A Constructively Destructive Day One

Mike Leake

187539_cleansing-of-the-temple_lgI’ve always found the Palm Sunday story a tad anti-climactic. There is massive build-up with Jesus riding into town, the people shouting Hosanna. The little header above the text of Mark 11 usually says, “The Triumphal Entry”. It is Messiah coming into his kingdom. And this is what we read:

“And he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple. And when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.”

Maybe he was just tired from a long trip. And tomorrow morning he’ll get to work establishing his kingdom. But what do we read next?

“On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. And he said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it.”

What Mark doesn’t tell us, but other gospel writers do, is that this first little look through the temple is when he cleared it of the moneychangers. It’s day one of Holy Week and Jesus is cursing a fig tree and crafting a whip to run people out of the temple.

The people expected when Messiah came he would rid the land of wickedness. And that typically meant rid the land of any foreign rulers. But here Jesus is doing something different. The King is coming into his kingdom and he is judging fruitless religious leaders.

The King is establishing his kingdom and step one is to root out the imposters.

When the people shouted “save us” they thought it meant from Roman rule. But Jesus spends day one saving them from religious leaders. That should be informative for us.

The Meaning of the Fig Tree

The atheist Bertrand Russell was astonished at this cursing of the fig tree. He said, “I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history.” The conservative scholar T.W. Manson was just as befuddled:

It is a tale of miraculous power wasted in the service of ill-temper (for the supernatural energy employed to blast the unfortunate tree might have bene more usefully expended in forcing a crop of figs out of season); as it stands it is simply incredible.

Wasted power.

It’s actually the opposite. Jesus is using His power to tear down the fruitless fig tree of abusive religion. What was supposed to be a lighthouse was turned into a business. And this did great harm to many people. Jesus spends day one of Holy Week tearing this down.

When we think of this week we tend to think of Jesus’ action of making all things new. We don’t tend to think of Jesus sitting opposite the temple. We think this week is about Jesus building his kingdom. And it is. But on day one he is building in an unexpected way.

His cursing the fig tree, overturning the tables in the temple, isn’t ONLY destructive. It, like the healing of a man with leprosy, is both constructive and deconstructive. It’s destructive to a dead religious system. It’s constructive to a real vibrant union with the God of the universe.

When Jesus turns his back to the temple….when he curses the fig tree…when he overturns the tables…do you know what he’s doing? Do you know what he’s doing for you?

Day one of Holy Week is far from anti-climactic it’s what the rest of the week is built upon; namely, Jesus using His power to rescue the weak and the weary for the glory of God.

Deconstruction and Filling the Gap

Mike Leake

marek-piwnicki-bKYO5IQ2mKI-unsplash

“And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.’ And he divided his property between them.” (Luke 15:12)

When I read that verse I think about the space between those two sentences. Dad give me my inheritance…………dad gives inheritance. What happened in that gap? Think of all the ways in which the father could have responded.

For one, this request is deeply offensive. This is a rejection of the family. He’s walking away from all the family stood for, all that he had been taught. He is taking his Proverbs 6:20-21 necklace and throwing it in the weeds. Does the father bring out the guilt card in an attempt to get the son to fall into order?

It is also evident that this son is acting in foolishness. Does the father raise his voice and point out the ignorance of not only the son’s request but also his inevitable actions? Does the father sternly warn him of his coming demise—reminding him of all the Proverbs and Sirach 33 and what the elders would think of such a thing? Will he use his power and position as a father to keep the son?

Perhaps the father could be passive aggressive. “Fine, if this is what you want then this is what I’ll give you. But this is not going to go well for you and don’t come running back when you run out of money, because I won’t have any.” I suppose the father could also try to shame the younger son by comparing him to his well-behaved older brother. “Why can’t you be like your brother…”

The biblical text gives us nothing in which to fill that gap. Or does it? Can we not learn something from the father’s response to the son returning? He clearly loved his son. Would any of the above options fit the character that we see from this father? Clearly, not. The silence of that gap is intentional. The father took the risk of letting his son have his rumspringa—a time of ‘running around’. And it seems he did in silence.

I believe the silence of that gap is what encouraged the son to return. Do prodigals return to an “I told you so” father? If they are won back by anger and control are they actually won back?

The Gap and Deconstruction

If you aren’t yet familiar with the term “deconstruction” you soon will be. I could try to define it philosophically and quote people like Derrida—but that’d be nerdy and you’d get just as lost as I do when trying to understand philosophers. Besides, the philosophical concept isn’t what people mean these days when they use the term. It’s basically that a whole generation, because of various scandals, abuses, and political wrangling have begun to question whether the faith they were taught is actually believed by those who taught it. How much of this thing we call “faith” is just excess and how much of it actually has to do with Jesus?

