“Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth” by Marco Palmezzano, ca. 1490 Credit: Wikipedia
Because the gospel is the crux of our Christian faith, we can never ponder it, speak of it, or write about it too much. This is why I was delighted to stumble across this passage from Ezekiel while reading devotionally a few days ago:
The righteousness of the righteous man will not save him when he disobeys, and the wickedness of the wicked man will not cause him to fall when he turns from it. The righteous man, if he sins, will not be allowed to live because of his former righteousness. If I tell the righteous man that he will surely live, but then he trusts in his righteousness and does evil, none of the righteous things he has done will be remembered; he will die for the evil he has done. (Ezekiel 33:12-13)
What a beautiful explanation of the gospel and what kind of righteousness saves. Ezekiel is clear: you cannot be saved by your own righteousness! Indeed, even if you act righteously, just one evil act erases all memory of your righteousness. As James writes: “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it” (James 2:10). To receive salvation, you need another kind of righteousness that is not your own. You need a righteousness that comes from God. The apostle Paul brings clarity to what kind of righteousness this is: “But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe” (Romans 3:21-22).
Besides reminding us that our own righteousness does not and cannot save us, Ezekiel’s words also remind us that the gospel is not confined to the New Testament. In both Testaments, the message of the gospel is consistent: it is God’s righteousness, not our own, that saves us. As God promises through the prophet Isaiah, “I am bringing My righteousness near, it is not far away; and My salvation will not be delayed.”
From the department of the inane but entertaining, the real estate site Movoto.com recently published its list of America’s most sinful cities. Surprisingly, the city famed for its profligate sinfulness, Las Vegas, didn’t make the list. An article in The Street explains how the list was compiled:
The study analyzed 95 of the nation’s 100 most-populous communities…to see how often locals commit the Catholic Church’s seven major sins: Envy, Gluttony, Greed, Lust, Pride, Sloth and Wrath…
[They then matched] each behavior on the church’s 1,400-year-old list of sins with a modern-day measure of immorality.
For instance, [they] gauged Wrath by looking at the FBI’s annual report on each U.S. city’s violent-crime rate – the number of murders, robberies, aggravated assaults, rapes and non-negligent manslaughter cases reported each year per 1,000 residents.[1]
Here’s what the study found.
Coming in at number five is Milwaukee. According to CDC obesity rates, Milwaukee falls prey to the sin of gluttony. Spot number four belongs to Pittsburgh, which struggles with pride. In this city, there is one cosmetic surgeon for every 3,170 residents. Minneapolis garnered spot number three. Over 30% of Minneapolis’s residents are inactive, making this city super slothful. Place number two belongs to Orlando, which, like Minneapolis, struggles with sloth. And spot number one belongs to – drumroll, please – St. Louis! Movoto found “the Gateway to the West places number two for Wrath and Envy, with 20 violent crimes and 65 property incidents per year for every 1,000 St. Louis residents.” If it’s banal carnality you want, St. Louis is the place to go.
Of course, it’s hard to take a study like this too seriously. But I have to admit, I breathed a sigh of relief when my town of San Antonio didn’t make the list. Then again, I used to live in St. Louis. I went to seminary there. So I guess that means, according to this article, I once lived in a den of iniquities.
What makes a study like this one so comical for Christians is that we know that sin defies such simplistic statistical quantification and comparison. This is the apostle Paul’s point when he writes, “There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:22-23). There is no difference, Paul says, between one sin and another in God’s eyes. Every sin leads to death. Every sin leads to damnation. Before God and apart from Christ, sin is sin. Period.
This is why, when an angry mob of religious leaders seek to have a woman caught in adultery stoned for her sin, Jesus disarms this mob’s self-righteous pretenses by saying, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7). Underlying this statement is an assumption that we have no right to use our own self-styled righteousness as a benchmark against which we can measure and condemn other people’s sinfulness. The only benchmark that may be used to distinguish righteousness from sinfulness is God’s. Everything else is just casting stones.
So, although I won’t cast stones at my old seminary town, I will eat concrete if I ever return for a visit. And if that previous line doesn’t make any sense to you, just click here.
