Jesus vs. Pharisees
Jesus contends with the Pharisees. (Artwork Courtesy of Morgan Guyton)
If there’s one thing that progressive and fundamentalist Christians demonstrate their enthusiastic agreement upon, it’s to take Jesus with a grain of salt when he says not to judge other people. Judging is the oxygen of postmodernity for all parties involved. It’s how we define ourselves: by who we ridicule and take down. God gave me a passage about not judging from the gospel of Luke to say over and over again as a prayer practice during Lent. It’s largely failed its purpose, partly because I’m a sinner and partly because I’m genuinely confused about where the lines fall between judging and speaking prophetic truth.
Jesus talks about not judging in Luke 6:36-38, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” It’s a beautiful passage. I love the imagery of a grain market where instead of getting nickeled and dimed by the vendor, you get a good measure of grain pressed down, shaken together, and running over into your lap.
This makes a lot of sense to me within my marriage, which is the context in which God originally confronted my about my judging this Lent. When I’m overly critical of my wife, I can’t expect to receive a whole lot of grace in return. The way that I make our relationship unpleasant is when I frame everything according to my rights and what I think are reasonable expectations of her. Example: if I’m on top of the dishes, then you’d better have the laundry done and put away. Of course, I’m rarely actually on top of the dishes, but it doesn’t stop me from grumbling about not having any clean undershirts left.
I have somehow persistently held onto this delusion that if I express my displeasure forcefully enough, then things will magically get better. I become an angry customer who complains rather than a loving husband who actually helps out. And it doesn’t work at all. Largely because my perception is skewed when I’ve got a nickel and dime attitude about our relationship. I don’t see how hard my wife really is working, and I take out my own insecurities about my lousy work ethic on her. But when I’m gracious with her, I can feel God’s grace for me. I stop hating myself internally so much for my disgusting hypocrisy. The measure I give is given back to me in spades. It isn’t that God lacks grace for me until I show grace for my wife, but rather that my lack of grace for her drowns out my ability to sense God’s grace for me.
Within personal relationships like my marriage, Jesus’ exhortation is a no-brainer. I see very clearly that being a judgmental jerk undermines everything and makes both me and the other person miserable. Where I get confused is what I’m supposed to do in the theological battles I’m fighting against people whom I perceive to be in the same crowd that Jesus fought against. Jesus tells us not to judge other people, but my gosh, he went to town on those Pharisees! Matthew 23 is a brutal take-down that can be applied to religious insiders from Jesus’ day and our day alike. In Luke 7, Jesus publicly humiliates Simon the Pharisee for his supposedly lousy hospitality all because Simon shot a dirty look at the sinful woman who was washing his feet. It seems like Jesus makes very harsh judgments against the self-appointed religious gatekeepers who judge others.
When I look at how Jesus treats people, I see him showing mercy to those who know that they’re sinners and ruthlessly attacking religious people who think they have it all figured out and have made their religion harsh and ugly so that they can get sacrifice points for following it. So when I encounter fundamentalists today who act like the Pharisees Jesus battled with, it seems like part of my duty to obliterate the facade of their supposedly agenda-less, objective “Biblicism” out of solidarity with those whom they are judging and dismissing presumptuously.
I think what makes me see red is when people claim to be utterly without a personal agenda or investment and say things like, “Your debate isn’t with me; it’s with Jesus.” Everybody has an agenda and a particular bias that they bring to the Bible and everything else. I certainly do. I will always be the kid who grew up moderate Southern Baptist during the fundamentalist takeover of our denomination. I will always have blind spots and presumptions that I carry from my origins. I’m always trying to transcend my past, but it would be dishonest for me to pretend that I’m ever selflessly contending for God’s truth (which is why I get offended when other people put on that front).
One scripture reference that’s been thrown around a lot lately is the narrow road that Jesus talks about. He says in Matthew 7:13-14, “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”
"To be obedient to the truth and simultaneously gracious to people I think have gotten it wrong is the hardest, narrowest road that I know of. I can’t tell you how many times I lose the trail each week."
