Changing the Church’s Story
Part 2 - Jesus and the Pharisees
Matthew 15:1-20
Last week we explored the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman, and I invited us all into a practice of prayerful noticing to observe some of the stories we tell ourselves. This week I want to back us up to the story that comes just before the Canaanite woman is introduced, because I think her story has a particular lesson for followers of Jesus in a season of questions as we look to discern the future of the Christian church.
This week I learned through our prayerful noticing that I am incredibly judgy about people who teach others to do electrical work that doesn’t meet building codes.
Most of you know that I became a homeowner for the first time a couple of months ago. One of the first projects I embarked on was swapping out the vanity light in my little powder room. And because I’m a millennial, of course the place I go to learn how to do this is YouTube.
And I notice right away that a lot of these tutorials would teach people how to do something with a light fixture and then they’d say, “It’s not code, but it works great!” Now, again, I know virtually nothing about electrical. For all I know these people are experts with 40 years of experience and they know that what they’re doing isn’t dangerous. I have no idea. But building codes exist to keep us safe, and because electrical work can be especially dangerous it’s extra important to follow the rules.
I got so judgy about those tutorials so fast – I didn’t even know they existed two weeks ago but now I’m all up in a story in my head about how irresponsible these people are, not only for doing electrical work that isn’t legal but for teaching other people how to do it wrong too! I mean! How dare they! Why wouldn’t you want to keep people safe!
So I’ll tell ya, it’s uncomfortable how much I relate to the Pharisees in our passage today. Because I think this is the exact reaction they’re having to the news that Jesus, just prior to where our passage starts, feeds five thousand Jews without mention of the ritual hand-washing that is demanded by the traditions of Jewish culture.
Bad enough that he’s doing it wrong! But he’s teaching his disciples to do it wrong too! How dare he put the community at risk that way?!
This might seem like no big deal to us, I mean handwashing is important and germs are a thing and all but really? You’re prepared to kill a guy for this? Seems like that escalated quickly.
But to the Pharisees these aren’t simply rules about hygiene. They’re the building codes that keep the Jewish people spiritually safe. The traditions of the elders were the thing that defined Jew from Gentile, the thing that made someone a member of God’s chosen people. Departing from these rules meant departing from spiritual safety!
It meant risking God’s wrath, not only on your own head but potentially on your whole community.
The rules we live by are a manifestation of the stories we tell ourselves. Whether we conceived these stories for ourselves or inherited them from our culture, from our family, from our ethnic group, from our social class – these stories birth interior and exterior rules about what life “should” look like.
So the Pharisees aren’t just having an ego trip moment, here. According to their cultural story, Jesus is doing something horrifying, and they’re not shy about showing their contempt.
I learned this week just how quickly I get contemptuous of the people who don’t live by the rules I think they should.
But here’s another uncomfortable thing. Contempt is a reaction of distancing. Of wanting to put separation between myself and something or someone else. Wanting to remove contamination, or remove myself to avoid the risk of contamination. It’s a way of saying, “I would never do that!”
Dr. John Gottman, a world-renowned expert in the science of human relationship, has famously said, “Contempt is sulfuric acid for love.” How’s that for a mental picture?
His research institute has the following on its website. It reads, “[Contempt] is the most poisonous of all relationship killers, destroying psychological, emotional, and physical health. Contempt is poisonous because it conveys disgust. It can only be destructive.”
I can be confident that if my interactions with another human being are coming from a place of disgust, then I am obeying a cultural story, not a divine story. God’s laws always begin with love — love for God, and love for one another. Jesus is unambiguous; all the law and the prophets hang on these.
ANY time we interpret a rule, we are to understand it through the lens of love, which means if I am judging someone from ANY place other than standing right next to them, the way Jesus stands next to us, I am the one who is out of alignment.
And this is what the Canaanite woman does, isn’t it, in the very next scene? When she asks for Jesus’ help she comes and she places herself not only right next to the people in need, but actually she goes all the way to below them. She accepts that in the cultural hierarchy of need, the children of Israel are ahead of her. She doesn’t dispute it. “Yes Lord,” she says. “Please make sure that they are taken care of.”
