Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, \u201cCome forward.\u201d Then he said to them, \u201cIs it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?\u201d But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, \u201cStretch out your hand.\u201d He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart.\u00a0<\/em>I\u2019m not going to name the issues of today about which Christians are hard-hearted; I\u2019ll let you make your own analogies. But let\u2019s think about what\u2019s going on in this scene. There is nothing unclear within the Torah: the Sabbath is not a day to do work; it is a day to turn your attention exclusively to God. Jesus may say that he expects his followers not to violate a single jot and tittle from the Law (Matthew 5:18), but that statement has to be interpreted in some way other than face value, because Jesus doesn\u2019t just do work on the Sabbath; he does it as the centerpiece of the synagogue worship gathering! How could he possibly have thrown an explicit violation of Torah more in the faces of the Pharisees?<\/p>\nIn Luke 13:14, the leader of a synagogue where Jesus is healing exhorts the crowd: \u201cThere are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.\u201d Is that an unreasonable request? Jesus later responds in Luke 14:5 by making an analogy: \u201c\u201cIf one of you has a child or an ox that has fallen into a well, will you not immediately pull it out on a sabbath day?\u201d But is that really a fair analogy? Not a single person that Jesus healed in any of his Sabbath healings had a life-threatening condition that required immediate attention and could not wait till one of the six days on which work ought to be done.<\/p>\n
But Jesus\u2019 Sabbath healings have a more critical teaching point. He says in Mark 2:27: \u201cThe sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath.\u201d That is a tremendously revolutionary statement that calls out one of the most pious-sounding things that Christians always say about worship and life in general: It\u2019s not about you; it\u2019s about God\u2019s glory<\/em>. Nope, the Sabbath is made for humankind<\/em>, not for God\u2019s glory. We absolutely have the need to spend the day losing ourselves in God\u2019s glory; furthermore we love ourselves the best by forgetting ourselves and enjoying God\u2019s glory in every minute of our lives; but this is done in order to fulfill our own therapeutic needs, <\/em>which Jesus has declared it legitimate to own and recognize.<\/p>\nSo the next time you\u2019re getting annoyed when an emotionally needy and perhaps immature person spends too much time talking during the prayer concern time in your worship service, let Jesus remind you that the Sabbath was made for him or her to be healed<\/em>, not for you to make it all about your<\/em> insistence that it\u2019s supposed to be all about God (which is to say that you actually make it all about yourself<\/em> the more that you need others to know that you<\/em> only care about glorifying God!). I consider the larger implication of Jesus\u2019 radical statement to be that God does not prescribe any laws for the pure sake of His glory, but all of His commands are analogous to the command to glorify Him through the Sabbath, which is done for the sake of human flourishing.<\/em><\/p>\nThe Pharisees of Jesus\u2019 day gave themselves power by deputizing themselves as police enforcing Torah for the sake of God\u2019s glory, particularly by attacking those who did \u201cwork\u201d on the Sabbath. In John 5:10, they lay into a crippled man whom Jesus had healed, saying, \u201cIt is the sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.\u201d Really? You can\u2019t carry an object<\/em>? What if the man had been carrying a plate of food? Do you have to eat your food like a pig with your mouth directly off the ground or is even that too much work? It is a tremendously common power tactic in our day for Christians to deputize themselves like the Pharisees as the defenders of God\u2019s glory whose job is to police others\u2019 morality. After all, Leviticus 19:17 says, \u201cYou shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself.\u201d Some Internet trolls probably have that printed out on a sticker on their laptop screens.<\/p>\nJesus throws a wet blanket over this power game by saying God doesn\u2019t want His own glory on the Sabbath because He wants to strip you of your pretext for oppressing people with your exhibitionist \u201cself-sacrificial\u201d piety. <\/em>But Jesus\u2019 Sabbath healing obviously isn\u2019t even primarily about offending the Pharisees. When he sees the man with the withered hand, he sees someone who has a legitimate obstacle to fully experiencing the glory of God on a day when God wants to share His joy with everybody. So He doesn\u2019t heal to disrupt worship or because worship is unimportant; He heals to allow worship to happen<\/em>. We don\u2019t know whether this happened in the middle of Jesus\u2019 sermon though it\u2019s clear that it was quite disruptive; but Jesus was unwilling to allow worship to continue until everybody could enjoy it together. The implication is that we are engaging in sacrilegious worship if anyone in our worship community has the equivalent of a withered hand or a withered dignity that prevents them from fully enjoying the glory of God, because worship is not about silently humblebragging that we are selfless saints who don\u2019t have any needs and only talk about God all the time; it\u2019s about bringing all our neediness and sin into the healing rays of God\u2019s light where we can lose ourselves inside His glory.