Many are trying to untangle a ton of knots and are doing it in the context of a ton of pain. It may not be entirely accurate to call them prodigals—because many aren’t leaving their father’s home in order to party in the far country. To be a bit more accurate many are exploring the far country because the father who taught them all about the faith didn’t seem to believe it himself. They are often leaving the far country on the search for Jesus. In the parable the father’s house is rightly positioned as the place of truth and love. It wouldn’t be accurate to slide evangelicalism neatly into that spot.

Using this parable may not be exactly a one-to-one correspondence, but I do believe there is much to learn. I think we can learn from the older brother as well as the father. Many of the responses I outlined earlier are typical of how someone might respond to a person asking for the inheritance and leaving the home of evangelicalism. And those responses, I would argue, have more in common with the older brother than they do the father. The father is the one we need to learn from in this parable. And I see two actions the father makes which can help us as we navigate this season of deconstruction.

Lessons From the Father

Again, I do not want to imply that evangelicalism has the truth market cornered. There are excesses and a type of deconstruction does need to happen. We aren’t consistent. In the parable there is nothing but pig slop in the far country. It’d fit well with our typical arrogance to neatly position ourselves as the father’s house but we evangelicals need to acknowledge that we have pig slop on our own farms and there might be more of Jesus out in the far country.

Having said that I do think there is some correlation here to the prodigal. There are some things being picked up in the far country that do not belong in the father’s house. You’ll notice in the text that though the father clearly loved the son he did not turn his home into the far country in order to keep him.

The Father will always remain true to Himself. He doesn’t have a wax nose that shifts with whatever our fallen inclinations are treasuring in the moment. He remains the treasure. He must remain our standard of truth. And we must remain steadfast to the truth as we see it in Jesus.

But we also need to prepare the soil for the prodigals return. There is famine and pig slop out there. Just as an evangelical obsession with power is collapsing, so also other worldviews seeking to fill that void will inevitably collapse. They too will experience famine.

I think this is why that gap is silent. The father knew it would eventually collapse and he wanted the road on which the prodigal would return to be void of roadblocks. He wanted his love to be the last thing the prodigal remembered as he walked out the door and into the far country.

Conclusion  

Truthfully, if our community looks more like the elder brother in the story then the prodigal probably isn’t going to return. And that isn’t a bad thing. The elder brother remains in the house but he’s just as far off from the father as the prodigal was. Tim Keller is correct:

“If, like the elder brother, you seek to control God through your obedience, then all your morality is just a way to use God to make him give you the things in life you really want.” (Keller, 39)

Filling that gap with elder brother responses isn’t going to bring back the prodigal, nor do you even gain much if you convinced him to stay. You’d just further encase his heart to the “far country” even if he stays in your house.

I also write this as an encouragement. I believe if you do have communities that are marked by the father—lovingly preparing soil for their return while remaining steadfast in truth, then there is a day coming soon when you’ll likely see a busy highway of returning prodigals.

But this is where we need to acknowledge that not a one of us is actually the father in this parable. It’s not our mud houses that we want people to return to, it’s the Father.

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From One Table To Another, Or How to Change An Opinion

Mike Leake

pexels-photo-631411I want to make a modern-day Matthew (Levi). But we aren’t as united as they were in first century Jerusalem. If you wanted to provide a stock image of a hated member of society a tax collector was an obvious one. Pharisees and Sadducees and Essenes had bitter debates about things like the resurrection of the dead, which books should be considered Scripture, etc. But one thing they didn’t seem to debate was that tax collectors were goons.

There were two types of tax collectors. The first type was the general tax collectors—they collected things like property tax, income tax, and poll tax. These were a fixed rate and usually collected by Romans.

The second type of tax collector was the one who would tax everything. (This was somewhat similar to our sales tax today but it wasn’t a fixed rate). The way these tax collectors made their money was in whatever they could squeeze out of the people. They’d give what was due to Rome and then pocket the rest. The more corrupt they were the more money they could make. Rome didn’t care what kind of tax these locals charged so long as they got their cut.

Matthew was the second type of tax collector. Now some of these types of tax collectors would be like a chief tax collector they’d hire others to do their dirty biding. If you remember Zaccheus he was one of these. But not Matthew. Matthew was one of the little guys who did his own thing—who set up his own lemonade stand and milked his own people out of their hard earned dollars.

Needless to say tax collectors were hated and despised. Not only were they daily reminders of Roman domination they were just crooked and dirty. Many Jews considered submission to Rome to be treason against God. And so to sell out like Matthew had done—this is just unthinkable. How could someone do such a thing? What kind of person is this? The Mishnah and the Talmud (Jewish writings) had whole sections dogging on tax collectors—and lumping them in with thieves and murderers. It was actually ruled by Jewish rabbis that it was okay—lawful even—to lie to tax collectors.

