Matthew 21:23-32
Daring to Follow
Jesus
James Sledge October
1, 2023
By now almost anyone associated with the church
world has heard the troubling trends in church attendance and affiliation.
According to one poll, the number of religiously unaffiliated has increased
with every recent generation. In the Silent Generation, 9% are unaffiliated.
With Baby Boomers, it’s 18%; with Generation X it’s 25%; with Millennials it’s
29%; and with Generation Z, those born between mid-to-late 1990s and the early
2010s, it’s 34%.[1]
You don’t need to be a statistician to recognize that this trend spells real
trouble.
The reasons for this ever-growing group of
religiously unaffiliated are many, and some are outside the church’s control.
But the church shares a significant responsibility. Too often we have embodied
the quote, sometimes erroneously attributed to Gandhi, that says, "I like
your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your
Christ."
Christian activist and author Shane
Claiborne has offered his thoughts on the demographic decline facing the
church, saying, “If we lose a generation in the church, that loss won’t be
because we failed to entertain them, but because we failed to dare them — to
take the words of Jesus seriously and to do something about the things that are
wrong in the world.”[2]
If you know Claiborne at all, you likely
know that he is quite disenchanted with the sort of Christianity trafficked by
the typical church. Very often this Christianity is focused mostly on what
people believe, and what few demands it puts on members are largely internal,
focused on keeping the institution going. Only rarely does it reflect the
radical teachings Jesus.
People like Claiborne can be a thorn in
the side of the traditional church, questioning whether this Christianity
actually follows Jesus. But if Claiborne is a pain in the you know what, he’s in
good company. Jesus has similar questions about the church of his day.
When modern people look at Jesus’
ministry, his conflicts with religious authorities are often seen as a fight
with cartoon bad guys. They were so corrupt that Jesus needed to start a whole
new religion to take their place.
Except cartoon bad guys are a rarity. Much
more common are people of faith who have gotten off track. Indeed the image of
Jesus cleansing the Temple the day before our reading takes place is often
depicted as Jesus attacking a gross commercialization of the Temple with money
changers and animal sellers setting up shop there.
In reality, the money changers and animal
sellers were an honest attempt to assist the pilgrims who had made the long
journey to Jerusalem. Money changers allowed people to exchange coins with
blasphemous images on them for imageless Jewish coins appropriate for an
offering at the Temple. Similarly, animal sellers allowed pilgrims who couldn’t
bring animals with them on the trip to Jerusalem to make a sacrifice. On top of
that, neither money changers nor animal sellers were actually in the Temple.
They were in the courtyard outside.
To be honest, I’ve never been exactly sure
what got Jesus so worked up that he turned over tables and chased vendors away,
but it seems likely that it was judgment on a theology that imagined Temple
worship somehow guaranteed God’s presence in Israel’s midst. In that sense
Jesus may well be as upset by the worshippers as by the vendors.
Regardless, Jesus’ actions are more than a
little upsetting to worshippers and authorities alike. Jesus had also brought
the blind in the lame into the Temple, people who were ritually unclean and not
supposed to be there. So it’s no surprise that when Jesus reenters the Temple
the next day, the leaders demand to know what gives him the authority to do
such things.
Jesus evades their question by asking
whether they recognized divine authority in John the Baptizer. John was a
difficult subject for them because he had been a thorn in the side of religion
that was mostly about belief and rituals. He had called people to repent, which
is less about feeling bad for what one has done and more about changing one’s
behavior. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,” cried
John, and he said this was about bearing fruit.
Interestingly, when Jesus began his
ministry, he picked up John’s cry, repeating it word for word. And throughout
his ministry Jesus laid out what sort of changes this entailed, the fruits he
expected people to bear, things like mercy, longing for a rightly ordered
society, loving all, even enemies, caring for the least of these, and having a life
not focused on wealth.
After deflecting the religious leaders’
question about where his authority came from, Jesus engages them with an easily
understood parable. Two sons are asked to work in the vineyard, the first says
“No” but then goes while the second says “Yes” but then does not go.
The parable has a clear allusion to an
earlier teaching of Jesus that gets lost in English translations. When the
second son says, “I go, sir,” and then doesn’t go, the
word translated sir is the same word translated lord in other places, notable
when Jesus says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter
the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in
heaven.” It seems that Jesus expects people to bear fruit just like
John did.
I think people like Shane Claiborne are
modern day prophets calling us to repent, to change what we are doing, to bear
fruit. “If we lose a generation in the church, that loss won’t be because we
failed to entertain them, but because we failed to dare them — to take the words
of Jesus seriously and to do something about the things that are wrong in the
world.”
But before we can dare others to take the
words of Jesus seriously, perhaps we need to dare ourselves. Dare we trust that
the way of Jesus is the way to life in all its fullness? Dare we long for and
work for a world set right, a world where there is good news to the poor and
release to the captive? Dare we let Jesus’ dream for a new sort of world become
our own?
I think God is longing for that sort of
Christian and that sort of church, and I think the world is longing for that
sort of Christian and that sort of church. Dare we be the Christians and the
church that God and the world are longing for?
No comments:
Post a Comment