Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging (8 page)

What is indiscriminate compassion? “Take a look at a rose. Is it possible for the rose to say, ‘I shall offer my fragrance to good people and withhold it from bad people’? Or can you imagine a lamp that withholds its rays from a wicked person who seeks to walk in its light? It could only do that by ceasing to be a lamp. And observe how helplessly and indiscriminately a tree gives its shade to everyone, good and bad, young and old, high and low; to animals and humans and every living creature
 
—even to the one who seeks to cut it down. This is the first quality of love
 
—its indiscriminate character.”
[14]

Awhile back, Roslyn and I took a day off and decided to play in the French Quarter here in New Orleans. We roamed around Jackson Square sampling gumbo, inhaling jambalaya, and finally stopping at the Häagen-Dazs shrine for the
pièce de résistance
 
—a praline-pecan Creole hot-fudge sundae that induced a short-lived seizure of pleasure.

As we turned the corner on Bourbon Street, a girl with a radiant smile, about twenty-one years old, approached us, pinned a flower on each of our jackets, and asked if we would like to make a donation to support her mission. When I inquired what her mission was, she replied, “The Unification Church.”

“Your founder is Doctor Sun Myung Moon, so I guess that means you’re a Moonie?”

“Yes,” she answered.

In my mind, she had two strikes against her. First, she was a pagan who did not acknowledge Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior. Second, she was a naive and vulnerable kid who had been brainwashed by a guru and mesmerized by a cult.

“You know something, Susan?” I said. “I deeply admire your integrity and your fidelity to your conscience. You’re out here tramping the
streets doing what you really believe in. You are a challenge to anyone who claims the name ‘Christian.’”

Roslyn reached out and embraced her, and I embraced the two of them.

“Are you Christians?” she asked.

Roslyn said, “Yes.”

She lowered her head, and we saw tears falling on the sidewalk. A minute later she said, “I’ve been on my mission here in the Quarter for eight days now. You’re the first Christians who have ever been nice to me. The others have either looked at me with contempt or screamed and told me that I was possessed by a demon. One woman hit me with her Bible.”

What makes the kingdom come is heartfelt compassion: a way of tenderness that knows no frontiers, no labels, no compartmentalizing, and no sectarian divisions. Jesus, the human Face of God, invites us to deep reflection on the nature of true discipleship and the radical lifestyle of Abba’s child.

•
5 •

The Pharisee and the Child

IN HIS BOOK
WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN
,
philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote, “The intolerance that spread over the world with the advent of Christianity is one of its most curious features.”
[1]

History attests that religion and religious people tend to be narrow. Instead of expanding our capacity for life, joy, and mystery, religion often contracts it. As systematic theology advances, the sense of wonder declines. The paradoxes, contradictions, and ambiguities of life are codified, and God Himself is cribbed, cabined, and confined within the pages of a leather-bound book. Instead of a love story, the Bible is viewed as a detailed manual of directions.

The machinations of manipulative religion surface in every encounter between Jesus Christ and the Pharisees. One confrontation is particularly poignant. In order to grasp its full impact, we must trace the Jewish understanding of the Sabbath.

Initially, the Sabbath was first and foremost a memorial of creation. The book of Genesis states, “God saw all that he had made, and indeed it was very good. . . . On the seventh day God completed the work he had been doing. He rested on the seventh day after all the work he had been doing. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on that day he had rested after all his work of creating” (1:31, 2:2-3).

The seventh day celebrates the completion of the work of creation and is holy to the Lord. The Sabbath is a sacred day, set aside for God, consecrating to Him a specific period of time. It is the Jewish memorial day dedicated to the One who said, “I am the
L
ORD,
your Holy One, The Creator” (Isaiah 43:15,
NASB
). The Sabbath was a solemn recognition that God had sovereign rights, a public act of appropriation wherein the believing community acknowledged that they owed their life and being to Another. As the memorial day of creation, the Sabbath meant a worship of adoration and thanksgiving for all God’s goodness, for all the Jews were and had. The rest from work was secondary.

A rest from preoccupation with money, pleasure, and all creature comforts meant getting a proper perspective in relation to the Creator. On the Sabbath, Jews reflected and put the events of the past week in a larger context of saying to God, “You are the true Ruler; I am but Your steward.” The Sabbath was a day of rigorous honesty and careful contemplation, a day of taking stock, examining the direction of life, and rooting oneself anew in God. The Jew on the Sabbath learned to pray, “Our hearts are restless all week, until today they rest again in Thee.” As a memorial of creation, the Jewish Sabbath foreshadowed the Sunday of the New Testament
 
—the memorial of our re-creation in Christ Jesus.

