#nofilter: Let Love Be Genuine Group Curriculum September 18, 2016 Sermon Passage: Romans 12:9a Curriculum Passage: Matthew 23:25-28 Introduction When I was growing up, one of our local channels showed the Wizard of Oz every year. It was always the same channel and the same time of year mid-spring, right around Easter. The timing always seemed odd to me. I never cared for it because I don t like monkeys, so flying monkeys were definitely off my list. However, I saw enough partial showings of it to piece together the basic idea. Oddly, I feel like I always walked in the room during the part of the movie when the man behind the curtain had just been revealed and he was trying to convince everyone who was looking right at him to pay no attention to him. That s dedication to a con. I could never get over the audacity of him telling everyone who clearly saw him to believe the lie about his grandeur instead of the truth. This week we begin a 3-week series called #nofilter that focuses on the power and freedom of living without manicuring a false version of ourselves and then selling it to everyone that knows us. All of us are tempted in many ways every day to proclaim to the world around us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Truthfully, many times they see us just as clearly as those weary travellers in the Wizard of Oz. What if we could become a community of faith that lived with one another and the world with such a degree of humility and honesty that it became the characteristic that we were most prominently known for? What would we have to do to make that happen? How would we start? This week, we re going to look at what it means to live authentically with God and how that impacts all of our other relationships. Biblical Background Although they all tell the story of the events of Jesus earthly ministry, each of the Gospel accounts has its own unique style and flavor. Part of what gives each of the Gospel accounts its individuality is the purpose and audience that the writer had in mind when composing the narrative. For some, the purpose and audience was fairly obvious. Luke, for instance, states clearly that the purpose of his Gospel was so that Theophilus would have an orderly account of the ministry of Jesus. John states that these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. (John 20:31) Matthew, however, gives very little explicit declaration about the specific audience or unique interest he had in arranging the content in his Gospel. What we know of Matthew s Gospel we discern from textual clues and structure. For instance, unlike the other accounts, Matthew opens with a long, detailed account of the Jewish genealogy of Jesus, tracing it all the way back to Abraham. In addition, Matthew contains more references to the Old Testament than any of the other Gospel accounts. Those references are included to demonstrate the fulfillment of Messianic prophecies in the 1
life and work of Jesus Christ. These two important notes let us know that Matthew is deeply interested in the Messianic identity of Jesus, which would indicate that his primary intended audience was predominately, if not exclusively, Jewish. It is important to note, though, that as much as Matthew emphasizes the Messianic identity of Jesus in his Gospel, he also uniquely demonstrates the repeated rejection of Jesus by the Jews. Time and again, the Sadducees and Pharisees attempt to thwart Jesus ministry, accuse Him of blasphemy, seek to entrap Him, and utterly reject him. This, like so many other aspects of Jesus life, is seen as a fulfillment of Messianic prophecy, as the rejected cornerstone. As the rejection persists, Jesus increasingly turns to Gentiles to offer the truth of His life and ministry to them. For Matthew, this foreshadows the coming shape of the spread of the Gospel, which we see take place under Paul s ministry in Acts. The passage we focus on this week is found in the midst of a discourse from Jesus addressing the woes of the Pharisees and Scribes. The section covers Matthew 23:1-39, but is broken into three subsections. Our passage appears in the second section (vs. 13-36), which specifically focuses on the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and Scribes. The Text As the passage opens, Jesus has just finished a series of harsh rebukes of the Pharisees and scribes for a variety of issues pertaining to the ritualism of their lives. Each of the rebukes is based on the Pharisees and scribes enjoyment of privilege and prestige because of their religious position, even in light of behavior that would seem to refute such religious devotion. Beginning in verse 13, each of the rebukes begins with the same phrase. