Monday, October 9, 2017
569 - Stuck in the Middle
Spirituality Column No. 569
October 10, 2017
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Stuck in the Middle
By Bob Walters
He was never stuck for an answer or stuck for the truth. And when it came to good and evil Jesus
Christ spent no time treading the middle ground.
Don’t we
all wish we could say the same assured, virtuous thing about our sometimes
tongue-tied and sin equivocating selves?
Think of the Apostle Paul in Romans 7:15-20, “…doing what I don’t want to do and not doing what I should do …” Jesus – the authority of all creation, the
embodiment of God’s Kingdom, the fulfillment of the Law, the author of all
wisdom, fully God and fully man – never had that problem.
But let’s not stew in our own
shortcomings over how we are less than Jesus. We are, and that’s OK. Instead let’s examine how Jesus unfailingly
blended mercy with righteousness, shrewdness with truthfulness, God’s power
with humanity’s weakness, never expressed neutrality about anything, and was
never mistaken about anything.
Christ’s ministry was God’s
absolute expression of right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, and grace vs. the
Law. And almost nobody wanted to hear
it. His parables picked apart Jewish
traditions, enraging the Pharisees who lived by them. When in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew
5-6-7) Jesus repeatedly asserted, “You
have heard it said … but I say …” He was redefining the Kingdom of God
which the Jews were certain resided in the Law. They were overlooking, unaware, and refusing
to believe that Jesus – with love, grace, humility, and mercy – was the
fulfillment of the Law.
Salvation, Jesus was saying, was
real and attainable and a gift of pure divine love, not a function of legal
obedience. True salvation brought
forgiveness of sins, joy in this world through faith in Jesus and the
trustworthiness of God, and eternal glorious life in the true heaven of the
true God. Salvation was an explanation –
it is the only explanation – of
life’s truest purpose: our loving relationship with God who created us in His
image, expressed in this life by faithful, selfless love for God and our fellow
man.
Jesus never wavered from that
message of love and sacrifice, though it was the antithesis of how the Jews
thought the Law worked. Mercy was the real
message of Jesus and caring for our neighbor was the true fulfillment of the
Law (Good Samaritan parable, Luke 10:25-37).
Jesus forever brings relationship; the Law always builds pride, judgment,
hate, and separation from our neighbors.
That’s the ominous lesson of the Old Testament. The Law was not a waste of time; it was a
lesson man had to learn.
Our problem
today may not be that we are wishy-washy; it may be that we sacrifice mercy at
the expense of righteousness. That’s
what the Pharisees and pious Jews did with the Law, and they killed Jesus for
it. Today we have cultural Pharisees
with incomplete love who misjudge good and evil and navigate God’s Kingdom
poorly.
Political Correctness, as my friend
and teacher George Bebawi notes, is modern society’s attempt to be neutral
between good and evil.
Please listen, Christians … you’ll
never find Jesus in the middle.
Walters
(rlwcom@aol.com) craves generosity and politeness but sees
P.C. as a controlling secular exercise ignoring obvious truth, not a divine function
of true mercy.
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