Second, the Sabbath was also a memorial of the covenant. On Mount Sinai, when God gave the two tablets to Moses, He instructed the people, saying, “The sons of Israel are to keep the sabbath, observing it from generation to generation: this is a lasting covenant. Between myself and the sons of Israel the sabbath is a sign for ever” (Exodus 31:16-17). Thus, every Sabbath was a solemn renewal of the covenant between God and His chosen people. The people renewed their dedication to His service. Every Sabbath they rejoiced anew in the promise of God: “If you obey my voice and hold fast to my covenant, you of all the nations shall be my very own, for all the earth is mine. I will count you a kingdom of priests, a consecrated nation” (Exodus 19:5-6).

Once again, rest from work was not the primary focus of the Sabbath
observance. It was both supplementary to worship and a form of worship itself. But worship remained the essential element of the Sabbath celebration.

Years later, the prophet Isaiah would speak of the Sabbath as a day of delight. Fasting and mourning were forbidden. Special festive white clothes were to be worn, and joyous music was to permeate the Sabbath observance. Moreover, the feasting was not restricted to the temple. The Sabbath was and still is the great feast of the orthodox Jewish home
 
—so much so that the Sabbath is considered the chief foundation of the remarkably stable home life and close family spirit that has characterized orthodox Jews through the centuries. All the members of the family were to be present along with invited guests, especially the poor, strangers, or travelers. (In Luke 7, we see Jesus, the itinerant preacher, having dinner on the Sabbath in the home of Simon the Pharisee.)

The Sabbath celebration started at sundown Friday with the mother of the family ceremonially lighting the candles. Then the father, after saying grace over a cup of wine, laid his hand on the head of each of his children and solemnly blessed them with a personal prayer. These and many similar paraliturgical gestures not only hallowed the Sabbath but also sanctified the Jewish home, making it a
mikdash me’at
 
—a miniature sanctuary in which the parents were the priests and the family table was the altar.

Unfortunately, after the Babylonian exile the primary spiritual meaning of the Sabbath had become obscured. Under spiritually bankrupt leadership, a subtle shift in focus took place. The Pharisees, who carried religion like a shield of self-justification and a sword of judgment, installed the cold demands of rule-ridden perfectionism because that approach gave them status and control while reassuring believers that they were marching in lockstep on the road to salvation. The Pharisees falsified the image of God into an eternal, small-minded bookkeeper whose favor could be won only by the scrupulous observance of laws and regulations. Religion became a tool to intimidate and enslave rather
than liberate and empower. Jewish believers were instructed to focus their attention on the secondary aspect of the Sabbath
 
—abstention from work.

The joyous celebration of creation and covenant stressed by the prophets disappeared. The Sabbath became a day of legalism. The means had become the end. (Herein lies the genius of legalistic religion
 
—making primary matters secondary and secondary matters primary.) Concurrently what emerged was a jumble of prohibitions and prescriptions that transformed the Sabbath into a heavy burden leading to nervous scrupulosity
 
—the kind of Sabbath Jesus of Nazareth inveighed against so vehemently.

Seventeen centuries later, the hairsplitting pharisaical interpretation of the Sabbath washed ashore in New England. In the Code of Connecticut we read, “No one shall run on the Sabbath Day, or walk in his garden, or elsewhere, except reverently to and from meeting. No one shall travel, cook victuals, make beds, sweep house, cut hair, or shave on the Sabbath. If any man shall kiss his wife, or wife her husband on the Lord’s Day, the party in fault shall be punished at the discretion of the court of magistrates.”

Paradoxically, what intrudes between God and human beings is our fastidious morality and pseudopiety. It is not the prostitutes and tax collectors who find it most difficult to repent: It is the devout who feel they have no need to repent, secure in not having broken rules on the Sabbath.

Pharisees invest heavily in extrinsic religious gestures, rituals, methods, and techniques, breeding allegedly holy people who are judgmental, mechanical, lifeless, and as intolerant of others as they are of themselves
 
—violent people, the very opposite of holiness and love, “the type of ‘spiritual’ people who, conscious of their spirituality, then proceed to crucify the Messiah.”
[2]
Jesus did not die at the hands of muggers, rapists, or thugs. He fell into the well-scrubbed hands of deeply religious people, society’s most respected members.

…

At that time Jesus took a walk one sabbath day through the cornfields. His disciples were hungry and began to pick ears of corn and eat them. The Pharisees noticed it and said to him, “Look, your disciples are doing something that is forbidden on the sabbath.” But he said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he and his followers were hungry
 
—how he went into the house of God and how they ate the loaves of offering which neither he nor his followers were allowed to eat, but which were for the priests alone? Or again, have you not read in the Law that on the sabbath day the Temple priests break the Sabbath without being blamed for it? Now here, I tell you, is something greater than the Temple. And if you had understood the meaning of the words:
What I want is mercy, not sacrifice
, you would not have condemned the blameless. For the Son of Man is master of the sabbath.”
(MATTHEW 12:1-8, EMPHASIS ADDED)

The stakes are not small here. The Pharisees insist on the overriding importance of the rule of law. The basic dignity and genuine needs of human beings are irrelevant. Jesus, however, insisted that law was not an end in itself but the means to an end: Obedience was the expression of the love of God and neighbor, and therefore any form of piety that stood in the way of love stood in the way of God Himself. Such freedom challenged the Jewish system. Yet Jesus said He had not come to destroy the Law but to fulfill it. What He offered was not a new law but a new attitude toward law based on being loving.

