For Christmas, my wife was worried about my back injury,
so she signed me up for yoga lessons. I had my first class this week. I marvel
that some of my muscles are as stiff as they are! I marvel that I have aching
muscles I didn't know I had. I am not generally unhealthy, but over the years,
parts of my body have become less used, and bad habits of posture have begun to
catch up with me. This new discipline has made this plain.
We think we are doing pretty well until we adopt a new
perspective. In general, we are good people, living the best way we know. Once
in a while, we see ourselves from a different perspective and we have to
re-evaluate how we are doing. The prophet Isaiah has a stern judgment about the
people of God. This poem of warning was probably written after the people
returned from exile, yet hadn't seemed to return to a place of blessing and
success. Perhaps they had managed to accumulate some wealth and power, yet the
people seem disconnected to God.
Isaiah points out their hypocrisy. They make a show of
fasting, and they neglect to feed the poor among them. No wonder God ignores
their prayers. Isaiah reminds them that it is not words or ritual that gets the
attention of God, except when they are accompanied with works of justice and
mercy. In all our public discussions about true religion, we forget the
obsessions of the prophets. You'd think God cared about sex as much as we do!
The prophets scolded the people almost exclusively about two sins, idolatry and
neglect of the poor.
Idolatry is the sin of worshipping a God who is not God. While
we do not set up physical idols, we are often guilty of worshipping money, or
power, or patriotism, or whatever besetting sin you can imagine. For all our
worry over the worthiness of others, the prophets commanded the people to care
for the poor without any tests of worthiness or neediness. Imagine how
different the world would be if we competed in how much we gave instead of in
how much we have?
Isaiah (like all the other prophets) is reminding the
people about the most important purpose of the law. We are to love God and we
are to love our neighbors. When we worship another God, we lose our love for
God. When we neglect the poor around us, we neglect our love for our neighbor.
We stop being who we are.
This is what Jesus is talking about when he tells us we
are the salt of the earth. I have read many interesting commentaries that try
and explain how salt can lose its saltiness. Perhaps ancient Israelites used a
sort of low-grade salt that loses its efficacy? I read another commentator who
surmised that salt used in religious rituals could become ceremonially unclean
- and then it had to be discarded. I think all of these explanations miss the
point. There is no such thing as “unsalty” salt. There's no such thing as a
lamp shining under a basket. There is no such thing as a city on a hill that
you can't see. So, how can we hide who we are?
The good we do shows the glory of God. Why do we try to do
otherwise? Later, Jesus will talk about doing good deeds in private, and we
will be reminded of this on Ash Wednesday. Jesus is speaking of the absurdity
of a private faith. We are so careful to be tactful; we forget that everything
we do is an expression of what we believe and of who we are. This public faith
is not for our own ego, but to proclaim to everyone around us just how good God
is. We do good works as a declaration of Gods love for us and to declare how
God helps us to love our neighbor.
Jesus will begin to compare two ways of true worship.
Jesus will speak against the scribes and the Pharisees, yet it is also
important to remember that he is teaching as if he is one of them. If you were
to read ancient accounts of arguments of points of law between first century
teachers and Pharisees, those arguments sound quite similar to what Jesus is
arguing. He is very much like a first century liberal Pharisee. There was a
tendency to become over-scrupulous in the observance of the law after the
exile. Those conservative Pharisees didn't want to make the same mistake of
their lapsed ancestors. In exile, they learned to adhere to the law as a way of
devotion and as a way to preserve their identity in a foreign land. After the
return, and under Roman rule, there was still a tendency to live a life in
opposition to the dominant culture of Rome. The Pharisees took great pride in
their observance of the law and they worried about anyone who had any excuse to
relax their practice.
Jesus reminds us what true practice of obedience is, and
why we do it. We devote ourselves to God because we love God (or we seek to
deepen our love for God.) We perform good works, not to prove our commitment to
laws, but to declare our love for our neighbor (or to deepen our love for our
neighbor.) This is how we might surpass the righteousness of the scribes and
the Pharisees - not in some ridiculous race to be even more correct and pure in
our obedience - but in our desire to draw nearer to God in love, and nearer to
our neighbor in love.
Of course this is not easy. As soon as we try, we face our
own fears and hypocrisy. We are immediately confronted with questions about how
best to serve the poor. Are we serving their true needs or only our own? Are we
helping or enabling bad behavior? What do our neighbors really need from us?
Who are we responsible for? How wide a circle can we draw? The closer we look,
the more we feel like we are at our first yoga class, discouraged and stiff.
The good news is that God's righteousness does not look like perfect
observance. God's righteousness is love.
As long as we keep asking uncomfortable questions - as
long as we keep offering our imperfect love - God will help us discover how
best to shine. We must be ready to look foolish. The cross is no wise or easy
thing. The truth of the cross is love and sacrifice. As we are willing to offer
whatever we have to be used for God's glory, the closer we will find ourselves
to the heart of God. We will gain our saltiness. We will shine more brightly.
We will be a people on a hill, for everyone to see.
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