<\/p>\nII. Circumcision<\/strong><\/p>\nThe controversy of circumcision was the basis of the first apostolic council that Christianity ever convened, the Jerusalem council of Acts 15. It seems to me from the way \u201ccircumcision\u201d is used in New Testament discourse that the word doesn\u2019t just refer to the physical act of cutting the foreskin of the penis but serves as a symbolic summary of Torah fidelity, all the ways that God\u2019s people are supposed to\u00a0honor their covenant and set themselves apart from the Gentiles. Circumcision was the first covenantal command given to Abraham in Genesis 17 long before the Ten Commandments were even written. God says very plainly that \u201cany uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people\u201d (v. 14).<\/p>\n
But what circumcision ends up becoming is a mark of legitimacy, a means of separating who\u2019s in from who\u2019s out. And neither Jesus nor Paul nor any other apostles are as devoted to reinforcing the power of insiders as the Christian machine has become for the majority of its Constantinian existence. Whether or not we have our sons\u2019 foreskins snipped is more a matter of hygiene today, but boy oh boy, do we have our own \u201ccircumcisions.\u201d Since the information\u00a0 age is an ideological era in which we are increasingly defined not by our physical bodies but the words with which we represent ourselves, our \u201ccircumcisions\u201d are the position \u201cstances\u201d and doctrinal \u201cviews\u201d we use to mark ourselves and litmus-test other people to see if they are \u201cset apart for God\u201d like us or \u201cGentile\u201d losers.<\/p>\n
To be fair, this kind of litmus-testing happens just as readily with the liberal concerns of identity politics as it happens with the conservative concerns of doctrinal \u201corthodoxy.\u201d Nothing is more important to progressive bourgeois white people than to put their \u201ccircumcised\u201d political correctness on proud display before others; nobody hates racists and sexists and homophobes and so forth more than progressive bourgeois white people who need to show how \u201ccircumcised\u201d they are. Likewise, I think the reason that conservative evangelicals defend their doctrtinal \u201ccircumcisions\u201d so furiously is because without them, their whole system for organizing the world into who\u2019s in and who\u2019s out would collapse and they wouldn\u2019t know who to be friends with.<\/p>\n
This is why I\u2019m tickled perhaps a little too giddily to read Paul\u2019s subversive shredding of the concept of circumcision in Romans 2:25-29:<\/p>\n
Circumcision indeed is of value if you obey the law; but if you break the law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision. So, if those who are uncircumcised keep the requirements of the law, will not their uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision?\u2026\u00a0<\/sup>For a person is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. Rather, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart\u2014it is spiritual and not literal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThis revolutionary statement, which almost all Romans Roaders completely gloss over on their way to Romans 3\u2019s talk of total depravity, sabotages the litmus-testing capacity of circumcision, whether in its literal foreskin-snipping 1st century form or in its ideological form today. Circumcision itself was a requirement of the law. <\/i>So it\u2019s a complete oxymoron for Paul to say that the uncircumcised could \u201ckeep the requirements of the law\u201d since by being uncircumcised, they haven\u2019t.\u00a0<\/em>Circumcision is the ultimate symbol of a willingness to do arbitrary things to your flesh purely out of obedience to God and without any humanist ethical basis. It is a perfect physical reflection of Kierkegaard\u2019s priority of the absolute over the ethical in his Fear and Trembling<\/em>. And here Paul says that there are people whose \u201cuncircumcision\u201d can be \u201cregarded as circumcision,\u201d which renders this foundational proving ground of arbitrary obedience to God completely meaningless.<\/p>\nThe only way Paul\u2019s statement that uncircumcised people can \u201ckeep the requirements of the law\u201d makes any sense is if the \u201crequirements of the law,\u201d like circumcision, are really \u201cmatters of the heart\u201d that are \u201cspiritual and not literal,\u201d meaning that one could somehow achieve the spiritual equivalent of circumcision (and presumably every other law) without being \u201ccircumcised in the flesh of his foreskin\u201d (or literally obeying any other law). Man, the implications of Paul\u2019s thinking would make guys like John MacArthur so mad if they ever allowed themselves to recognize them, because he yanks out their \u201ccircumcised\u201d soapbox from under them.<\/p>\n
Many Christian interpreters of Romans want to make Paul\u2019s concept of \u201cfaith\u201d into the new \u201ccircumcision\u201d that replaces foreskin-snipping. But justification by faith is not a replacement \u201ccircumcision\u201d; it is the repudiation of the concept of \u201ccircumcision\u201d and the insider\/outsider game that it creates. Paul writes that \u201cthere is no distinction\u201d between insiders and outsiders anymore \u201csince all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith\u201d (Romans 3:22-25).<\/p>\n