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. (Matthew 23:25) This is the fifth of the woe proclamations in this section. In this particular woe, Jesus addresses a matter of daily ritual purity: the cleaning of utensils for eating and drinking. Jesus uses the cleansing of dishes and utensils as an object lesson to represent the utter futility, and even danger, of cleansing only the outside of a person. No one would even think of repeatedly using a dish that was only cleansed on the outside; that s not where the food goes. The whole point of cleaning a cup or plate is to prevent contamination of future meals through the spoiled residue from previous meals. Cleaning the part of the dish that never touches food misses the main point of the cleansing. Cleaning the outside, however, does serve to make the dish seem pristine to onlookers. To make certain His hearers, especially the Pharisees and Scribes, did not miss the point of his metaphor, Jesus makes a direct correlation between futile dish cleansing and the manner in which the Pharisees and Scribes ordered their own lives. How do we know this? Because greed and self-indulgence do not generally fill literal dishes. In one brilliant metaphor, Jesus has woven together the matters of following the Mosaic Law, arrogant showmanship as it pertains to ones own righteousness, and the misguided object of the Pharisees faith. Just as appearing to have followed the Law could reap disastrous consequences for the physical health of the Hebrews, merely appearing to follow God in 2
obedience without actual devotion would reap horrific consequences for the Pharisees and Scribes. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean. (Matthew 23:26) Jesus points out a tremendous truth about how transformation works in His confrontation with the Pharisees. The inside is the beginning place. Just as the cleansing of the inside of the dish is only logical place to begin actually cleaning the dish after a meal, so too is the necessity of soul-cleansing to be seen as clean before God. However, therein lies the problem. Where any one of us could simply reverse the order of how we wash dishes and rectify the literal problem, our ability to cleanse our own soul falls tragically short of being able to complete the task. In fact, the reason that we cannot cleanse our own soul is because, as we apply Jesus metaphor, we are not the washer we are the dish. We are that which is contaminated and in need of purification by someone outside ourselves. This is what Jesus came to earth for in the first place. The Pharisees and scribes, however, were playing a dangerous game of pretending they did not need cleansing at all. So, when Jesus directs them to first clean the inside of the cup and plate, they knew quite well that He was directing them to something only God can accomplish. One final point of interest in this verse: notice that Jesus did not say First clean the inside..., THEN clean the outside. Jesus said to clean the inside that the outside also may be clean. Instead of an order of events, Jesus presented a cause and effect. When the soul is cleansed, the outer transformation follows suit gradually and progressively. What does that mean? It means that self-oriented approaches to righteousness are inherently doomed to failure because they amount to little more than behavior modification. Despite best efforts and intentions, such self-oriented change cannot and will not last. Only through a divine cleansing at the level of the soul can genuine change be affected. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people s bones and all uncleanness. (Matthew 23:27) If Jesus first metaphor had any degree of vagueness about it all with regard to the gravity of the situation, His second one assuredly did not. The somewhat palatable idea of a dirty cup or plate is replaced with Jesus simile that these elite religious leaders are, in fact, like whitewashed tombs. There are two possibilities for use of whitewashed tombs here. First, because touching a dead body or tomb would render a Jewish man unclean and incapable of, among other things, worshiping in the temple, tombs were whitewashed in advance of major Jewish festivals to make them particularly obvious. The reason was that that increased visibility would prevent any accidental contact, warning Jews to steer well clear of the area. Second, to honor fallen ancestors, tombs would be whitewashed as a type of memorial. Doing so, it was believed, would decrease the sorrow of remembering the lost family members by making the sight of the grave more radiant in the sunlight. 3
Whichever was the reason for Jesus use of this metaphor, the intent was clear. Jesus was pronouncing the inner reality of death, in spite of their exterior grandeur. The external glory of the Pharisees is something that Jesus had already mentioned earlier in Matthew 23. They wore elegant, distinguished robes with particularly long tassels, or fringes, which would make them visibly stand out from all of their countrymen. Everyone that saw them wanted to be like them, to enjoy their place of honor and privilege, to be revered by their peers as the Pharisees were. Jesus, however, obliterates the falsehood of their piety by revealing that they, like those tombs, were full of dead men s bones that tainted everything they touched. