The Center of Gravity

The Center of Gravity--September 7, 2018

[Jesus said:] "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!" [Matthew 23:23-24]

Jesus' sharpest criticism was not aimed at atheists, but at respectable religious people.

That might seem counter-intuitive--we might expect Jesus, of all people, to be the cheerleader for all things "religious," but that's really only the shallowest possible understanding of Jesus.  

No, in fact, Jesus can deal with people whose faith wavers--he knows how to respond to the honest response, "I believe--help my unbelief!"  He can even pray for forgiveness for the pagan Roman soldiers who crucified him, because, as he says, "they know not what they do."

But Jesus' harshest words were undoubtedly for the religious culture-warriors of his day, who had appointed themselves the arbiters of righteousness and respectability.  And Jesus was at his most ferocious in his criticism of the Respectable Religious Crowd, not because they were robbing banks and burning orphanages in a blatant display of premeditated wickedness and depravity, but because they were sure--damned sure--that all they were doing, saying, and teaching was holy and righteous and good.  Blaise Pascal famously said that people "never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction."  Jesus, it would seem, wholeheartedly agrees.

Jesus is most upset with the Respectable Religious Crowd of his day, not because they are black-hat-and-mustache-twirling villains with maniacal laughs, but because they had missed the boat on what really mattered, and yet because they claimed to speak with divine authority for knowing what "mattered," they were giving a terribly distorted picture of the character of the living God.  And the God (or "god"? or idol?) which the Respectable Religious Crowd presented to the world seemed astoundingly similar to their own preferences. The god of the scribes hated all the people and things that the scribes themselves hated--what a coincidence! The god of the Pharisees was oh-so-impressed with meticulously measured tithes and offerings of the harvest even from their herb gardens, but was not grieved when real people got stepped on--imagine that!  The god of the respectable religious crowd, they insist, is very, very interested in bookkeeping, in official pronouncements of affirmations and denials, and in keeping the respectable religious crowd in power--how convenient!

And Jesus says they have missed the boat on what matters--what truly matters--to the real and living God: justice, mercy, and faith (with its sibling "faithfulness," which is the same word in the original Greek of Matthew's gospel here).  Jesus' problem with the "scribes and Pharisees" of his day was not that they were trying successfully with all their might to do the worst evil possible, but that they were convinced they were doing right and godly work in teaching people to focus on their preferred issues while leaving aside justice, mercy, and faithfulness.

This raises a really difficult issue for us to face.  Jesus compels us to see that, even though all people are created equal (as we like to quote from our founding national documents), the commandments of God are, curiously enough, not all created equal.  At least, not according to Jesus.  Jesus insists--without saying that he has come to "break" or "abolish" the Law--that there is a difference in the gravity across the instructions of God.  There is a certain weightiness, a heaviness, so to speak, at the core of it all, and Jesus locates that core in "justice," "mercy," and "faithfulness."  (Interestingly enough, the Hebrew word for "glory" comes from the word for "heavy" or "weighty," so there is reason to suggest that the Jesus sees the true "glory" of God in justice, mercy, and faithfulness, even more so than in golden altars, ritual sacrifices, holiness codes, and liturgical precision.)

We are going to have to let this sit and simmer for a bit, because a lot of church folk in the 21st century have been taught differently--we learned somewhere along the way that the whole Word of God is all equally important, such that the commandment against wearing two types of fabric has to be weighed the same as the commandment not to sacrifice your children to an idol.  We say we are doing it out of respect for the Bible, and we insist that anybody else who takes a different position clearly is dishonoring the Scriptures or tailoring it to suit their own agenda.  But Jesus himself here is the one who says that there is a gravitational center to God's Word, and that means there are some parts that are, in his words, "weightier" than others.  He never takes the scissors out to cut out parts that are difficult or unpopular or provocative.  But he does insist that justice and mercy and faithfulness are at the core of what matters to God... and that in the big scheme of things, God is much less interested in our offerings of mint and dill, or for that matter, oregano and cilantro.  

If we are going to take this realization seriously, it will mean that we need to be constantly recalibrating ourselves to see if our bearings line up with Jesus.  We cannot just say we are "pro-Bible" and then proceed to wield verses that seem important to us as weapons to smack other people with.  We will need to keep ourselves re-centered in the perspective of Jesus, who keeps pulling us back to the gravitational center of the Scriptures in justice, mercy, and faithfulness, and who also keeps showing us in his words and actions what those actually look like.  If we don't keep allowing Jesus to re-orient us in line with that center of gravity, we are bound to end up like the Respectable Religious Crowd who had traded in the living God for an idol in their own image without even realizing it.

Today, then, and every day after, let this be our focus--to keep coming back to justice, mercy, and faithfulness as the heart of God's list of values, and to let everything else fall into place around those, as Jesus shows us what they look like.

Lord Jesus, keep us grounded in what matters to you and to the God whom you bring near--keep us centered on justice, mercy, and faithfulness as we have seen them in your nail-scarred, leper-touching, table-turning, enemy-loving hands.