It’s A Dirty Job But Someone’s Got To Do It, Matthew 23.34-39 - Continued

If what Jesus says about rejecting his prophets is not sufficiently upsetting, he goes on to explain the basis of this rejection, and why it matters. “How often I wanted to gather your children together . . . .” Our Lord here uses the verb-form of the word he just used as a noun in v.34, “synagogue.” Synagogue comes from two Greek words, a verb meaning “to lead” combined with a preposition meaning “together”. A synagogue, in other words, is the place where people come together to seek God. The Christian equivalent is ecclesia, the verb “to call” with the preposition ex- as in exit, thus a group of people called out from their usual society in order to be God’s community. “Called out from” and “called into” are simply two sides of the same theological coin. In fact, James 2.2 uses the word synagogue (the New American Standard and King James Version both translate it “assembly”) to refer to a local Christian church.

So notice what we have here: “your synagogues” vs. Jesus deep and repeated desire “to gather” his people. In other words, it comes down to a question of who owns Christian assembly, of whose church it is. Jesus contrasts their way of being synagogue with his way, our way of being church with his way. And if we get this wrong, if we make a mistake about the ownership, we get everything wrong. In our church we focus on doing things our way. When Jesus sends his messenger to assert his Lordship, we treat that person like a South Texas road treats a truck’s transmission!

The whole thing reminds me of what I like to call the Parable of the Bolshevik Share Croppers. Jesus had just gotten done telling it earlier this same day – Matthew 21.33-44. Seems that an agri-businessman purchased some land and rented it out to a group of sharecroppers then went back East to lobby Congress for farm subsidies. In his absence the Joad family worked hard and produced a bumper crop but they also started reading Karl Marx and perhaps some Liberation Theology. In any case, when the owner sent his lawyer to collect they refused to pony up. Instead, they declared the farm a commune and launched a sit-in. The demonstration inevitably turned violent: the laborers beat up the lawyer and tossed him out.

The owner tried to work things out – he sent Jane Fonda and Al Sharpton and Jimmy Carter down to negotiate a solution but by this time things had gotten out of hand. CNN buzzed with scenes of cars set ablaze and angry demonstrators flashing clenched fists as they hoisted placards on their shoulders.

The owner, as it happens, had a son who had just graduated from Harvard with a Ph.D. in social work. He volunteered to go in person. He had a real sympathy for the plight of these brazeros and hoped he could reach a solution that would avoid violence. But by now the thing had taken on a life of its own. Someone on the Revolutionary Council suggested that killing the son would send a strong message against inherited wealth as a keystone of the capitalist system. The next thing they realized they had hung the young man from a street light and torched the corpse. The resulting popular outcry provided sufficient political capital for the President, at the owner’s request, to call up the National Guard. Congress, afraid of being perceived as weak on terror, approved the measure. Absentee landlords everywhere felt renewed security in subletting their land to farm cooperatives.

So Jesus says that a Savior takes necessary steps to remind his people of who owns the church. And don’t fail to notice his motivation, or you’ll miss the whole point and come away with a skewed notion of the character of Christ. Jesus says he wanted to “synagogue” his people, to make a church of us his way “as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.” Hens do that because danger threatens. Augustine in his commentary on the passage talks about scorpions, and how a single sting from one of those bad bugs can kill a chick dead. The mother hen huddles her brood beneath her and then tears the enemy to shreds.

So Jesus tells his nation that thousand-legged danger threatens them with a deadly sting. What might he be talking about? Well, remember the parallel to ancient Israelite history which Jesus makes in v.34 when he invokes the language of 2 Chronicles 36.15 and the story of Jerusalem’s destruction by Babylon. In the first century the Romans were the equivalent of the Babylonian empire. Strong nationalistic elements in Jewish society in Jesus’ day called for rebellion against Rome. That, they said, was the proper way to be Israel, to be the people of God. It cut directly against Jesus’ image of Israel - people who volunteered to lug a Roman soldier’s pack twice as far as the law required. He says that he has offered his nation a clear choice of how to be God’s people, God’s synagogue, and they have gone with the wrong option.

History proves Jesus right, by the way. Within about four decades of the Lord’s resurrection the radicals won out in Jewish life, rebelled against Rome and holed up in the temple. Titus marched his legions down and stormed the city. They decided that as long as the temple stood it would be a lightning rod for rebellion so they pulled it down brick by brick and it has not been rebuilt to this day. Israel’s house was indeed left desolate!

So what does all this have to do with you and me as we try to find Jesus’ way of being church? Quite simply, we face the same choice: whether we will let the radical individualism of our Enlightenment society determine how we shape our churches, or whether we will let radical submission preached by Jesus rule the day. Let me apply this in a single instance.

