Luke 11:37-46

How to Make Jesus Really Mad

Sermon preached April 12, 2015
Opening
A guy was getting ready to tee off on the first hole when a second golfer approached and
asked if he could join him. The first said that he usually played alone, but agreed to the
twosome.
They were even after the first few holes. The second guy said, We're about evenly
matched, how about playing for five bucks a hole? The first guy said that he wasn't
much for betting, but agreed to the terms.
The second guy won the remaining sixteen holes with ease and the other player paid up
the $80 he lost
As they were walking off number eighteen, the winner noticed the nametag on the other
golfers bag - said Father Brian ODonnell. The man was a priest.
So the man confessed that he was the pro at a neighboring course and liked to pick on
suckers, he was flustered and apologetic, offering to return the money. The priest said,
You won fair and square and I was foolish to bet with you. You keep your winnings.
The pro said, Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?
The Priest said, Well, you could come to Mass on Sunday and make a donation. And, if
you want to bring your mother and father along, I'll marry them.
The Pharisees
Thats what the young people call, a sick burn. Heres another one.
Jesus is at a dinner party hosted by a Pharisee. In the gospels, you find Jesus at dinner
parties all the time - this got him accused of being a chowhound and a boozer - he didnt
pull back from life and live on cold lentils and lukewarm water - he dove right in and
spent time with people, broke bread with them, hoisted a cup of wine with them, shared
life with them.
Now a word on the Pharisees. Said it before, will say it again. We think of them as the
bad guys in the gospels. But we must remember that they were the good religious people
of the day.

Heres how they got their start - the Greeks under Alexander the Great and later his
successors occupied Israel and put their own stooges in charge of the religious
establishment, including the temple in Jerusalem. That corrupted the Temple, so devout
Jews had to find another way to worship God, learn about God, so two things happened.
One was the development of synagogues - local places of worship - Jesus had one in his
hometown in Capernaum. Synagogues meant you didnt have to depend so much on the
Temple in Jerusalem that been corrupted by their Greek occupiers.
Second thing, was the development of a way of life where people asked, How can we
obey God in everyday life, in the midst of the corruption of Greek culture and religion?
And the people who devoted themselves to this became the Pharisees. And they
developed an elaborate lifestyle based on the idea of obeying and honoring God in the
everyday - prayers, rituals like hand-washing before meals, rituals like tithing not only
your income, but everything you made or grew - including the herbs from your garden.
As one writer has said, the Pharisees were among the best people of their day - the most
devout, the most dedicated to God. They were highly respected, people looked up to
them.
And this Pharisee was reaching out to Jesus - an invitation to dinner was an invitation to
friendship, it meant I want to be your friend.
And yet they really ticked Jesus off
So Jesus goes to the dinner party. What sets Jesus off? Luke tells us that the Pharisee
who threw the dinner party was amazed that Jesus didnt wash his hands before the
meal.
Thats curious, isnt it? For two reasons.
Washing your hands before eating is a good idea, isnt it? My momma always
made me and my brother and sister wash our hands before dinner. Maybe wed
been playing outside, who knows what nasty germs and filth we had on our
hands? Turn on the hot water, grab the bar of ivory soap and wash those hands
before dinner, thats what we did. Thats just good hygiene, right?
Second reason this is curious. The Greek word Luke uses for amazed is a
strong one - it has the idea of jaw-dropping, head-shaking, eye-popping
amazement. The Brits have a great word for this - gobsmacked.
Why was the Pharisee amazed that Jesus skipped washing his hands? And why did Jesus
skip hand-washing? Well, here we get to the nub of the problem.
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For the Pharisees, hand-washing wasnt about physical cleanliness, it was about
religious cleanliness. You know the old saw, cleanliness is next to godliness?
Thats kind of what the Pharisees were thinking - and what contaminated them,
made them dirty, wasnt mud and germs and dust - it was people they believed
were religiously impure.
A Pharisee would have right by his front door, a big stone jar full of water and
they would rinse their hands in the water to cleanse them of the impurity they had
contracted by coming into contact with impure people - like Gentiles, like women
having their monthly cycle, like people with a disease.
So the Pharisee is amazed that Jesus the holy rabbi prophet-man doesnt do this ritual of
cleansing himself of the contaminating impurity he might have contracted by coming into
contact with unclean people. Jesus sees the amazement on the mans face and it
sets...him...off. Why?
Because the Lord completely and utterly rejects this whole notion of unclean
people from whom we must separate ourselves and who can contaminate us with
their foulness.
Because the Lord Jesus sees into the heart of this whole religious system that the
Pharisees have created and sees hypocrisy - sees that its really a way to set
yourself above other people by going through religious rituals that allegedly make
you more holy, more pure, better and more righteous.
The irony of this
The irony of all this is pungent as a bowl of chopped onions. Jesus is saying, when you
try to get closer to God by moving away from unclean people, you instead separate
yourself from God. Jesus is saying, when you try to make yourself holy by putting
yourself above other people, you instead become wicked. Evil.
And Jesus gets angry out of frustration, I think - all this religious effort - tithing your
herbs for instance, to make sure youre following the law of God down to the smallest
detail - I mean, how ridiculous - you go out to your herb garden and pick some basil and
you take it inside and put it in a pile and then carefully, like a drug dealer dividing up a
pile of weed, separate out a tenth of it to devote to God. Youre oh-so-scrupulous in
allegedly obeying God and yet you miss the whole point of knowing and loving and
obeying God.
And even worse, as the Lord charges the Scribes in vs. 52, you hinder other people from
knowing and loving and obeying God too.