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. (Matthew 23:28) Being full of hypocrisy is something that a person comes to expect of the Pharisees as a person becomes more familiar with the Bible. The more notable descriptor here is their lawlessness. What set the Pharisees and Scribes apart from their countrymen was their perceived mastery of interpreting, understanding, and keeping the Mosaic Law. This is why, in other conversations with Jesus, other Pharisees would claim to have kept all the commandments and there is no record of anyone correcting them. To be called lawless, then, is the final stripping away of every false thing upon which they had built their collective identity. They believed they were more righteous than others, followed the Law better than others, and were in better standing with God than others because of their self-oriented pursuit of righteousness. Jesus defrauded them. Jesus defrauding us is always where transformation begins, depending on how we respond to the defrauding. When Jesus draws back the curtain, so to speak, on the person that we put forward to be seen by others, revealing only our true self, we have the option to come clean or cover up. Coming clean means living life in honesty about ourselves and our need for Christ. Covering up only screams our self-created virtues and falsehood all the more. The Text in Life As we begin our brief sermon series, #nofilter, we must realize that living with authenticity begins with our understanding of ourselves. We cannot love others when we still refuse to come to grips with our own condition apart from Christ, our desperate need for His forgiveness, and the total dependence on Him for the forgiveness of our sin. Those things tell us who we really are. Still, there are numerous ways we fight against that type of authenticity. In that light, here are some things to consider as we apply this week s passage. First, authenticity is predicated on allowing ourselves to be known. That may sound obvious, but consider the number of ways that we try to prevent people from knowing who we really are on a regular basis. I ve heard numerous pastors over the years say things similar to, we buy things we don t want and can t afford, to impress people we don t like and don t want to be around. We do that sort of thing to prevent people from knowing the real us. The problem with that is that it spills over into our relationship with Christ. We can 4
actually convince ourselves that Jesus is a pretty big fan of ours, that we ve come a long way in our spiritual growth, and that we re good, more or less. When we do that, we lose sight of our desperate need for Christ, the gloriousness of His grace toward us, and the absolute nothingness we have to offer Him. Once we begin to process that, we can then allow ourselves to be authentic with others because our self-worth is no longer dependent on them. The inside of the cup has been cleaned and we are being made pure all over as a result. Second, when we understand how much we are loved, we can love others. This is built on the foundation of authenticity and humility before God. When we grasp how much He loves us, though we have no reason to expect it, loving others becomes an overflowing act of gratitude. Loving others authentically can take multiple forms. Sometimes it means crying with them in times of heartbreak. Sometimes it can mean confronting them when they are engaging in harmful or sinful behavior. Sometimes it means rejoicing as loud as they do when something good happens to them. If we do not understand how much God loves us, though, these opportunities to love others can instead become temptations toward bitterness, resentment, or apathy. Third, authenticity moves us toward community. The reason the Pharisees were elite among their countrymen is because they thought they were better than everyone else. They separated themselves based on a faulty sense of self-righteousness. Authenticity, though, moves us toward community because the blockades of posturing and pride are removed. The big question, considering these three things, is will you do it? Will you attempt to live authentically? It s dangerous, for certain. Our culture is built on preserving our own image, controlling what people really know about us, and controlling our own perception as best we can. Our culture is also crumbling from insecurity and loneliness. Want to do something different? You can. Discussion Questions 1. What are some ways you can think of that we try to manicure our image in front of neighbors and co-workers? 2. What would you say are the primary consequences that a person faces who has to constantly maintain a certain image? 3. When Jesus talks about cleansing the inside, what episodes in your own life come to mind? 4. When you think of the people in your life you are the most genuine with, what words would you use to describe your relationship? Do you speak freely and openly? Does the relationship invigorate or drain you? 5. Of all of the spheres of influence you exist in, which one is the most challenging for authenticity? Why do you think that is so? 6. How have you seen a lack of authenticity lead to an isolated life? 5