False Hope

Are you a Christian?  What makes you say so?

Many people who identify themselves as Christian say so because it’s their religious preference based mostly on their place of birth.  Born in a country where Christianity dominates the religious landscape, it’s the easiest option.  Some are born into a more religious family, and therefore simply adopt the family faith.  Others remember coming to a decision at some point when they went through some sort of a process of discovery that led them to make a profession of faith that they believe in God understood through the lens of Christianity.  Some remember choosing Christ as a personal savior.  All of these things lead people to declare themselves Christian.

When Jesus was about to make his entrance on the world with his ministry, Christianity didn’t exist.  Judaism, however, did.  Jesus was Jewish, as was his cousin, John the Baptist.  John saw himself as a precursor to Jesus, and his ministry was to prepare people for Jesus’ work to come.  Lots of people in their neck of the woods were hoping for God to send a messiah – one anointed by God – to deliver them from Roman oppression.  A few self-proclaimed messiahs popped up before and after Jesus performed his ministry in the world.  The apocalyptic hope they all had included God rewriting the script humanity had penned.  Judgment would come on those who were enemies of God, and salvation in all its fullness would come for the Jewish people.

John, in his preaching, certainly asked his audience in a variety of ways, are you Jewish?
Most would say yes.  They were born in the Jewish homeland, to Jewish parents.  They went through the paces that kids went through back then to discover the tenets of their faith.  They professed their faith.  Of course they were Jewish.  Right?

Take a moment and read Luke 3:7-17.

John obviously missed the course on speech writing, right?  Insulting your audience is generally a bad way to begin a speech…  What was John getting at?

Short and simple, John was telling his self-proclaimed Jewish audience that they weren’t as Jewish as they thought.  Their DNA, their family ties, even their childhood profession really amounted to nothing.  God was about to deliver something new and big, and those who thought they were going to be on the winning side were about to be swallowed up in a consuming fire.  Their hope based on their religious affiliation was false.  John was challenging a human tendency that we face today: is faith about having the right belief?

John was telling his listeners that they were missing the point.  The rabbis of their day would study the Law, and use it to interpret who should receive grace and mercy.  This approach lent itself to interpreting the scriptures to suit their own worldview, biases, preferences, and prejudice.  They were known for determining who was in and who was out.  This way of thinking was not really what the Jewish faith was all about, however.  What was being perpetuated was rule following as a means to keep God appeased.  It was a way of earning God’s favor.  And it was fundamentally off point.

Jesus would continue this line of thinking, turbo-charged.  It was not that the Law was wrong, but that the rabbis reversed the process, which was causing lots of problems.  The way Jesus taught was that grace and mercy were the lens through which we interpret the Law, not the other way around.  One way sees people’s neediness as a sign of their sin and justification of their plight and therefore a means of rationalizing our lack of support, stinginess, apathy, and even disgust.  The other way sees helping people in need as in sync with the heartbeat of God, which forces a different rendering of the Law.  One starts with the Law, the other starts with a merciful spirit.  The Apostle Paul would later say that the Law leads to death, while the spirit leads to life.

John was livid with some in his audience who were resting on their laurels of right belief while people around them suffered as they looked the other way.  John was basically saying that they weren’t Jewish at all – at least not the kind of Jewish that would have any saving effect on them.  If they wanted to be saved, they needed to be Jewish, not just give intellectual ascent to Jewish theology.  Furthermore, the action he called for, while at first glance seemed easy enough, actually forced a break in his audience’s belief system.  John’s demand required a level of sacrifice that forced people to come to grips with who they really were and what they were really all about.  The Jewish label was worthless.  What mattered was how Jewish they were.  For regular people, this meant that if they had an extra coat when someone around them needed a coat, they had to give it up – because that’s what being Jewish, being in sync with the heartbeat of God was all about.  For tax collectors who had purchased the right to gouge people for whatever they could get, it meant they scaled back their lifestyle to accommodate fair taxation.  For the soldiers who enforced that taxation who had been known to use their position to beat money out of people to line their own pockets well beyond the salary they agreed to. Being Jewish required them to stop such things and live with integrity.  Each and every demand required a significant level of sacrifice.  A level that challenges comfort.  A level that pushes a person toward deep thought.

I used to have a fairly callous attitude toward “idiots” who didn’t take faith at all seriously.  They were offending God, missing the point of life, and making the world a worse place, not better.  My distance from them allowed me to judge them easily.  That didn’t change until I lived enough to become an idiot myself.  After I lived like those idiots for some time, and realized that my decisions were based on my brokenness more than anything else, I didn’t see them as idiots anymore.  I saw them as people really struggling with life.  I related to them, and I began caring about them.  The longer I live, the more I relate to different kinds of people.  When I struggled years ago feeling like a failure and the depression that brings, it helped me relate to those who struggle with the same.  When I had a serious back problem a few years ago, I related to people with chronic pain in ways I never could have imagined.  All of this relating to people’s situation resulted in greater compassion.

John, and Jesus after him, were shouting as loud as they could to stop looking at people from a distance and come close, understand and relate, and respond in sync with God.  That’s being Jewish.  That kind of Jewishness offers real hope, because it is founded on relationship with God, not simply rule following.
When the fire of judgment comes, it is welcomed by those who seek to be in sync with God, for it means that all of our personal chaff – the sin that hinders and entangles us – will be burned off, making us more pure, more able to be in relationship with God.  We long to get rid of these old clothes and put on heavenly clothes, as Paul stated.  For those who don’t really want to be burdened by relationship with God – just let me follow the rules – the fire of judgment is pure hell, because all that we cling to that is not of God gets fried.  We don’t really want God or the God-honoring parts – we cherish the stuff that helps us be isolated and comfortable.  Our greed, our selfishness, our convenient worldviews that prop us up in opposition to whoever we deem our enemies – we identify ourselves with it all.  But since those things are out of sync with the heart of God, it’s toast.  In this line of thinking, judgment and grace are two sides of the same coin, both are parts of the same refiner’s fire which is here and coming.

The fire is always burning, and we feel it all the time, really.  It melts away areas we are grateful for, yet scorches where we are defiant.  We can all tell stories about this reality that has been in play throughout our lives.

So, are you a Christian?  Do you know what I am asking?  Are you truly a little Christ – the literal meaning of Christian?  Or are you banking on the false hope provided by being born in a land where Christianity is the prevailing religion, or into a religious family, or lip service uttered at some point?  Do you get that these do not deliver anything at all?  That banking on this false hope just makes the flames hotter and higher?  Are you truly born again into a new way of being in relationship with God and in a graceful relationship with the world?


Are you a Christian?  Do those in myriad form of need sharing life with you on this planet think you are a Christian?  Do your actions speak of a close relationship with God which in turn takes you into relationship with those who struggle which in turns leads you to compassion akin to that found in the very nature of God?