Well, we will never know for sure all that happened. There are a few things we do know. We do know that on the night of February 26, 2012 in Sanford, Florida, an altercation took place between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. We do know that this altercation left Trayvon Martin dead of a single gunshot wound, fired at intermediate range. We do know that George Zimmerman was the shooter. And we do know that on Saturday, July 13, Zimmerman was found “not guilty” of both the charges of second-degree murder and of manslaughter.
As the trial of George Zimmerman unfolded before a nation of breathless spectators, it became clear to many pundits and reporters – regardless of how these pundits and reporters hoped this case would turn out – that the prosecution was in trouble. Consider this from ABC News:
Prosecutors started strong with a powerful, concise opening statement from Assistant State Attorney John Guy, in contrast to the silly knock-knock joke and seemingly disorganized and meandering defense argument …
But then something happened that many would have thought improbable as this case received wall to wall coverage leading up to Zimmerman’s arrest.
What the state hoped would be proof that Zimmerman initiated the altercation and that he, not Martin, was on top as they grappled on the ground, did not appear to proceed as planned …
With each witness there were either facts that we now know are not true (like hearing three shots, when there was only one) or indications that their memories have somehow become clearer since the incident itself.[1]
The prosecution’s witnesses, in their testimonies of what happened that night, gave conflicting and confusing accounts. Coupled with the fact that the burden to prove that Zimmerman shot Martin in something other than self-defense rested on the prosecution, the prospects for a conviction were grim for the state. Again, ABC News summarized the prosecution’s problem well:
Prosecutors still have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman did not “reasonably believe” he was “in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm” during their altercation. That is a heavy burden to bear.
It turns out, as the verdict this past Saturday revealed, that it was a burden too heavy to bear.
Along with the wide range of human emotions that a trial such as this one elicits, this trial has also exposed the limits of human justice. The jury found George Zimmerman “not guilty.” This does not necessarily mean that Zimmerman committed no crime. It simply means that, in the opinions of the jurors, there was not enough evidence to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that he was guilty of a crime. The jurors’ verdict does not pretend or presume to rule on George Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence as a matter of fact. It simply says that Zimmerman will not be incarcerated as a matter of the law.
The justice of our God is much more comprehensive and, as strange as it sounds, just than the justice of our courts. For our God is concerned with infinite transcendent justice rather than with limited legal justice. Indeed, our God is passionate about justice. God shouts in Amos 5:24: “But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” Where human justice falls short, God’s justice does not.
Ultimately, regardless of the verdict, the justice rendered in that Florida courtroom can only be provisionary and incomplete. Even if George Zimmerman had been found guilty, his incarceration would not have undone the painful problem of death, which is finally what this case – and every murder case – is all about. But the painful problem of death cannot be solved in any courtroom; it can only be solved on a cross. Only Jesus can bring justice to death by conquering it with His life – a life that will finally and fully be revealed on the Last Day.
So while a Florida court has ruled, we are still waiting for Jesus to rule – or, to put it more clearly, to reign – when He returns on the Last Day. And, blessedly, the justice He will bring on that day will be far better than the justice we have in these days. For His justice does much more than merely rule on tragedies; His justice fixes them.
It must have been a terrifying ordeal. The man who twelve men had followed, loved, learned from, and staked their lives on was being arrested by an angry mob, led by a man who used to be among their ranks: Judas. Mark depicts the scene like this:
Judas, one of the Twelve, appeared. With him was a crowd armed with swords and clubs, sent from the chief priests, the teachers of the law, and the elders. Now the betrayer had arranged a signal with them: “The one I kiss is the man; arrest him and lead him away under guard.” Going at once to Jesus, Judas said, “Rabbi!” and kissed Him. The men seized Jesus and arrested Him. Then one of those standing near drew his sword and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear. “Am I leading a rebellion,” said Jesus, “that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture Me? Every day I was with you, teaching in the temple courts, and you did not arrest Me. But the Scriptures must be fulfilled.” Then everyone deserted Him and fled. A young man, wearing nothing but a linen garment, was following Jesus. When they seized him, he fled naked, leaving his garment behind. (Mark 14:43-52)
This final detail about this young man who flees naked is unique to Mark’s Gospel, leading many scholars to believe that it may have been Mark himself who, overcome with fear, fled the scene. But what is recorded here is more than an incidental historical detail. What is recorded here is a tragic historical pattern:
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as He was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?” He answered, “I heard You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” (Genesis 3:8-10)
Mark wasn’t the first to flee the Lord naked and afraid. Adam did too.
