SOTM 20: Black, White, and Gray

27"You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.'[a] 28But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell."

Mt. 5:27-30

(part 4)

The problem with rules and regulations is that they are at once both the lifeblood of a stable society and also the heart of Pharisaical legalism. Some rules are simply pragmatic. I flew to California last week. I was given a airline ticket that assigned me to a specific boarding group and was asked to board accordingly. That's a good rule. We'd need rules like that even if we weren't a bunch of sinners. It just makes things run smoothly. Churches also have to establish policies. For example, my church had to make sure that I really was a Christian before hiring me as a pastor. In fact, not only do I need to be a Christian, but not a "nominal one." The challenge of course, is that true religion is religion of the heart, which can't be assessed through a series of simple litmus tests. Ultimately, only God knows if I've really declared him as Lord. Not even my family, closest friends, or fiancee, can know with certainty. But decisions have to be made, pastors have to be hired, etc. So we are forced to come up with easy and quick ways of guestimating who's in and who's out. It's unavoidable. But we must only draw these lines when WE ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO. The problem with much of religion is that the easy thing to do is to set up a complete system of litmus tests so that we can easily organize our chaotic world. This is what the Pharisees did. They figured that as long as they followed their system of rules, they would know that they were OK. But again Jesus tells us that at once it is both much more complicated than that and also much simpler. It is complicated because the complex combination of a heart that is constantly changing as forces of good and evil weigh in on it, along with the fact that the state of one's heart will manifest itself differently depending on the individual's personality and cultural background, make it difficult for us to assess anyone's spiritual condition with precision or certainty. Yet at the same time Jesus makes it clear to us that actually it's all very simple. Nobody "has it down." Every single one of us, whether we sport a Bertrand Russell or WWJD bumper sticker is (by virtue of the fact that we've all lusted in the heart) in desperate need of the grace of God. Jesus' religion of the heart shows that virtually everything else is gray and ultimately beside his very black-and-white central point.