We do not justify ourselves<\/i> by believing in Jesus; we are rescued from justifying ourselves<\/i> by believing that Jesus has put every mistake we\u2019ve made onto his cross. If we really are \u201cjustified by [God\u2019s] grace as a gift,\u201d then there is no performance evaluation for us to pass or fail, whether in the form of living a flawless life (which no one has ever done) or \u201caccepting\u201d Jesus perfectly into our hearts (which no one has ever done either). The question is whether we really trust in God\u2019s grace enough to let ourselves renounce the self-justifying \u201ccircumcisions\u201d by which we divide the world into outsiders and insiders. We are saved when we stop \u201ccircumcising.\u201d<\/p>\n
III. Unclean Food<\/strong><\/p>\nThe question of unclean food is dealt with by both Jesus and Paul. Like circumcision and the Sabbath, the Jewish dietary laws comprise a holiness of obeying arbitrary commands from God for the strict sake of being obedient<\/em>. God says in Leviticus 10:10, \u201cYou are to distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean.\u201d There is much value to having a division in our world between holy space and common space, even if its basis is arbitrary. Evangelical low-church Protestants have lost something by destroying this distinction when they worship in elementary school cafeterias and take communion by way of single-serving cracker and grapeshots sometimes in the same packaging.<\/p>\nSo there\u2019s a legitimacy to distinguishing between sacred and profane that we\u2019ve lost in American culture. But as with the Sabbath and circumcision, what the New Testament eradicates is this concept of obedience for the sake of obedience. <\/em>The corrective that both Jesus and Paul provide is a transformation from a morality of establishing your covenantal \u201cset-apartness\u201d to a morality of purifying your heart to become God\u2019s mercy in the world. What\u2019s most important to learn from are the underlying principles<\/em> that Jesus and Paul offer for their teaching on unclean foods. These principles can and should be applied analogously to the moral questions of our day now that things like \u201csacrificial meat\u201d are quaint relics from the distant past.<\/p>\nJesus says in Mark 7:18-22:<\/p>\n
Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?\u2026 It is what comes out of a person that defiles.For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What this says to me is that morality is not an external juridical matter for God, but rather an internal therapeutic matter. God is not looking to see whether we are doing what he said to do for the sake of His honor. There are two reasons why we have been given all the commandments: for the sake of justice in how treat others (love of neighbor) and for the sake of purifying our hearts so we can enjoy God perfectly in worship (love of God), which actually makes our justice into its natural outflow. Jesus chastises the Pharisees for their casuistic legalistic approach to obedience: \u201cFor you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith\u201d (Matthew 23:23). What matters to Jesus is not whether we do things that are unclean<\/em> from a juridical, behavioral standpoint; it\u2019s whether we do things that are impure<\/em> to our hearts <\/em>so that they pervert our worship and make us live unjustly.<\/p>\nNow here\u2019s the awful scandal for the religious insiders who have so much invested in their deputized policing of other peoples\u2019 Sabbaths, circumcisions, and unclean foods: different things corrupt different hearts<\/em>, which means that sin is (wait for it\u2026) relativistic<\/em>. What a scandalously heretical\/postmodern\/liberal thing to say, etc! Why do you hate it so much for me to say that? Because it means you have to take off your Jesus purity-cop badge and lay it beneath Jesus\u2019 cross with all the other idols!<\/p>\nI don\u2019t know else can you read the verse that is perhaps the most ignored teaching of Paul\u2019s in all of his epistles: \u201cI know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself<\/em>; but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean\u201d (Romans 14:14). Go ahead and say it: But Paul\u2019s just talking about unclean food! <\/em>Then why didn\u2019t he say \u201cno food\u201d instead of nothing? Paul says something very similar in 1 Corinthians 6:12-14:<\/p>\nAll things are lawful for me, but not all things are beneficial. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything. Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food,and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There\u2019s a theory that \u201call things are lawful for\u00a0 me\u201d is a slogan the Corinthians had that Paul is throwing back in their faces, but there weren\u2019t any quotation marks in the original Greek text so I took them out. It\u2019s horrifying to the purity police to hear Paul say something like \u201cAll things are lawful for me.\u201d The NIV translators were so scandalized they had to add a \u201cYou say\u201d in front of it. But this is no call to an anything goes kind of hedonism! Paul\u2019s moral standards are way more demanding than the easy clear legalism that the purity cops want so they can focus on technically following the rules and condemning others who don\u2019t. This requires constant critical thinking. What is going to make me live a fleshly existence and what is going to make me live an inspired existence?<\/p>\n