The danger of religion

What does this have to do with us? Well, when you read the Bible, you ought to ask,
where do I fit in here? We do that with other stories - when you read the Lord of the
Rings, you wonder, would I be a person of courage like Sam and Frodo? Well, I
recommend every time we read about the Pharisees and Scribes in the Gospels - who
were the good religious people of the day - we ask ourselves, I am like that? Am I doing
that? Am I - a Pharisee? Because who are the so-called good religious people of our day
and time? Who are the people who are trying to know, love and obey God? We are.
Listen to what theologian Cornelius Plantinga Jr. says about this:
When we are most religious, we may be most at risk of losing touch with
God...Honest religious practice builds spiritual growth...But not nearly all
religious practice is honest. Evil perverts religion as well as everything
else...When it does....People start to use their religion to get rich or to get
happy...They use it to build a power base or simply to secure and enrich a middleclass life. We believers are entirely capable of using mutant religion to conceal
from ourselves the character of God; we are entirely capable of using our religion
to oppose the project of God in the world.
How we do this?
And we must ask ourselves, in our attempts to know love and obey God, are we
separating ourselves from other people, and hindering them from coming to know God?
Lets think of how this can happen.
How about, for starters, church signs?
Like the one I saw that said, Dont Make Me Come Down There! - God
Like the one a church put up for Easter - Were Open More Than Twice a Year
Like the one you see in August sometimes - You Think Its Hot Here?
On a personal level - does your piety separate yourself from other people?
One of my college roommates told about the time his company hired a new
department manager for my friends department, and the man got the people in his
new department together and said, You need to know that Im a Christian, so
dont swear or tell dirty jokes anywhere where I might hear them.

