When Good isn't Good Enough

My son has reached the age where he has been taught the classic, "Stop, Drop and Roll" technique for addressing being on fire.  This is a good thing.  If my son ever finds himself in a situation where his pants have begun to burn and smolder, it will be very beneficial for him to know what to do.  Not to mention it is fun to watch him demonstrate his SDaR technique in our living room.

Valuable as it may be, SDaR misses a very important point that ultimately is much more vital to my sons survival.  Practically speaking, the likelihood of my five year old spontaneously catching fire while playing on the swing set is highly unlikely.  What is much more probable is that while we are sleeping there is an electrical fire that starts somewhere in our house.  With our house ablaze my son may very well find some sort of fire on his clothes.  And if that is to occur....he has to GET OUT OF THE HOUSE!!!! 

If you were to find yourself in a burning house all the SDaR in the world will not save you if you do not first get out of the source of the fire.  No matter how effectively and rapidly you roll back and forth on the floor you will eventually burn up.  Get away from the fire, and THEN deal with your smoldering pants.  To reverse that vital process is the height of absurdity. 

In the Gospel of John the ministry of Jesus really gets going when he comes to the Festival of the Booths and calls out all the hyper religious people for being great rule followers who are still destined for destruction.  The Jewish religious establishment prided itself on doing all the right things the right way, but Jesus tells them it is all for naught.  Their behavior is not going to stave off destruction. 

Clearly he was a popular fellow......

Behaving morally, ethically, kindly, etc, are all nice and commendable things.  My preference is to have neighbors who do NOT rob me in the middle of the night and set my house on fire.  The reasons that they do not behave in such a manner are, in some ways, immaterial to me.  If my neighbor believes he is being monitored by aliens who will shoot him with space lasers if he mistreats me, the end, self-centered result is that my day to day life is more pleasant because I have a neighbor who acts appropriately. 

Good behavior is our Stop Drop and Roll.  In a vacuum it is a good thing to know and put into practice.  But what if we are ultimately in the middle of a blazing inferno? 

In John 8 Jesus is beginning to get to the crux of his argument.  That these moral and good behaving people cannot follow Jesus and are going to die in their sins(verse 21).  To understand the context of what Jesus is saying we must recognize the context of the environment that Jesus is stating this.  Everything about this Festival is in proclaiming how righteous and good they all are because of how they follow all the rules.  Their self-styled "goodness" is based on the belief that following the clearly laid out rules justifies themselves in the eyes of God.  They treat religious law as a sort of road map that guarantees that they will arrive at their desired destination. 

With that sort of imagery in mind Jesus says, "You cannot follow where I am going".  Which means, "There is no human road map that you can control and manipulate that will save you".  What will save them?  Believe in the Son of Man who will be raised up(verse 28).  Through the finished work of Christ on the cross(the raised up Son of Man) we can be saved from death.  There is no other way.

If you are sit in a burning house your inevitable life trajectory is destruction.  Before you do anything else, get out!  The natural state of our lives is death.  No matter what good we do, what rules we adhere to, what ethically justifiable behaviors we practice, we are headed to a fire. 

Does this mean that "good" behavior is pointless?  Of course not.  Even if you get out of the burning house you still have to deal with the embers before they cause you damage.  But if you reverse the process of salvation first, THEN regeneration(Holy("good") lives), you aren't doing anything at all.  Rolling around on the ground won't get you out of the house.  Getting out of the house makes the rolling around effective. 

You will never be good enough to get out of the fire. 

Party Pooper

Who doesn't love a good party?  My son is turning 5 in about a month and has been making special requests for his birthday for about....ummm.....11 months now.....  He has decided he wants us throw him a surprise party.  He wants me to take him for a walk and when we get back everyone yells "surprise".  I am not sure if his concept of "surprise" is a completely developed one yet.....

Rarely do we have pointless parties.  Either it is a birthday, a celebration of some event, a holiday, etc.  And the party itself becomes shaped by the specific event that is being recognized.  You don't hand out birthday presents at a Halloween parties, nor do you give everyone a Christmas present during your birthday party. 

If you are the host of a party, especially a specifically themed party, you can take great offense at people ignoring the type of party it is.  When hosting a costume party it is a bit off putting if your friend shows up without a costume because they think the idea is "dumb". 

The way in which we want things to be gives us a sense of comfort.  When people don't follow the "rules" we can tend to get frustrated and anxious.  A party is one thing, but when our sense of how life should be, or, when our plans are found thrown apart we can get very defensive and angry.

In the beginning of chapter 7 in the Gospel of John Jesus is invited to come to Judea for the Festival of the Booths.  Because that way lots of people can be impressed by him.   Every year the longest, and arguably biggest, Jewish holiday celebration was this festival(also known as Sukkot). 

Sukkot was a week long holiday where the Jews would build temporary shelters that they would dwell in and eat in for the course of the week.(this is still celebrated today, but people don't live there for a week and generally just eat a single meal during the week inside their booth)  This was to celebrate the Harvest and a reminder of the Exodus.  During the festival they would make blessings to all the ends of the earth to recognize God as sovereign over all of creation. 

The key blessing phrase they would speak was, "Blessed are you, Adonai our God, Ruler of the universe, who has sanctified us with commandments, and commanded us to dwell in the sukkah."

Jesus refuses to go along with the plan to make a big appearance at the Festival since the hearts of his brothers in encouraging him to come was not based on His divinity, but in the sense of getting a bigger following.  And Jesus plainly states that it is not yet his time.

So his brothers go on ahead of him, and Jesus "sneaks" in later.  He goes into the Temple and begins to teach.  And what does he teach...That no one lives up to the Law.  The main blessing is what?  That God's commandments(and following them) is what sanctifies people.  And Jesus says, your party is a lie.

Jesus didn't want to come to the party on the parties own terms.  He was here with a diametrically opposed purpose and message.  The Jews(and you and I) can't hope in God's law as the source of being made righteous.  We don't even live up to the standards we claim to celebrate. 

Our life is the party we design for ourselves.  We set up the decorations and the snacks in the way that is most reflective of what we want to communicate to the world.  Namely, that we are pretty ok people and we are doing just fine.  Jesus comes into your party on His own terms and says, "Who are you fooling?  You are broken, lost, hurting, and no matter the public show you make, this party simply is hiding that internally, what you claim and what is true about you are not really in alignment."

After tearing into the hypocrisy he ends with a simple question for each of us.  "Are you angry because I make a whole mans body well".  See, they want to fix themselves their own way, and Jesus says, it doesn't work.  I am here doing the work that you claim you want done, but you are angry because I am not doing it your way. 

We claim we want our lives to be a certain way.  But doing it our way isn't actually getting us there.  And Jesus says, I am the one who can do it...but guess what....it isn't going to be your way.  And we get angry.

What we have done is made an idol out of the way we want things to be done.  We claim that we want a specific result.  Whether that is peace, joy, happiness, etc.  But it turns out what we really want is not those things, but to do it our way.  We sacrifice what we claim to want on the altar of following the script we want for our lives. 

Jesus says, quit doing it your way.  I am the one who will make you whole. 

Sometimes a ruined party is a much better story.....