I would say first of all that just because a road is narrow and hard doesn’t mean that it leads to Jesus. Many of the heretics whom Paul battled throughout his letters didn’t think that Paul’s gospel of grace was narrow and hard enough so they wanted to add a bunch of ascetic regulations on top of it, whether it was the circumcision faction in Galatians and Romans or the Gnostic ascetics of Colossians. It’s a standard game within religion to leverage exhibitionist “self-sacrifice” as a means of gaining the higher moral ground over other people. There are plenty of pretend “hard and narrow roads” of fake martyrdom that don’t do anything to spread God’s love in the world. That’s why God says, “I desire mercy not sacrifice.”
If we look at the context of the “narrow gate” passage, it’s impossible to say definitively what exactly Jesus is referring to, because it comes in the middle of a list of sayings in the Sermon on the Mount which don’t appear to have a particular thematic trajectory. Right before the “narrow gate” passage is Jesus’ exhortation to “do to others as you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12). Right after it is Jesus’ warning about false prophets whom we are to know “by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16-18).
But maybe one way to describe the “narrow gate” we have to walk through is that it’s actually the path in between the Golden Rule and Jesus’ warning about false prophecy. Somehow we have to stay vigilant against false prophecy without forgetting that the other people we debate are real human beings whom God is leading on a legitimate spiritual journey and who deserve to be treated with the same grace and dignity we expect for ourselves.
To be obedient to the truth and simultaneously gracious to people I think have gotten it wrong is the hardest, narrowest road that I know of. I can’t tell you how many times I lose the trail each week. I’m scratched up with thorns and stained with the juice of poison berry bushes that I’ve brushed up against. Because I think if somebody’s with the “bad guys” who are ruining Christianity, then I don’t need to be respectful or patient or kind to them. I just need to defeat them decisively enough that they’ll shut up and go home. So I betray my witness by lashing out at them carelessly and barreling off the narrow path to tumble into another ravine filled with poison and thorns, thus making it easy to discredit whatever truth God has given me to share.
One of the things that God is drawing to my attention about the false prophecy passage is that the fruit is the criterion for evaluating the validity of a prophecy; it’s not a simple matter of objectively evaluating whether something is a fact or fiction. This is because we can all find proof-texts within scripture to twist into the service of any argument. The devil knows how to quote scripture quite well. The question Jesus asks is not whether the false prophets have tallied up a sufficient quota of Bible verses to support what they’re saying. He asks whether their fruit is good or poisonous.
In this sense, I am a false prophet regardless of whether or not I’m telling the truth if my fruit is poisonous. It’s an even deeper betrayal than just telling a lie I made up if God has given me a truth to share and I fail at God’s mission because my bad fruit has swallowed up the truth, whether it takes the form of “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions,envy,drunkenness, [or] carousing” (Galatians 5:19-21). Part of staying on the narrow path is not betraying the truth I have been given to share by making sure the only fruit that comes out of me is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23).
God has indeed given me truth to share, some of which involves removing stumbling blocks to the gospel entangled in very popular, widespread evangelical theology. And yet I have been a false prophet whenever my zeal for winning arguments has created rotten fruit that betrays the truth I was given to share. When what you want the most is to win, you aren’t interested in learning from other people; you’re focused on recruiting disciples and pounding your opponents’ faces in the mud. And somehow I keep thinking that it’s my job to break cinder-blocks over self-assured fundamentalists’ heads until I’m convinced that they’ve demonstrated enough authentic humility.
But I betray the truth when I do that. I leave the narrow path behind for the wide road to destruction. God has a lot to teach me even through people who make bad fruit just like me that I could easily use to dismiss the truths they’ve also been given. So I’m going to try to get back on the narrow path again. I’m going to try to focus on the truth that I’ve been given, and not let Satan bait me into making poisonous fruit that wastes God’s time and alienates his people. God is faithful even when I’m not.
The Rev. Morgan Guyton currently is associate pastor of Burke (Va.) United Methodist Church. He blogs at Mercy Not Sacrifice.