Making a Modern Day Matthew

So how do I make a modern-day Matthew. Do I make him a liberal and pull out all the characteristics that would make my right-wing audience easily identify him as a goon? What position do I have our Modern Day Matthew take on sexuality? What about immigration reform? Offshore-drilling? This Matthew is sold out to the “leftist” culture. Maybe I can call him a cultural Marxist or throw out a couple terms like “woke”.

Or do I go the other path? Do I have him sitting at a table selling MAGA material and being a fully convinced Christian Nationalist? What is his position on gun control, women’s rights, etc? Do I make him abusive and controlling? This Matthew is sold out on the right-wing of things. Maybe I can call him a misogynist or a white supremacist or something.

Does everyone sufficiently hate our Matthew now? If I haven’t done a good enough job of painting a picture then here is a box of crayons—do the work yourself and come back in a moment.

Here is a question for us. How would you encourage change for Matthew? Picture the meme of the guy with a cup of coffee and a sign that tells you that you’ve got five minutes to convince him. What do you do?

The World of the Real Matthew

The world in which the real Matthew lived had an answer for this:

Repent.

Change your life, stop being such a lying, thieving, cheat. And then maybe God will have something to do with you. Study Torah (start reading your Bible) and get your life cleaned up so that maybe you won’t be such a piece of scum.

That was Matthew’s world. Even if wanted to repent—there wasn’t much of a way for him to do this. It was engrained in him that this was who he was. He’d always be a bum. Folks like Matthew tend to just buckle and fully embrace their identity, maybe trying to justify it or sanctify it a little.

You pass by Matthew’s tax collector booth as a good and righteous person who has all of the greatest opinions on all of the things and you spend your five minutes telling him he needs to turn his life around. If our social media accounts are any indication this isn’t a stretch. How many times is “do better” our mantra?

But there’s a different way…

The Jesus Way

My guess is that Matthew was just as much a “do-good” legalist as the rest of the bunch. He’d just given up on the game. He just accepted his identity as a sinner. That’s how the world was divided.

The righteous were the ones who worked hard to follow God. The sinners are the ones who didn’t. We see this in Mark 3:16. The word for “sinners” is one that really just means common folk—those people who don’t give themselves to studying the Torah 24/7. The less-thans. The outcasts. The ones that don’t pass the muster. The ones who fail every religious test.

But Jesus blows that system up. Yes, there are still categories of righteous and sinners—but what did Jesus say, “Only God is righteous”. And so Jesus—being God—is the only one in the righteous category and everyone else is in the other category. In order to be made righteous it doesn’t happen through effort it happens through our relationship to Jesus.

You see this in Jesus’ call of Levi/Matthew. Follow me!

That’s the Jesus way. It’s radically different. It’s not “change your stinking ways so you can become righteous”. It’s, “follow me, and I’ll make you righteous.” Righteousness happens through connection and relationship to Jesus.

He does leave his tax collector booth. You can’t really follow Jesus and cling to your table. But there is something else going on here in that Jesus is now willing to be identified with this tax collector.

And once Matthew leaves his own table he’s immediately invited to another table—this one filled with Jesus and a bunch of other outcasts and “sinners”. Legalism will always dismiss the Lord’s table and try to turn it into something they can control.

Legalism looks at transformation and the gospel doing work in someone, it looks at Jesus reaching sinners and says, “What kind of man identifies with sinners like this?” What kind of religious leader is this? Sinners and tax collectors like Matthew have no hope of ever becoming righteous. But the problem is, neither do the Pharisees and scribes. They too are sinners but they don’t have the capacity to see it.

Here is the conclusion:

You want to see transformation happen with the guy sitting at the table with an opinion that ticks you off? Maybe try inviting him/her to another table. And you might just find that he’s not the only one who changes sitting at the Jesus table.

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How We Lost the Conversation on Human Sexuality

Mike Leake

photo-1625480857953-700f9cac1582“Father, why’d you get so upset at that man who helped the lady?”

Everyone else seemed to be celebrating at synagogue when the visiting teacher had helped Miss Ruth. But not his dad. His father, a religious leader, was indignant at the traveling teacher. Rather than celebrating he rebuked the congregation, and not so subtly the teacher. It sure put a damper on Miss Ruth’s great day.

It wouldn’t have added to the conversation to admit that he’d also been part of the group who had been teasing the strange lady who seemed to always be staring at the floor. Joshua remained silent on this point, but he was abundantly curious about his father’s rebuke of what seemed like a work of God.

“I was upset, Joshua, because the Law matters, the temple matters and holiness matters. It is very clear in our Law that we are not supposed to do work on Sabbath. This woman had been disabled for 18 years. If this teacher was authentic he would have waited until sundown to do his healing. It could have waited.”

This answer didn’t make much sense to Joshua. Had he been a little younger his father would have been dealt a barrage of ad infinitum “why” questions. But he was older and had to be more cautious in his approach.