You see, there is a fake form of holiness that repels other people because at heart its
about making the so-called holy person feel better about themselves by thinking Im good
and righteous and better than other people. And people can smell that a mile away and
they feel judged by it, they sense its self-righteous phoniness.
Jesus was the holiest man who ever lived. And yet broken and sinful people were not
repelled by him, they were attracted to him. They felt an overwhelming love and
acceptance that enabled them to come before him - not run away from him - come before
him and admit their mess and need and find his mercy and healing.
What do we do?
The Lord says in vs. 42 that the Pharisees had neglected the love of God, and mercy
towards people - and they should have devoted themselves to those - rather than their
fussy religious nonsense.
It goes back to basics, really - that great commandment again - love God with all your
heart soul mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. With one nuance here mercy towards people - mercy towards people who need mercy - broken, poor, hurting
people.
The Pharisees had made it so complicated - all these little rules - wash your hands! Tithe
your herbs! Jesus makes it conceptually simple - Love God, and love others. He says
elsewhere, come to me all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you
rest. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
The Lord doesnt burden us with endless religious requirements that we must follow out
of duty and obligation so we can try to please a distant, frowning deity.
Love God
What does that mean? For one thing, to delight in God
The great cellist Pablo Casals, in his life story entitled Joys and Sorrows, revisits
his first memory of attending church on Christmas Eve when he was 5. He
walked to the church in a small village in Spain hand-in-hand with his father, who
was the church organist.
As he walked, he shivered - not because the night was cold, but because the
atmosphere was so mysterious.
"I felt that something wonderful was about to happen. High overhead, the
heavens were full of stars, and as we walked in silence I held my father's hand ....
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In the dark, narrow streets, there were moving figures, shadowy and spectral and
silent, too, moving into the church, silently .... My father played the organ, and
when I sang, it was my heart that was singing, and I poured out everything that
was in me.
And Central, I think youre on to this. Ive had some wonderful experiences of the
presence of God in worship here lately - and that comes from people gathering to worship
a God they love. And if we can keep our focus on God, keep our hearts on God, as we
worship - thats what Jesus was talking about here, thats what we do, and people will
walk in here and sense the presence of God, it will feel to them like the smell of bread
baking in the oven.
Mercy towards others
I read a column in The New York Times a couple of months ago by Nicholas Kristof - the
Time is not exactly a hotbed of sympathy towards Christians. But heres what Kristof
wrote:
...the liberal caricature of evangelicals is incomplete and unfair. I have little in common,
politically or theologically, with evangelicals or, while Im at it, conservative Roman
Catholics. But Ive been truly awed by those Ive seen in so many remote places,
combating illiteracy and warlords, famine and disease, humbly struggling to do the Lords
work as they see it, and it is offensive to see good people derided.
On a recent trip to Angola, the country with the highest child mortality rate in the world, I
came across a rural hospital run by Dr. Stephen Foster, 65, a white-haired missionary
surgeon who has lived there for 37 years much of that in a period when the Angolan
regime was Marxist and hostile to Christians.
Foster, the son and grandson of missionaries, has survived tangles with a 6-foot cobra and
angry soldiers. He has had to make do with rudimentary supplies: Once, he said, he
turned the tube for a vehicles windshield-washing fluid into a catheter to drain a patients
engorged bladder.
Armed soldiers once tried to kidnap 25 of his male nurses, and when Foster ordered the
gunmen off the property, he said, they fired Ak-47 rounds near his feet. He held firm, and
they eventually retreated without the nurses.
Oh, by the way, this is where Dr. Foster raised his family.
Kristoff continues, ...I must say that a disproportionate share of the aid workers Ive met
in the wildest places over the years, long after anyone sensible had evacuated, have been
evangelicals, nuns or priests.1
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Friends, this is why, for example, were doing this diaper ministry - I must say that I am
grieving and wounded they didnt select my name for the ministry - Blessed Bottoms but hey, Ill get over it.
Why are we giving diapers away? Because we want to move towards people like Jesus
did - the diapers are only a means to say we care about you, and a way we hope will break
the ice and show we are people who care so we can develop relationships with hurting,
struggling people outside our walls here. Mercy, mercy towards the hurting!
We need Christ to do this
And if this loving God stuff sounds weird to you - well, thats a diagnostic indicator that
you may be trapped in joyless mechanical obedience that you follow in hopes that it
makes you ok in Gods sight.
And thats where we all start really - were trapped in our own mess and on our own
were pretty hopeless. We are, the very kind of people whom Jesus came to save - the
lost, the broken, the messed-up. And instead of standing far off in the splendor of his
holiness, the Lord came all the way down to us and moves towards us to touch us and
heal us and forgive us and free us from the curse of bogus religion. Heal us and forgive
us so we can love God and love other people. Died to heal us and forgive us. My
goodness, think of that - the Lord did not retreat from sinful, impure people - he let them
arrest him and lay hands on him and beat him and nail him to a cross - and somehow took
their sin and our sin into the great heart of God - where it was forgiven. Thanks be to
God. Amen.
Endnotes
1. Nicholas Kristof, A Little Respect for Dr. Foster, in The New York Times, March 28, 2015.