Jesus Dared Humbly

What Did Jesus Do?

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!
Matthew 23.13,15,23,25,29

The self-righteous, the falsely-pious, and the hypocritically-holy are among the most dangerous denizens of any body of believers, mostly because believing in themselves has superseded believing in God. It takes, if you will excuse a mild vulgarity, guts, to confront one of these. To call them out en masse requires almost super-human bravery. It would also help if one were a bit out of one’s mind. Perhaps that is why in ancient Israel, before Jesus, only the occasional prophet had ever spoken out against the manipulating ministers who had appropriated the Mosaic covenant faith to suit their agenda. Everyone knew that the prophets were all a little crazy.

Among things not needed in such a confrontation are: any amount of arrogance, opportunism, or payback. The prophets were never seeking any personal advantage in delivering God’s verdict on Israel’s faithless shepherds. And Jesus certainly was not trying to seize the place of religious authority from those who held on to it so tightly when he pronounced the seven woes of Matthew 23. There was no need to make a grab for authority when the Father had already given all authority into your hands.

The problem over the last two millennia, and now into the third, is that very few of us who seek to follow Christ can resist the urge to get a hold of enough authority to tell others what to believe, and how to believe, and, to borrow a biblical expression, to smite them when we feel they need it. This is a problem because when we do this all of us inevitably find ourselves in the midst of the crowd on whom the Lord pronounced the woes of Matthew 23. And, unfortunately, our typical response is not to repent of our hypocrisy, but rather to become more hypocritical by announcing some more woes upon someone we don’t get along with.

If you believe I am painting too severe a portrait of much of the Body of Christ, explain to me the never ending squabbles and un-civil wars of congregations, the inter and intra denominational battles, the pulpits policed and cyclically emptied by the descendants of the scribes, Pharisees, and hypocrites, who now occupy many a pew.

You see, when daring to pronounce woes, one must begin with addressing them to the audience in the mirror. Of course, Jesus didn’t need to do this, but the Lord is the only one who never needed to remove a beam from his eye to see all the specks in ours. But, for those who have the greatest courage, the courage to confront themselves first, there is the opportunity to learn the great lesson of humility. Without humility I am afraid we are condemned to pronounce woes that bounce immediately back on ourselves. When we have humbled the man or woman in the mirror, well only then is God exalted when woes are pronounced but only when we’ve humbled ourselves. To dare with humility, that is the trick. And that, my friends, is what Jesus did.

S.D.G.

Jim
www.jimwilkenministries.org
Marion, NC
PS 37.4