There is frankly no other theme that made Jesus quite as furious as seeing people hurt in the name of religion. This is dramatically captured in his haunting rebuke “woe unto you, teachers of the law” (Matt 23:13). Jesus is opposed to their “law-keeping” because he saw how it was hurting people, pushing them away from God. Jesus acts to restore people and refuses to be held back by legal restrictions, but they do the opposite and “shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces” (v. 13). As a result, Jesus tells them, they completely miss what really matters: acting in compassion and restorative justice (v. 23). While the Pharisees and teachers of the law saw Jesus as a lawbreaker, Jesus certainly did not see any of his actions as being unfaithful to God or the Bible. On the contrary, he understood his actions as directly fulfilling God’s will and kingdom. Yet in faithfully acting to restore people, the Gospel writers tell us, Jesus continually appeared in the eyes of the religious leaders around him to be breaking God’s laws. Jesus was not particularly concerned with this, and instead was infinitely more concerned with caring for the least, even if this meant his reputation became one of a “blasphemer” and “law breaker” in the eyes of the religious authorities. This radical stance of prioritizing love over law could be said to be the baseline of Jesus’ exegetical method. It is absolutely central to how Jesus understood and interpreted Scripture. The take-away here is an alternative understanding of faithfulness to the Bible, rooted in compassion, that allows room for questioning and wrestling with abusive religion. We frequently see Jesus questioning and confronting the Pharisees and teachers of the law for what he understood as a hurtful and misguided interpretation of Scripture. -Derek Flood
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 14:34:08 +0000
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