But whatever it looks like to the world, however much wealth and privilege she seems to have, she is still up against something she can do nothing about. In the divine hierarchy of need, in reality itself, she is powerless to help her child. She is in need, and in that sense she is right next to everyone else in line who needs Jesus’ help. And she trusts implicitly that Jesus wants to offer that help, even though she’s technically outside his cultural story about who’s in and who’s out.
In her faith, she holds Jesus to the divine story, instead of the human story.
The Pharisees, on the other hand, despite being THE religious institution, they’re still living according to the human story. They are preparing to kill God rather than relinquish their grip on their familiar rules. They are so unwilling to be uncertain about whether they’re on “the right side” that they’re going to murder the Savior they’ve been waiting for rather than take a step outside their comfort zone and risk getting something wrong.
Friends, two thousand years later, the Christian Church is still doing this. The Church is still killing the Christ in our midst by trying to find the “right” cultural rules to follow, instead of trying to live from a posture of repentance.
Now lest you imagine that I’m trying to point a finger here at certain other branches of our beloved Church, let me be clear that this includes us. This includes progressive, social-justice minded people. We are still looking for cultural rules about what love and justice look like.
If someone walked through those doors wearing a Make America Great Again hat, would that person experience unequivocal love from this congregation? Or would there be a distance? A recoiling? A frisson of disgust?
When my life fell apart and my ex was arrested, I was thrown out of my queer goth social justice community – I was cancelled – because I broke the cultural rules. There was no room for someone like me in their story. I’d behaved unacceptably.
It was an evangelical Christian congregation that extended themselves to show me love in my time of need. They understood forgiveness. Their story had room for messing up, confessing, holding one another accountable, and helping each other try again.
The divine story is bigger than the story we are telling ourselves.
And it’s really important to note here that my queer goth community wasn’t wrong. I DID break the cultural rules. I broke my own rules! I behaved badly! I was massively out of line! The Pharisees are not wrong about their rules either.
Jesus’ disciples didn’t wash their hands according to the tradition of their elders. That tradition is believed to keep the children of Israel safe! Everything the Pharisees believe in says that the disciples have done wrong, in a way that puts the safety of their community at risk.
Here’s the thing, though, friends: if that wrong person deserves to be thrown out – if that leper, that tax collector, that prostitute deserves to be thrown out for doing something disgusting – then so do I. Because like our Canaanite mother, I have done harm. Every single one of us is the villain in somebody’s human story.
If Jesus were to abide by the story that came from his culture, he would continue to insist he was only there for the children of Israel. He’d have turned the Canaanite mother away, and justice would not have been done. Instead, faced with a woman in need who trusts, not in her own correct behavior like the Pharisees, but in who Jesus is, he interprets his calling through God’s story of love for one’s neighbor — and it is immediately clear that his mission is to all who need, not merely the children of Israel who need.
This shift is then borne out by the final story of Matthew chapter 15, in which Jesus expands his ministry loudly and publicly with the miraculous feeding of the four thousand. That exact thing that just riled up the Pharisees in the last chapter? He does it again – but instead of feeding Jews, this time he’s feeding Gentiles. Boy he’s breaking all the rules now!
In all this — starting with the healing of the Canaanite woman’s daughter, and expanding to four thousand hungry Gentiles — Jesus is teaching his disciples by example. He’s showing them the answer to Peter’s question: “Tell us what this parable means.” And friends, he’s showing us the answer too.
The answer is that we repent of our disgust.
The answer is that we move to stand beside the people our cultural story calls lepers, and tax collectors, and prostitutes. The answer is that that person who revolts us has a place in the Kin-dom of God, and that place does not depend on them getting a clue and fixing their behavior.
And that is good news, because it means that my place in God’s heart doesn’t depend on perfect behavior. Your place in God’s heart doesn’t depend on perfect behavior. We are all in simply because of who Jesus is, because he lives according to the divine story and not the human story. Jesus wants to save everybody.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean we never criticize another person. A crucial part of loving well is holding each other accountable. Love is not avoiding conflict – Jesus gets angry, Jesus straight up flips tables when he sees people getting between the needy and the love of God.