In the Bible, nakedness is often used as a symbol of shameful sin:
“Your nakedness will be exposed and your shame uncovered. I will take vengeance; I will spare no one.” (Isaiah 47:3)
Jerusalem has sinned greatly and so has become unclean. All who honored her despise her, for they have seen her nakedness; she herself groans and turns away. (Lamentations 1:8)
“I am against you,” declares the LORD Almighty. “I will lift your skirts over your face. I will show the nations your nakedness and the kingdoms your shame.” (Nahum 3:5)
Sin and nakedness go hand in hand. But the promise of Scripture is that when sin leaves us shamefully naked, Jesus clothes us with His righteousness: “I delight greatly in the Lord; my soul rejoices in my God. For He has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of His righteousness” (Isaiah 61:10). Even as we flee from the horror of the cross naked in sin, Jesus draws us back to His cross, covering our nakedness with His atoning blood. The death on a cross that once caused everyone to flee now beckons all to its promise of salvation. During this Holy Week, this is what we remember. And this is what we believe.
The other day, I came across an experiment. It was conducted by a Christian guy named Timothy Kurek who, by his own admission, wanted to “shock the Pharisee out of himself.” He had been raised with a quintessentially fundamentalist pedigree, even attending Jerry Falwell’s famed Liberty University as a college student. But something in his fundamentalist upbringing proved profoundly unsettling to him. So he left everything he had known and feigned coming out of the closet as a gay man to his friends and family in an effort to see how his Christian friends would respond to him. Some were loving. Others, sadly, but predictably, skewered him.[1]
As I learned about his experiment, I came to appreciate his moving and sometimes heart-rending experience. What I found somewhat troubling, however, was his characterization of the Pharisees. Tim spoke many of times of his “inner Pharisee” – this voice deep inside his soul full of accusations and vitriol. By the end of his journey, TIm went from having an inner Pharisee to calling himself a “recovering Pharisee.” Part of this journey seems to have included a radical change concerning his conception of sin. He is not nearly so comfortable calling things that have been traditionally called sins, “sins.” After all, this is what Pharisees do. They talk way too much about sin. And he doesn’t want to be like them.
This past weekend at Concordia, we talked about Jesus’ Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. The Pharisee, in Jesus’ telling, represents everything we have come to hate about these religious elites. He comes across as arrogant, judgmental, and outright smarmy in the prayer he offers on the steps of the Jerusalem temple: “God, I thank You that I am not like other men – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get” (Luke 18:11-12). This guy’s bluster is palpable. Yuck.
Did I mention the irony is also deep? Our reflexive response to this parable all too often sounds something like this: “God, I thank You that I am not like other religious hypocrites – Pharisees, Sadducees, creationists – or even like those unenlightened, bigoted fundies who attend Liberty University. I judge not and am smart enough to realize that my Christian witness to the world has to be nuanced and Huffington Post appropriate.”
Somehow, I’m not sure this is what Jesus intended for us to get out of this parable.
The problem with the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable was not that he was religiously conservative, nor was it that he was concerned with sinfulness. Both of those things are fine and, in many instances, even desirable. The problem was that this Pharisee trusted in the wrong righteousness – his own. Luke’s setup of Jesus’ parable makes this clear enough: “To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable” (Luke 12:9).
Sadly, many people see the road to killing their inner Pharisee as one paved by downplaying certain sins, thereby demonstrating themselves in-tune and in-touch with our culture’s zeitgeist. But the road to killing our inner Pharisee cannot be paved in this way. Indeed, Jesus Himself was quite comfortable with much of what the Pharisees said about sin and, many times, thought they did not understand sin deeply enough. Just read the Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount or His discussion on human sexuality in Matthew 19:1-12 to see how seriously Jesus took sin. Killing our inner Pharisee is not about redefining sin, but about killing sin by the cross.
So let’s stop trying to slay Pharisees by diminishing sinfulness. That’s simply swapping one form of Pharisee-ism for another. It’s swapping a religious self-righteousness for a cultural self-righteousness. And that simply will not do. For we do not need self-righteousness, we need Jesus’ righteousness. Only His righteousness can cure a Pharisee and save a sinner.
