Mercy not sacrifice

Many Christians have been taught to believe that there is a tension at the heart of God between mercy and justice.

They’re told that God is loving, slow to anger, willing and able to forgive. But they’re also told that God is just, which means that God cannot allow sin to go unpunished. For many Christians, this supposed tension at the heart of God is the whole reason for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The Gospel is apparently how God figured out a way to both punish sin and forgiven sinners.

Never mind that Jesus never spoke about his life, death, and resurrection like this.
What he did say (or at least what he seems to imply) is that far from mercy and justice being in tension with one another, mercy is the fulfillment of justice.

It would not be inaccurate or unfair to say that the Jewish religion of Jesus’ day had become preoccupied with concerns for justice. On the one hand, they lived under the injustice of the Roman empire and they longed for the day when God would rescue them. On the other hand, God was the great lawgiver and what it meant to be a faithful, God-fearing Jew was to obey God’s laws.

And these two sides of justice worked hand-in-glove. When the people of Israel faithfully obeyed God’s laws, God would finally rescue them.

So, controlling what you can control, the religious system became preoccupied with obeying God’s laws, best represented by the sacrificial system; a very complex list of prescriptions for various types of animal sacrifices. So long as you sacrificed the prescribed animal at the prescribed time and place in the prescribed way, you were good with God and God was good with you, provided you were doing your level best to keep the rest of the commands that had been handed down in the book of Moses.

The primary job of a religious leader, so it would seem, was to make sure that people kept the commands. Rabbis called select students to follow them, accepting difficult “yokes” of strict obedience. Everyone else had Pharisees to look over their shoulders.

But Jesus reframed the whole religious point, usually by quoting one of his favorite prophets, Hosea; “I want you to show love, not offer sacrifices.”[1]

For example, in Matthew 9 Jesus called Matthew from his tax-collector’s booth and Matthew responded by throwing a lavish party at his phone, inviting all of his disreputable friends. Jesus attended as the guest of honor. When the religious leaders discovered that Jesus was socializing with sinful people they raised a stink. Jesus responded with the above quote from Hosea. Religion was not about obeying the laws (represented by getting sacrifice correct) so that those who honored the system (religious leaders) should not associate with those who failed to honor the system (Matthew and his buddies). Religion, rather, was about showing mercy to people who needed it.

Like sick people.[2]

Again, in Matthew 12 Jesus and his disciples walked through a grainfield on the Sabbath and picked some heads of grain for lunch. Some religious leaders saw them do it and accused them of violating the law that forbids common work on the Sabbath. Jesus quoted Hosea 6:6.

The law prohibiting work on the Sabbath was given so people could rest. Without the law in place, those in positions of ownership would likely exploit both land and people for profit.

The law was not given to prevent hungry people from being able to eat, which Jesus pointed out by citing several analogues from their sacred history.

According to Jesus, the point of religion was not to obey rules but to offer mercy to those who needed it. In fact, I think from Jesus’ perspective showing mercy was the fulfillment of the law’s legal requirement. To show mercy was to keep the law, regardless of what the letter of the command might say. You were a faithful, God-honoring Jew if you showed mercy to those who needed it, even if you didn’t offer the right kind of sacrifice.

Christians today still misunderstand this. I see it most prominently when they are reading the Bible. They treat the Bible like it’s a list of descriptions they are required to believe or a list of prescriptions they are required to obey (or both), rather than as a tool or resource they are supposed to employ to help them live in ways that are consistent with Jesus. The Bible is like the new sacrificial system; as long as you “believe what it says” or “do what it says” you are good with God and God is good with you, even if by believing or obeying it you’re living in ways that are entirely inconsistent with Jesus.

As I argue in my book, model every Sunday, and teach people in our formation groups, the Bible is not some magic book that fell from the sky or that we found in the woods. Nor did we receive it from a single person who wrote it in a cave after some self-proclaimed, unverifiable revelation. The Bible is the written record of a people’s experience with God in space and time, most importantly their experience with Jesus, meant to be used to help them from generation to generation remain faithful to their peculiar identity as God’s people.

In other words, we wrote the book for ourselves, to help us live the life we had already become convinced we needed to live based on our experience with God in time and space, most importantly our experience with Jesus. We don’t start with the Bible. We start with our experience with Jesus. And the Bible is not a dictator. It’s a resource that when handled properly (meaning used properly) gives life to the religious community so that the community can live out what it is convinced religious faith is all about (because that’s what Jesus told them), showing mercy to those who need it.

Religion is not a set of arbitrary commands given to a past people but meant to be woodenly applied in all times and places because those commands happen to be a book we believe is sacred. Religion is about knowing God and living consistent with that God’s revealed life. For the Christian, the life of God is revealed in the person of Jesus Christ as a life of mercy. All of God’s commands recorded in the pages of the Bible are meant to be used by the Christian community to help it honor that peculiar way of life in the world.
 
   [1] Hosea 6:6 NLT. Other English translations say, “I want you show mercy, not offer sacrifices.”
   [2] Which was, apparently, how Jesus thought about Matthew and his friends.