The pharisaic spirit flourishes today in those who use the authority of religion to control others, entangling them in unending spools of regulations, watching them struggle and refusing to assist. Eugene Kennedy asserted, “The Pharisees’ power rises from the burden they
heap on the backs of sincere Jews; their gratification comes out of the primitive manipulations of people’s fears of displeasing their God.”
[3]
The placard held by one Baptist minister proclaiming “God hates fags” is as offensive and degrading as the sign in the window of a southern thrift store in the 1940s: “No dogs or niggers allowed!”

The words of Jesus
 
—“What I want is mercy, not sacrifice”
 
—are addressed to men and women of religion across the boundaries of time. Kennedy commented, “Whoever in history has put the law, the regulation, the tradition ahead of the suffering person stands in the same field of grain [as the Pharisees] smugly making the same accusation against the innocent.”
[4]

How many lives have been ruined in the name of narrow-minded, intolerant religiosity!

The pharisee’s forte in any age is blaming, accusing, and guilt-tripping others. His gift is noticing the speck in another’s eye and failing to see the beam in his own. Blinded by his own ambition, the pharisee cannot see his shadow and thus projects it on others. This is his gift, his signature, his most predictable and reliable response.

Several years ago, en route to a friend’s sister’s funeral, I drove over a bridge observing the fifty-five–miles per hour limit. I spotted a sign ahead that the speed limit returned to sixty-five. I quickly accelerated to seventy and was suddenly flagged down by a policeman. The officer was African-American. I explained that I was hurrying to a funeral. He listened with indifference, checked my license, and gave me a stiff speeding ticket. In my mind I immediately accused him of racism and vindictiveness and blamed him for my probable late arrival at the church. My dormant inner pharisee announced that he was alive and well.

Whenever we place blame, we are looking for a scapegoat for a real dislocation in which we ourselves are implicated. Blame is a defensive substitute for an honest examination of life that seeks personal growth in failure and self-knowledge in mistakes. Thomas Moore stated, “Fundamentally it is a way of averting consciousness of error.”
[5]

…

Pharisaic Judaism comprised a relatively small group of “separated ones” who, almost two centuries before Christ
 
—in order to preserve the Jewish faith from foreign dilution
 
—had given themselves to lives of vigilant observance of the Mosaic Law. “Their lives were one long rehearsal, a symphony orchestra tuning up endlessly by playing tortured variations of the Law.”
[6]

Before the Jewish exile, when the spirit of the covenant was vibrantly alive, the people felt safe in the shadow of God’s love. In the Pharisaic period, as the understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures deteriorated, the Jews felt safe in the shadow of the Law. Obviously, the gospel of grace presented by the Nazarene carpenter was an outrage.

The attitude of the pharisee is that keeping the law enamors him to God. Divine acceptance is secondary and is conditioned by the pharisee’s behavior. For Jesus, the circumstance is diametrically opposite. Being accepted, enamored, and loved by God comes first, motivating the disciple to live the law of love. “We are to love, then, because he loved us first” (1 John 4:19).

Suppose a child has never experienced any love from her parents. One day she meets another little girl whose parents shower her with affection. The first says to herself, “I want to be loved like that too. I have never experienced it, but I’m going to earn the love of my mother and father by my good behavior.” So to gain the affection of her parents, she brushes her teeth, makes her bed, smiles, minds her p’s and q’s, never pouts or cries, never expresses a need, and conceals negative feelings.

This is the way of pharisees. They follow the law impeccably in order to induce God’s love. The initiative is theirs. Their image of God necessarily locks them into a theology of works. If God is like the insufferable Nurse Ratched in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, eager to find fault with anybody and everybody, the pharisee must pursue a lifestyle that minimizes mistakes. Then, on Judgment Day, he can present God with a
perfect slate, and the reluctant Deity will have to accept it. The psychology of the pharisee makes a religion of washing cups and dishes, fasting twice a week, and paying tithes of mint, dill, and cumin very attractive.

What an impossible burden! The struggle to make oneself presentable to a distant and perfectionistic God is exhausting. Legalists can never live up to the expectations they project on God, “for there will always be a new law, and with it a new interpretation, a fresh hair to be split by the keenest ecclesiastical razor.”
[7]