Jesus the Ill-Advised
Sometimes I visit Mere Comments, a blog for the online journal Touchstone. Both are really pretty conservative, so I don't usually bring stuff back from there to here, but just the same, what is there can sometime give me a different slant on things. The journal and blog are from The Fellowship of St. James, a non-profit org. Below is the first part of the latest blog post at Mere Comments - kind of interesting ...
Jesus the Ill-Advised
As Christians we are called upon to “speak the truth in love.” This is commonly translated to mean that if you have something unpleasant to say to someone by way of correction, you must say it nicely—gently and kindly. There is something to that interpretation, and we will never go wrong if we enlist gentleness, kindness, good humor, and the golden rule as guardians of our speech and writing.
But that, of course, is not all there is to be said on the matter. The gospels provide us examples of our Lord’s intercourse with many different kinds of people. He is presented, if we may say it, as a deeply serious man who always had everyone’s highest good—their salvation—in mind, saying and doing what was needful, no more and no less, to deliver his point. This means he usually appears to our eyes as gentle, for the souls that were open to him were most often injured, damaged by sin and sorrow, and clearly the Lord followed the physician’s maxim primus non nocere—first, do no harm. With the prostitutes, the used camel salesmen, the lay sectarians, the petty bureaucrats, the soldiers, the average folks, struggling to get by in the world, the prosperous for whom something was missing, he showed himself grave, caring, and kind.
There was a class of people, however, for whom speaking the truth in love—for we hold his speech, by definition, to be truth and love--often involved delivering some of the rawest, most vitriolic insults and condemnations that literature has ever recorded coming from someone (as Bertrand Russell pointedly observed) purported to be a good man. These were delivered exclusively to men of his own class—the religious leaders--the bishops, denominational officials, the seminary professors, the certified teachers of and writers upon religion. It is hard in our day not to regard ancient Semitic locutions like “brood of vipers,” and “whitewashed tombs” as colorful and quaint, thus missing the original force of the epithets on the hearers, for whom no more crude or insulting, not to mention unkind and unhelpful, words could be imagined.
The fundamental problem was their teaching. They were not only theological innovators, misinterpreting and misrepresenting the ancient law, but to increase their own status, power, and advantage, they had established, bureaucratized, and sacralized their innovations, ruling the people over whom God had given them charge by making him into an idol in their own service. This was true of all their parties. (That is why it is difficult to apply “liberal,” “conservative,” or “sectarian,” in the sense we normally use these terms to this group, taken as a whole, for they combined elements of each.)
It was this doctoral class of which Jesus would have been a member, and in which he would have been careful to remain collegial, had he been more concerned for his place in the world. While he recognized its office as divinely ordained, for that very reason he consistently denounced the doctrine and conduct of its incumbents in the strongest imaginable terms.
Alas, though, had he been more practical, he would have recognized that attacking the church leaders in the way he did was apt to throw faithful into confusion. He would have contented himself to raise the standard of truth, trusting they would recognize and flock to it, without the highly questionable and deeply problematic expedient of deposing, for all practical purposes, a large, powerful, and highly influential portion of the magisterium. He would have understood the importance of church unity better than he evidently did--that given the choice between heresy and misconduct on one hand and schism on the other, the former was preferable. He wouldn’t have been so apparently enamored of the notion that one should do the right thing and let the chips fall where they may ...
- read the rest of the post here
- cover art from The Fellowship of St. James website
Jesus the Ill-Advised
As Christians we are called upon to “speak the truth in love.” This is commonly translated to mean that if you have something unpleasant to say to someone by way of correction, you must say it nicely—gently and kindly. There is something to that interpretation, and we will never go wrong if we enlist gentleness, kindness, good humor, and the golden rule as guardians of our speech and writing.
But that, of course, is not all there is to be said on the matter. The gospels provide us examples of our Lord’s intercourse with many different kinds of people. He is presented, if we may say it, as a deeply serious man who always had everyone’s highest good—their salvation—in mind, saying and doing what was needful, no more and no less, to deliver his point. This means he usually appears to our eyes as gentle, for the souls that were open to him were most often injured, damaged by sin and sorrow, and clearly the Lord followed the physician’s maxim primus non nocere—first, do no harm. With the prostitutes, the used camel salesmen, the lay sectarians, the petty bureaucrats, the soldiers, the average folks, struggling to get by in the world, the prosperous for whom something was missing, he showed himself grave, caring, and kind.
There was a class of people, however, for whom speaking the truth in love—for we hold his speech, by definition, to be truth and love--often involved delivering some of the rawest, most vitriolic insults and condemnations that literature has ever recorded coming from someone (as Bertrand Russell pointedly observed) purported to be a good man. These were delivered exclusively to men of his own class—the religious leaders--the bishops, denominational officials, the seminary professors, the certified teachers of and writers upon religion. It is hard in our day not to regard ancient Semitic locutions like “brood of vipers,” and “whitewashed tombs” as colorful and quaint, thus missing the original force of the epithets on the hearers, for whom no more crude or insulting, not to mention unkind and unhelpful, words could be imagined.
The fundamental problem was their teaching. They were not only theological innovators, misinterpreting and misrepresenting the ancient law, but to increase their own status, power, and advantage, they had established, bureaucratized, and sacralized their innovations, ruling the people over whom God had given them charge by making him into an idol in their own service. This was true of all their parties. (That is why it is difficult to apply “liberal,” “conservative,” or “sectarian,” in the sense we normally use these terms to this group, taken as a whole, for they combined elements of each.)
It was this doctoral class of which Jesus would have been a member, and in which he would have been careful to remain collegial, had he been more concerned for his place in the world. While he recognized its office as divinely ordained, for that very reason he consistently denounced the doctrine and conduct of its incumbents in the strongest imaginable terms.
Alas, though, had he been more practical, he would have recognized that attacking the church leaders in the way he did was apt to throw faithful into confusion. He would have contented himself to raise the standard of truth, trusting they would recognize and flock to it, without the highly questionable and deeply problematic expedient of deposing, for all practical purposes, a large, powerful, and highly influential portion of the magisterium. He would have understood the importance of church unity better than he evidently did--that given the choice between heresy and misconduct on one hand and schism on the other, the former was preferable. He wouldn’t have been so apparently enamored of the notion that one should do the right thing and let the chips fall where they may ...
- read the rest of the post here
- cover art from The Fellowship of St. James website
posted by crystal | 12:04 PM
3 Comments:
Jesus part of the doctoral class? Religious leaders? BISHOPS?!?!
What happened to the workman's son from Galilee? The hick from the country?
I did not think Jesus was part of the priestly class.
And I've been hearing that Jesus might well have been a Pharisee (as Paul certainly was). He attacked their teachings more because they were detracting from the spirit of the Law with their emphasis on ritual purity. Many of the arguments we read in the Gospels might have been the back and forth method of teaching that was common (and still is) among certain rabbis.
I dunno. Jesus as a member of the religious class? It just doesn't seem like the guy I read about in the Gospels. Maybe I'm misundertanding this, though?
Hi Talmda :-)
I don't know much about this myself, but I'd side with your opinion ... Jesus seems like a religious outsider to me. Maybe the writer was being rhetorical for effect?
I think Jesus was very much anchored and located inside his religious tradition of Judaism, but took exception to the abuse of the powerless by the powerful in whatever the setting was. These early Christians were apocalyptic people. They expected to see God's justice done, and they expected to see it any any moment.
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