We're on Each Other's Team

Not everyone who says to me, "Lord, Lord," will enter the kingdom of heaven, 

but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.

-Matthew 7:21

Today is Maundy Thursday, which I thought growing up was Monday Thursday, and that seemed strange.  Maundy is derived from the Latin word mandatum, which means "mandate."  Jesus has called his disciples, taught them what they needed to know, and now, before the suffering and death, before the resurrection, he gives them their purpose.

In most of the modern protestant formulations of Christianity we have emphasized the idea of salvation by grace through faith.  This was a reaction to the medieval Roman Catholic Church and the practice of  "works righteousness" where you could work your way out of your sins with acts of penance (the most particularly repugnant to reformers was giving a whole bunch of money to the church in exchange for forgiveness of sins). 

Theological ideas, like most human constructions, tend to swing like a pendulum, an initial impetus pushes an idea in one direction and it moves, then most often it gets to a place where the inertia of the initial impulse simply runs out and the pendulum begins to swing back the other way.  The reaction against works righteousness and the simultaneous rise of individualism have created a bit of a monster: a brand of Christianity that stridently preaches the Gospel of "giving your heart to Jesus," but only sporadically challenges people to live into the transformative power of that affirmation.  And so you have millions of people who strongly self-identify as Christian, but who have only a thumbnail sketch in their mind of what Jesus actually said and did.

I used to hate group projects.  I used to hate getting randomly assigned to work with a bunch of other people on something or other and finding out that half the "team" thought meetings were more or less optional.  It has taken me years and is an on going discipline in my life to learn to work with and accept the way other people work.  In pastoral work, it's tempting to wish for a congregation full of dedicated disciples, all of whom hold solid theology and all of whom are striving for the kingdom in the best sense of the word.  Then I have to be convicted of the naivety of that desire, and I have to learn, over and over how to work with what I've got.

Remember a couple of years ago when Lebron James left Cleveland for Miami?  People in Cleveland burned his jersey and generally wanted to strangle him, but people everywhere else pretty much understood why he was leaving, even if they didn't particularly care for the, "I'm taking my talents to South Beach," TV extravaganza.  He looked around a the Cleveland Cavaliers and he saw a team that, without him, was going absolutely nowhere, and even with him was only ever going to get close but no cigar.  He understood that even as preternaturally talented as he is, basketball is a team game, and to win the big prize you have to have teammates.  He didn't like the teammates he had there and he liked the teammates in Miami a lot better.  Lucky for us, Jesus was a different sort of King.

When I read articles and blogs, or hear first hand stories about why people have left or are leaving the church, I can feel in my guts that the criticism of the Body of Christ is all fairly well deserved.  Churches and their people can be annoying, misguided and sometimes downright toxic.  We are full of sloppy theology, intolerant and dogmatic positions, loose organizational controls and sometimes just downright laziness.

Then I remember that Judas and Peter were both part of the Mandate.  The betrayer and the denier were both there when Jesus broke the bread and made the New Covenant.  Peter was going to make amends, but Judas?  Yes, Judas.  This gets really messy.

Judas had some messy work to do, but I suspect he's not the villain that Dante made him out to be.  I suspect that Judas is just like many people in Christian churches all over the world, who think that they are advancing the cause, and maybe he is, but I suspect not in the way he imagined.  The explanation that I like best about why Judas betrays Jesus is not the greed angle, it's the zealot angle.  I think that Judas was trying to force Jesus' hand and get the rebellion started, I think he really thought that once the palace guards were there to arrest Jesus, the gloves would come off and the Messianic butt-whooping would commence.

Slight miscalculation on his part, but we all make them.

It's not enough to call Jesus Lord and then ignore everything he taught, or even selectively ignore things that you don't happen to like. It is not enough to go all lone ranger on the high plains of  "spirituality." That is not salvation.  That is only the individualist simulacrum of salvation which is the great heresy of modern Christianity. Salvation is not just what happens when you die, it is living out the process of both justification (getting saved) and sanctification (which does not have a neat little word or phrase to describe it because it is too complicated).  If it was as simple as a confession or affirming the proper doctrine, Jesus would not have said anything like the above quote from Matthew's Gospel, but he did and he repeated similar themes in parables and teachings all the time.

We're all lucky that there's such a thing as grace, because without it we would be in big trouble.  Look around you on Sunday, look at all those people you know, and a whole bunch that you don't know: they're your team.  It ain't always gonna be pretty, but it is the Mandate.