Saturday after Ash Wednesday -- March 12, 2011
Luke 5:27 – 32
After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. “Follow me,” Jesus said to him, and Levi got up, left everything and followed him.
Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”
Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 32 I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
In my seminary class on the Hebrew language, I had to write a paper that analyzed one Hebrew word that occurred prominently in the Old Testament. I wrote a lengthy paper on the Hebrew word kadosh, which is usually translated “holy.”
I learned that in the Hebrew scriptures, to be holy generally meant to be separate from or different from. That is the sense in which God is holy: God is separate and different, not only from humans, but from the other “gods.”
Likewise, the Hebrew people in the Old Testament prized their separation and uniqueness from their neighbors, from the other nations.
As I learned about the background of Hebrew kadosh, it was not much of a leap for me to transfer that theology to Christian faith and practice, and to interpret much of what Jesus did and Paul taught as that same kind of holiness.
In fact, I spent a lot of time in the church trying to create an exclusive club of “holiness” – though I never would have dared call it that – that was pure and beyond reproach, separate from the evil influences of the world. I thought that’s what God was and what God wanted from us. And I think I was supported by a centuries of Christian theology.
In retrospect, for me it was about creating a country club for the spiritually elite, separate from the world and unstained by the world.
You can’t read Jesus, though, and deny that he was about inclusion, not exclusion. He didn’t look for ways to push people away, but for ways to draw people in. He most often stood against those who wanted to make religious belief and practice a litmus test for orthodoxy.
He stood with cheating tax collectors . . . with adultresses caught in the act . . . with the faltering belief of mothers and fathers who had dying children . . . with those beaten beside the road and the renegade foreigners (Samaritans) who cared for them . . . with children in the far country and children who never left home.
It is still the human tendency to separate and exclude. And it is still the Jesus-tendency to draw in and include.
After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. “Follow me,” Jesus said to him, and Levi got up, left everything and followed him.
Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”
Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 32 I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
In my seminary class on the Hebrew language, I had to write a paper that analyzed one Hebrew word that occurred prominently in the Old Testament. I wrote a lengthy paper on the Hebrew word kadosh, which is usually translated “holy.”
I learned that in the Hebrew scriptures, to be holy generally meant to be separate from or different from. That is the sense in which God is holy: God is separate and different, not only from humans, but from the other “gods.”
Likewise, the Hebrew people in the Old Testament prized their separation and uniqueness from their neighbors, from the other nations.
As I learned about the background of Hebrew kadosh, it was not much of a leap for me to transfer that theology to Christian faith and practice, and to interpret much of what Jesus did and Paul taught as that same kind of holiness.
In fact, I spent a lot of time in the church trying to create an exclusive club of “holiness” – though I never would have dared call it that – that was pure and beyond reproach, separate from the evil influences of the world. I thought that’s what God was and what God wanted from us. And I think I was supported by a centuries of Christian theology.
In retrospect, for me it was about creating a country club for the spiritually elite, separate from the world and unstained by the world.
You can’t read Jesus, though, and deny that he was about inclusion, not exclusion. He didn’t look for ways to push people away, but for ways to draw people in. He most often stood against those who wanted to make religious belief and practice a litmus test for orthodoxy.
He stood with cheating tax collectors . . . with adultresses caught in the act . . . with the faltering belief of mothers and fathers who had dying children . . . with those beaten beside the road and the renegade foreigners (Samaritans) who cared for them . . . with children in the far country and children who never left home.
It is still the human tendency to separate and exclude. And it is still the Jesus-tendency to draw in and include.
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