What happens when the heart just stops?
We usually fake it. We fake sympathy, we fake joy, we fake love. Our lips move, but they are so out of sync with our hearts that you’d swear you were watching Ashlee Simpson on Saturday Night Live symbolically re-enacted.
Much of Jesus’s ministry zeroes in on the heart. His reading of Scripture reflects as much.
In one story from Mark 7, Jesus finds himself confronted by a group of Pharisees. These were the zealous keepers of law, who saw strict adherence to it as the mark of true Judaism. Their law determined who was in and who was out. The question for them was, where did Jesus stand? Could he be trusted by them to do things their way?
Evidently not, because on account of his disciples’ “unlawful” behaviour they were forced to ask him,
Jesus replies by transporting the words of Isaiah to the present time:
This quotation highlights a dramatic role reversal not unlike the one seen at Nazareth. The keepers of the law, the ones so scrupulous in their desire to remain uncorrupted, are seen by Jesus to be part of corrupt Israel. And as YHWH judged Israel through Isaiah the prophet, so Jesus was bringing that judgement to a climax through his own ministry.
Unlike much modern usage of Scripture, Jesus did not here employ it to form doctrines or rules to beat others over the head with. That’s not to say doctrines and rules are bad; it’s just that that’s not their purpose. After all, Jesus did not intend to add burdens, but to remove them.
Instead, Jesus reads Scripture in terms of man’s relation to YHWH. We saw this already in the wilderness, where all of his quotations centred on this relationship. The question for the Pharisees was, Where do you stand in relation to the traditions of the elders? The question for Jesus is, Where do you stand in relation to God? Are you far from him, or are you near?
Of course the Pharisees probably thought that meticulous keeping of the traditions reflected right covenant relations with YHWH. For them the two were intertwined. For Jesus, it was a matter of the heart. If our reading of Scripture leads is in any other direction, we are not reading it as Jesus read it.
Finally, his relationship with the Law is again shrouded in mystery here. According to Jesus, it does not matter what food goes into a person’s mouth. This flies in the face of much of what we read in Torah, which speaks at length about what food should and shouldn’t be consumed. And yet Jesus claims elsewhere not to be doing away with The Law, but to be fulfilling it (Matt. 5).
Normally I’d interpret that "fulfillment" as Jesus coming to meticulously keep all of the laws written in Scripture, but Jesus’s words and actions towards the Pharisees and his own reading of Scripture put that interpretation in jeopardy.
We usually fake it. We fake sympathy, we fake joy, we fake love. Our lips move, but they are so out of sync with our hearts that you’d swear you were watching Ashlee Simpson on Saturday Night Live symbolically re-enacted.
Much of Jesus’s ministry zeroes in on the heart. His reading of Scripture reflects as much.
In one story from Mark 7, Jesus finds himself confronted by a group of Pharisees. These were the zealous keepers of law, who saw strict adherence to it as the mark of true Judaism. Their law determined who was in and who was out. The question for them was, where did Jesus stand? Could he be trusted by them to do things their way?
Evidently not, because on account of his disciples’ “unlawful” behaviour they were forced to ask him,
“Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?”
Jesus replies by transporting the words of Isaiah to the present time:
“This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.”
This quotation highlights a dramatic role reversal not unlike the one seen at Nazareth. The keepers of the law, the ones so scrupulous in their desire to remain uncorrupted, are seen by Jesus to be part of corrupt Israel. And as YHWH judged Israel through Isaiah the prophet, so Jesus was bringing that judgement to a climax through his own ministry.
Unlike much modern usage of Scripture, Jesus did not here employ it to form doctrines or rules to beat others over the head with. That’s not to say doctrines and rules are bad; it’s just that that’s not their purpose. After all, Jesus did not intend to add burdens, but to remove them.
Instead, Jesus reads Scripture in terms of man’s relation to YHWH. We saw this already in the wilderness, where all of his quotations centred on this relationship. The question for the Pharisees was, Where do you stand in relation to the traditions of the elders? The question for Jesus is, Where do you stand in relation to God? Are you far from him, or are you near?
Of course the Pharisees probably thought that meticulous keeping of the traditions reflected right covenant relations with YHWH. For them the two were intertwined. For Jesus, it was a matter of the heart. If our reading of Scripture leads is in any other direction, we are not reading it as Jesus read it.
Finally, his relationship with the Law is again shrouded in mystery here. According to Jesus, it does not matter what food goes into a person’s mouth. This flies in the face of much of what we read in Torah, which speaks at length about what food should and shouldn’t be consumed. And yet Jesus claims elsewhere not to be doing away with The Law, but to be fulfilling it (Matt. 5).
Normally I’d interpret that "fulfillment" as Jesus coming to meticulously keep all of the laws written in Scripture, but Jesus’s words and actions towards the Pharisees and his own reading of Scripture put that interpretation in jeopardy.
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