, compared with your heritage and your upholding of your role. God does not merely dismiss this concept, he fulfills it to the highest degree, gaining the authority from which to say there is something more important.

The simple fact that as modern readers we are kind of bored by this passage, taking it for granted that anyone from anywhere has value and whose viewpoint should be heard out, shows how deeply the message of Jesus has penetrated the world.

— by Steve Lansingh

Photo courtesy of jcrump55 on stock.xchng