“Why is it okay to help somebody on one day but not another?”

Joshua’s father tried to explain.

“You see, Joshua, there was a time when our temple was destroyed, our homeland was razed, and we were carried off into a foreign land. All of this was because HaShem (the Name) was displeased because we did not honor him. We were guilty of things like profaning the Sabbath. When we returned to the land our fathers wanted to make certain we did not break the Law anymore.”

“You mean like making sure people didn’t get healed on the wrong day,” Joshua interjected perhaps a bit too forcibly.

“No! We do this because we want to honor the Sabbath.”

Josh interjects a bit more forcefully this time, “But how does that honor the Sabbath!”

Josh is beginning to get a bit more heated as the cognitive dissonance ratchets up. He starts thinking about all the rules his family has lived by, rules about tying knots, picking up sticks, writing letters, number of steps taken. It is all starting to collapse for him.

His father tries a bit harder to bring Josh back to the family way. “It honors the Sabbath because that’s what we are called by God to do! It is clear from the Law that this should have waited for tomorrow!!!!”

“I just don’t understand, father, where do you read this? Where in the Law does it say this?”

Josh’s father grabs out a scroll and points to Leviticus 23 and then another from Exodus. “Here, Josh! It’s clear. Read it, son. Do not disgrace your father.” They read the scroll:

‘For six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, a holy convocation. You shall do no work. It is a Sabbath to the LORD in all your dwelling places.”

“See, son. The Law is clear. That is why I was so angry with that woman and the teacher. They profaned the Sabbath. To not confront this could have made all of us guilty.”

Josh walks away, rolling his eyes, and wondering why his dad just doesn’t get it. 

When You Forget the Why

One of the most valuable lessons I learned in seminary came from Dr. Donald Whitney in a class on spiritual disciplines. On the class schedule there were two days marked “fasting”. We were required to fast.

I’ll be honest, I bristled at this being on the calendar. It felt really stupid and legalistic. Fasting didn’t seem like the type of thing you should do for a grade in a class. We were supposed to do the fast and write our experience in a journal.

The day came for the first fast. We hadn’t been taught a single thing about the practice, just that we had to do it. I did it, but rather begrudgingly. I tried praying some. Tried muscling through it and making at least some spiritually profound lesson out of it. In truth, it was terrible and it was a mostly empty experience.

When we came to class I was kind of surprised to hear Dr. Whitney say something like, “That was pretty bad wasn’t it?” And that’s when he taught us the lesson:

Discipline without direction is drudgery.

We didn’t know why we were fasting. We didn’t have any purpose to it. We didn’t know a theology of fasting. It was just a discipline without any direction. Much like “Honor the Sabbath”.

That’s what happened to Josh’s dad. He had lost the core of why they even honored the Sabbath. It lost the heart of what it was supposed to be symbolizing. It wasn’t about dependence upon God—it was about completing an assignment.

And because Josh had gotten a tiny taste of the freedom from this teacher who healed Miss Ruth on the Sabbath, things he had been taught his whole life stopped making sense. He saw through the ritual and all he heard was a guy yelling at a lady whom he’d always known as being a bit weird.

When you move away from the heart of why you end up being the type of person who yells at redemption rather than rejoices. You can be angry with the substance because you’ve become hyper-focused on a shadow. He is indignant at Messiah when he should have been celebratory.

And the next generation will either see this duplicity and run away or they will double down on it. But here’s the shame of the whole thing. Those who run away aren’t ever running away from the substance which is at the core. And those who double down aren’t doubling down on that which is at the heart of the matter but they go all-in on the periphery. 

Now, let’s bring this story up to date a little…

Why Does It Matter What Consenting Adults Do?

“Dad, why were you yelling about those two guys holding hands. Isn’t love what Jesus was all about?”

“Son, the Bible is very clear…one man, one woman…”

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Now, there are differences between our two stories. But the conversation itself is very similar.

If you went to a youth group in the 1990s or early 2000s you likely had some sort of True Love Waits campaign. Purity culture came as a result of the cultural obsession with human sexuality.

The church responded in a way similar to the Pharisees of the days of Jesus. We built fences around certain biblical commands for purity. And those fences started becoming part of the Law itself. Some teens didn’t actually break any explicit commands in Scripture but were condemned as if they had.

Then when the conversation turned to issues of gender identity, same-sex relationships, etc. some within the church doubled-down on the rules and others simply walked away. Neither of which, I would argue, are actually dealing with the core issues of human sexuality. We aren’t having conversations about why God might say certain things about our sexuality. And how our flourishing might be an aim. We’ve lost the ability to ask tough questions on these matters.

“Why does it matter what two consenting adults do…” shows us how far the conversation has moved from the central concerns of human sexuality. If we want to have a meaningful conversation with the Josh’s in our life then we’re going to have to work overtime to get the conversation back to the core.

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