Avoiding conflict and critique isn’t love. It’s enabling.
If I see someone doing harm to another person, love asks me to step in, to risk being wrong. Love asks me to tell that person, “I love you too much to let you hurt yourself like this.” Because any time we harm another person, we are harming a part of ourselves. We are all inextricably connected.
And if that person refuses accountability, sometimes love might mean restraining them. But never from a place of distance. Never from a place of disgust. Only from a place of standing right beside them, knowing that but for the grace of God that could just as easily be me. Only from a place of grief that their pain, their bitter story, is causing them to walk away from love.
So where does this leave us? How do we learn to live from the divine story of eternal love instead of a human-sized story of shoulds and shouldn’ts?
This is going to sound weird but my favorite example of how to live a life of repentance is actually the scientific method. Stay with me for a moment here.
When we do science, we’re not looking for the “right answer” or the “wrong answer”. We are simply asking a question. We form a theory about what the answer might be, we test it out, we take note of the results, and then we allow those results to refine our understanding. Based on this new understanding, we then form a new question and begin again.
It is a practice of curiosity, a practice of relationship, and a practice of surrender and resurrection as we continually let go of our old ideas and allow new more true ideas to grow.
We do the same thing in a life of repentance. I read my Bible, I form an interpretation about what I think Jesus is asking me to do, and then I go out into the world and I test it. Does it produce the fruits of the Holy Spirit in my life, or in the lives of those around me? Does it make me more loving, more patient, more gentle, more kind? More self-disciplined? More honest?
And sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes my theory was totally wrong. Sometimes I screw it up and I hurt someone. There’s no need to beat myself up about that. It’s going to happen. Nobody gets through life without ever leaving a bruise on someone else. Own it, feel the grief of it, and allow it to change your approach next time.
Wouldn’t it be weird if we berated ourselves for getting a negative result in a science experiment? If I could have known ahead of time that I was off track, I wouldn’t have had to do the experiment!
A life of repentance is NOT a life of self-castigation and shame – in fact a shame spiral will actively get in the way of a life of repentance because it stops me from turning and trying again. It shuts me down into self-protection mode and causes me to refuse vulnerability.
To refuse vulnerability is to refuse Christ, who took vulnerability all the way to the cross rather than condemn humanity for failing to understand. “Let them be,” he says of the Pharisees. “They are blind guides leading the blind.”
In science, a negative result is almost as good as a positive result because either way, I now have new information about what to try next. No moralizing necessary. I take my experience back to scripture, I form a new hypothesis about what Christ is asking of me, and I go back out into the world to test again.
And gradually, over time, through no action I control, Christ’s life is formed in me.
When Jesus says, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots,” this is what he’s talking about. He’s asking us to be awake to our interior lives. To notice when the story we’re telling is a story of disgust, instead of a story of love, and to pull that story up by the roots so that love can be planted instead.
Friends, we will never arrive at an understanding of God the way might arrive at an understanding of math or physics. We usually want to understand things because we want to be able to control them. We will never be able to control God, and thank goodness. This practice of repentance and uprooting the weeds in our hearts is not about controlling God through our good behavior. It’s about turning and re-turning to relationship when we realize we’ve strayed from the Way of Jesus.
This is why I often describe Christianity as my orientation, rather than my religion. Religion suggests rules, suggests dogma, suggests right way and wrong way. Orientation reminds me to turn constantly to Christ, because he’s not just some abstract theoretical historical figure but a living breathing presence speaking into my heart through scripture, perpetually pointing to love like a compass points north.
The American body of the Church of Christ has strayed from the Way of Jesus. We have been the Pharisees, judging according to human tradition, honoring God with our lips but missing the mark in our hearts. We have judged with disgust instead of with love.
But Jesus is still beside us. The invitation is still open for the prodigal son to come home. Pull up that weed, let it pass out of your body into the sewer and be gone. No need for shame.
Let’s practice the faith of the Canaanite woman. Let’s hold each other to the divine story and put our trust not in our own good behavior but in Christ’s offensively inclusive love.