The Power of the Imaginative Story: Matthew (part 4)

The ancient laws chronicled in the Old Testament often confound people. It’s not just the Ten Commandments, but also the myriad of dietary/social/economic laws that fill the pages of books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy (not most people’s preferences for devotional reading). The laws seem to us to be mostly irrelevant in our time and provide us with clear evidence of the fruitlessness of legalism when it comes to pleasing God.

Or, could it be that something else is going on here?

Imagine the ancient Hebrew people as they suffered through generations of slavery under the yoke of the Pharaoh in Egypt. After their rescue under Moses’s leadership, they wandered in the wilderness for a long time before landing in a place that would become their homeland. What was going on for them in that long sojourn?

They were being reformed.

The lens through which the people saw the world would be colored by their experiences of captivity in Egypt. Their religious views would be as permeated by Egyptian mythology as much as it was by early Semitic worship practices. How would they move from a people oriented around slavery to a people with a destiny crafted and energized by the God of the universe?

They would be reformed by adherence to laws that would reorient every aspect of their lives. They would be required to think in new ways about human relationships and interactions, the nature of life-giving work, the purpose and effects of communal worship, and care for the world around them. It would take a great deal of reorientation to extract the mentality of slavery from the people and to reorient them around the presence of the God who had rescued them from Egypt.

And Jesus sits on the side of the mountain and tells his disciples, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”

It appears that, for Jesus, the law and the prophets were not static propositions but rather signs and wonders that continuously directed the people into the living presence of God. Yet the law had become rigid and life-draining in Jesus’ day, framed by the religious elite as measurements of personal righteousness, a righteousness attained by disciplined adherence to the ancient code of Moses.

And Jesus must have startled his followers when, after affirming the authority and purposefulness of the law and the prophets, he warns of a distortion that was evidenced in the Jewish religious leadership of the day:

“For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

And what comes next will shake people’s understanding of righteousness for centuries to come.

A Lenten Reflection for February 22, 2013

So now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you? Only to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the Lord your God and his decrees that I am commanding you today, for your own well-being. Although heaven and the heaven of heavens belong to the Lord your God, the earth with all that is in it, yet the Lord set his heart in love on your ancestors alone and chose you, their descendants after them, out of all the peoples, as it is today. (Deuteronomy 10:12-15)

Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest . . . (Hebrews 4:11a)


Our Sunday night church services when I was young were aimed at getting people to come forward to the altar for prayer. Once there, a group of the fine old saints would gather to pray for those who were brave enough to make the journey up front, signaling to the congregation that something was amiss and needed to be fixed (I made that trip often). There was a comfort in that experience, but it was also occasionally confusing, as one would encourage the seeker to “hold on!” while another would urge, “let go!” I never quite knew which one to do, and sometimes feared I would let go when I should have held on and end up making God mad at me.

The writer of Hebrews comes close to creating that kind of confusion in admonishing the readers to “make every effort to enter that rest.” Rest is rest, isn’t it? To rest is to take a break from one’s labors. Yet we are told to exert effort in order to enter rest. Seems counter-intuitive at first.

But the rest isn’t one of disengagement, it seems. Moses speaks to the ancient Hebrews about God’s historic love for them and his choosing of them “out of all the peoples.” In that choosing they are to exert effort in service and obedience. This choosing is a bit like how we see the ordination of a priest or pastor: One is called out from among the people to lead the people in the way of the Lord. In a similar way, the Hebrew people were chosen, not to the exclusion of the world, but for the sake of the world. They were to be the light on the hill that would draw the world to God. That was their rest. And it’s ours as well.

If my effort is one of trying to curry God’s favor and rack up celestial points, then it becomes legalism. If my effort is one of posturing and power-grabbing in order to show others that I have attained sainthood, then it becomes hypocritical abuse. But if my effort is one of love, devotion, and service, then I just might find rest there.

The writer of Hebrews leaves us with a call to redemptive rest as we follow Jesus, the one who carries the ultimate ordination:

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:15-16)