Musings on the Daily Lectionary

There is a lot of conflict between Jesus and religious authorities in the gospels. It shows up in today's reading from Mark in the form of a Sabbath controversy. Over the years, Christians have tended to picture these authorities as evil folks in black hats, as cartoon bad guys. But that seems highly unlikely. No doubt they had mixed motives, as do religious leaders in every age. Some of them were concerned with preserving the status and privilege they had. And some worried about religious movements that might get out of control and lead to conflict with the powerful Romans. But along with such concerns, there were genuine religious concerns that God's laws be upheld. The Pharisees, especially, were a reform movement that wanted people to embrace the Law in day to day living, compared to what they saw as overly ritualized Temple Judaism.

My childhood was spent in North and South Carolina, when the Bible belt was a much stronger cultural force than it is today. And if you wanted a lot of folks in the neighborhood to look at you and shake their heads, all you had to do was cut the grass on a Sunday afternoon. Even though Sunday isn't the Sabbath, the culture had built in all sorts of safeguards to assure that the Christian Sabbath was not violated. And if you go back a bit further in the history of this country, you will find Sabbath enforcement that rivaled anything Jesus encountered.

Sometimes in these musings, I find myself sounding like one of those folks that hates organized religion. I'm not. I think that faith without a community that teaches and embodies the practices of the faith is a pretty nebulous and vacuous thing. But as much as I think the institutional Church is an absolute necessity, it, like all things human, has its dark side. The notion that Christians or the Church are somehow immune to the influences that made the religious authorities oppose Jesus, is a dangerous one, for it frees us from examining ourselves to see where we may be opposing God.

Now no genuine Christian would intentionally set out to oppose God, but then again, no genuine Jew of Jesus' day would have either. And Jesus himself notes how easy is can be to miss him in one of his parables. There people both good and bad say, "Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison?"

Lord, don't let my religious certainties cause me to miss you or reject you.

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