Every family has one. You know who I am talking about. That one member of the family who you could almost swear had to be switched at birth. If the family goes to the right, they go to the left. If the family loves the beach, they love the mountains. They love rock and roll while the rest of the family loves classical music.

Meet ‘that person’ in my family. The rest of my family adheres to the rule that we need to move within 20 miles of each other. Me, I’ve wanted to move hundreds of miles away, causing great consternation with my uncle. The family rules say you live with your parents until you marry. Me, I sought to find my own place and did so, causing my grandmother to constantly wonder what was the fight about that caused me to move out on my dad. My cousins took the safe jobs, usually getting some help from their father or mine. They might not have liked their jobs too much, but they took them. Me, I turned down my father’s offer to go into government service because I wanted to do something I liked to do. When I quit a job some time ago, my uncle gave my the following advice: Go back to them and eat your words. Beg for your job back. Boy, good to know my family has such faith in me.

What does all this say? That my family likes to live by the rules, while I like to live by my faith, whether that be in God, my destiny, or my capabilities.

Being ‘that person’ helps me to understand just how much of a radical Jesus was for his time. Here he was, in a society that just didn’t have a few rules, but five books of rules. There seemed to be a rule for everything and everyone. People followed those rules. The higher strata in society administered those rules. You knew who the rules applied to, and if they didn’t apply to you, you were considered a lower class of people. It was a society of rules, and what’s more, a society of rules handed down by God himself. By following those rules, you could earn God’s favor and get to heaven.

So what did Jesus do? In short, he said to toss out many of those rules. He proclaimed that adhering to the rules did not guarantee you getting into heaven. He claimed to be in direct contact with God and told the people what God wanted was not a sacrifice of a he goat, but rather for people to have faith in God, and show that faith in everything they did.

It wasn’t right anymore to look down upon a Samaritan or to stone the harlot. Instead, you were to love them as a fellow child of God and try to lead them to the path of worshipping the Lord. You no longer had the easy out of doing a simple ritual of forgiveness after committing some infraction, but rather repent to a God who would know in your heart if you were truly penitent. You would not longer have the temple priests telling you exactly what you had to do…you now had to figure it out for yourself, using the religious texts as your guide and hope that you would get it right.

And this scared the you-know-what out of people.

We can understand how this would be a direct affront to those in power in the temple. Jesus was saying, in effect, that you didn’t need them to be able to commune with God. He was undermining their authority at every turn, stripping away both their pretense and their power. Nobody really expected them to just roll over and say, “Fine, the Son of God has spoken, we’ll take an early retirement. You’re on your own”. Jesus knew this as well, and he still persisted because he knew that is the message his father needed for him to get across.

But, Jesus also scared the everyday folk. Sure, it was fine when he was just this guy who gave good Torah readings and healed the sick. When he began to speak about simply having faith instead of all the laws, that was a bit too much for the population as a whole to accept. Why? Because, we love rules.

Rules make it easy for us. They tell us, usually in very specific terms, what is right and what is wrong. What is legal and what is illegal. What we need to do and what we need to avoid. We may hate certain rules, but we love the concept of rules. There is very little thinking involved in rules. You can either follow them or you break them. We have structured our world around them, whether it be that you will go to jail if you murder or that you can’t have a runny egg in New Jersey. If we don’t like the rule, we can petition to get it changed or amended. There are even rules for that. Whole books have been written just to tell us how to follow the rules in an organized meeting.

We look for diet books that give us rules and tell us that if we follow those rules, the pounds will melt off. There are rules for dating and for divorce. We are promised that if we follow someone’s rules for investing, we will wind up wealthy. We are told that if we follow someone’s little book of rules, we can have a happier life.

There are no rules for faith. By its very nature it is intangible. It is uncertain. Faith does not throw the rules out the window, but says that by following the rules alone does not get you into heaven. There are no guidebooks that say if you do A, B, and C, you have faith, so go and be happy. It is subjective, and for something like the salvation of our very souls, we want something to be a little more substantive so we know we are doing it right. For a society sure in its rules, such as in ancient Israel, this was almost incomprehensible. The good news was that the people were being taken out of the rule setting of the temple priests. The bad news was that the people were being taken out of the rule setting of the temple priests.

Faith is not safe, it is not secure. It requires constant self-monitoring, constant self-examination. It tells us that we have to look at ourselves every day to see if we are living according to the path God has set out for us. It requires introspection and an ability to get past our egos. It is individual and unique to all of us. No wonder people would rather pick up a copy of How to Get Into Heaven for Dummies at their local Barnes and Noble.

The lessons Jesus taught and the message he preached were very difficult ones to accept. Those who did accept them agreed to live by God’s guidance, not a set of laws written on a page. Many chose that road, but many also chose to stay safe, stay with the laws and the security they afforded. Jesus knew this, but also knew that if mankind was to achieve salvation, they needed to follow the more difficult road. It is a lesson that rings as true today as it did when the Lord walked the earth as a man.

I’ve gained some acceptance by my family in recent years. I’ve become an Episcopalian, which, while not being a Methodist as they are, is still within the acceptable religions. I have three dogs, which instantly elevates me in my family’s eyes. I am still in that 20 mile radius. I somehow managed to find a job without having to go prostrate in front of old supervisors. I could explain to my family that this is part of my faith journey for now, and that it all could change tomorrow (well, except for the dogs…they are here to stay). I won’t however, because you can explain the rules, but you can’t truly explain faith. You either know you have it or your don’t.

If you do have it, you will never want to go back to those five books of rules again.

Amen,
Michael Gow

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