Remember I said that Jesus’ word for God’s people emphasizes the idea of being “gathered.” I want, he says, to gather all of you under my wings. The idea seems to be that if you want Christ’s protection you will find it only in the company of other believers. This news comes hard for modern American Christians, and perhaps particularly for modern American Baptists. We seem to make a theological virtue out of being uncooperative. Judge Abner McCall, the august former president of Baylor and the Baptist General Convention of Texas once compared leading Texas Baptists to lining 40,000 jackrabbits up and trying to make them all salute in unison! We justify such behavior under a theological rubric called soul-competency or the priesthood of the believer. Ralph Wood of Baylor challenges this notion when he points out that “Luther’s clasic doctrine of the preisthood of all believers . . . has been corrupted into the heretical and essentially Gnostic idea of the priesthood of the solitary beleiver.”

In other words, my “believer priesthood” means that I owe ministry to all of God’s people and especially the gathered people of my own visible, local church. What we usually take it to mean, however, is that I am my own church unto myself and when I do go to the gathered church, it has an obligation to me, not the other way around. The whole idea of ownership gets twisted 180-degrees dead opposite of what Jesus says here. And if we keep trying to be synagogue, to be church, on that basis, ultimately our house is left to us desolate!

Let’s take one example. I read the other day that at the University of California at Berkley they have four separate graduation ceremonies: African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic-Amreican and Anglo-American. The anti-racism gurus at Berzerkely, the Mecca of American liberalism, have so enshrined racism that they have to niche-market boutique bachelaureates in order to coddle the radical individualism of our nation’s egocentric ethnicities. I started to laugh at this silliness . . . until I thought of all the Baptist churches that have multiple worship services in an effort to keep order amongst the cultural ghettos of Builders, Boomers, Busters, X-ers, Next-ers and Millenials. I can understand the world having this kind of trouble - after all, they’re nothing but the sold-out sociological pawns of an ever-shifting power play in an ongoing game of intellectual chess. But we, we believers, we Christians, we claim to inhabit the unchanging Kingdom of the Eternal Christ who governs by an entirely different set of laws and yet we seem to do no better.

There’s a scene I have always loved in Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet.” Polonius, who is a sort of royal Chairman of Deacons in the court of Denmark, comes to tell the young prince that a group of strolling actors has arrived in the capital. He wants to show how good these guys are by emphasizing that they can perform any kind of play you can think of. They are, he insists, “the best actors in the world,

either for tragedy,
comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-
comical-historical-pastoral

I sometimes think of that line when I ponder how our churches proffer pandered praise designed to please the praisers more than the one we say we are praising: The best worship in the world, either for traditional, historical, contemporary, emergent, traditional-historical, contemporary-emergent, traditional-historical-contemporary-emergent. Well, the whole thing is really comical-tragical.

Think about this: I was reading the other day about the physics of stock car racing. Now I’ll admit that I don’t really get NASCAR. They tell me it is the second-most popular spectator sport in America, just behind NFL football and just ahead of tournament poker (yes, poker!). As the grandson of a mechanic and the descendant of a long line of rednecks, I still don’t see the attraction: floor it and steer left - what’s the big deal? But I admit this is my problem because thousands of bellowing, beered-up Southerners can’t all be wrong.

Anyway, this article was talking about the technique of drafting, where one car drives tightly on the rear-end of another. It was pioneered, by the way, in 1960 by Junior Johnson, a former moonshine runner, at the Daytona 500. Junior found out that his inferior Chevrolet could keep up wtih and even surpass the bigger, faster Pontiacs if he tail-gated the faster car and then shot forward at the last second. Junior had never studied physics; he just knew it worked. He won Daytona that year and drafting has been a staple tactic in NASCAR every since. These days pit crews hire Ph.D. scientists to study that kind of areodynamics and they have discovered something fascinating: drafting helps not only the trailing car, but the leading car as well. Drafting reduces wind resistance for the car in back, but it also cuts the turbulence of the air coming off the car in front by channeling it smoothly over the hood of the chase vehicle. The result, the article claimed, is that two drafting cars can, together, travel three to five miles per hour faster than either of them could alone.

That’s a pretty good picture of the real New Testament doctrine of the priesthood of all believers together, a pretty powerful image of all the chicks huddled under the same mother hen! We can resist the centipede sting of secularism, we can outrun the empire-mindset of our modern-day Rome, when our combined momentum drives us hard after Christ. Our whole, it seems, is greater than the sum of our parts.

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