I memorized 1 Corinthians 6:12-14 in Greek and I say it every week as a penitential practice, kneeling on the marble in each chapel of the basilica where I go because it hurts my knees. Why? Because I want resurrection!<\/em> When I conclude that prayer with ho de theos kai ton kurion egeire kai hemas exegeire dia tes dunameos auto<\/em>, I\u2019m asking God to throw off my filthy rags and raise me from the dead. There are things that are sinful for me and nobody else because they dominate me and become my idols. Being overly obsessed with my blog is one of them, which is why you won\u2019t hear from me for a while starting a week from Wednesday during Lent. Even though all things are lawful for me, not all things are beneficial. I want a pure heart so I can see God because that\u2019s the promise that Jesus made to me in Matthew 5:8.<\/p>\nWhat we should all want for each other are pure hearts so that we can all share in the glory of God together. The way to tell that it\u2019s really about that and not about the self-satisfaction of being a purity cop is if you\u2019re willing to accept that every single individual person has a different set of what is clean and unclean for them to do. We can help each other out when we see other people getting fixated, addicted, or overly zealous about anything in a way that detracts from love of God or love of neighbor. But we are disempowered by God through his teachings on Sabbath healings, circumcision, and unclean food in the New Testament of His holy word from using that book as the basis for self-aggrandizement, litmus-testing, and purity policing ever again. So let\u2019s all put our purity cop badges down at the foot of the cross and accept the resurrection of the one who died to save us from our self-righteousness!<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the main reasons that many Christians fall short who are earnestly seeking to live Biblical lives is their refusal to see legitimate analogies between issues of controversy in the time of the Bible\u2019s stories and our lives today. Most Christians completely miss the significance of three important social teachings in the New Testament […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1934,"featured_media":8580,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[86,207,544,558,1048,1219,1225,1411,1465,1522,1536,1580,1585,1644,1646,1723,1726,1734,1787,1805,1810,1918,2005,2074,2261,2316,2403,2414,2421,2458,2459,2819],"class_list":["post-8579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-1-corinthians-612-14","tag-acts-15","tag-circumcision","tag-clean","tag-genesis-1714","tag-holiness","tag-holy","tag-jesus","tag-john-510","tag-justification-by-faith","tag-kierkegaard","tag-leviticus-1010","tag-leviticus-1917","tag-luke-1314","tag-luke-145","tag-mark-227","tag-mark-31-6","tag-mark-718-22","tag-matthew-2323","tag-matthew-518","tag-matthew-58","tag-morality","tag-obedience","tag-paul","tag-purity","tag-relativism","tag-romans-1414","tag-romans-2","tag-romans-3","tag-sabbath","tag-sabbath-healing","tag-unclean"],"yoast_head":"\n
Three highly ignored teachings of the New Testament: Sabbath healings, circumcision, and unclean food<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"One of the main reasons that many Christians fall short who are earnestly seeking to live Biblical lives is their refusal to see legitimate analogies\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/2014\/02\/22\/three-ignored-social-teachings\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Three highly ignored teachings of the New Testament: Sabbath healings, circumcision, and unclean food\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"One of the main reasons that many Christians fall short who are earnestly seeking to live Biblical lives is their refusal to see legitimate analogies\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/2014\/02\/22\/three-ignored-social-teachings\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Mercy Not Sacrifice\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2014-02-22T13:12:05+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2014-07-17T18:58:26+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Morgan Guyton\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Morgan Guyton\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"17 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/2014\/02\/22\/three-ignored-social-teachings\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/2014\/02\/22\/three-ignored-social-teachings\/\",\"name\":\"Three highly ignored teachings of the New Testament: Sabbath healings, circumcision, and unclean food\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2014-02-22T13:12:05+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2014-07-17T18:58:26+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/#\/schema\/person\/32bff953b247bf1885d0323f969d801d\"},\"description\":\"One of the main reasons that many Christians fall short who are earnestly seeking to live Biblical lives is their refusal to see legitimate analogies\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/2014\/02\/22\/three-ignored-social-teachings\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/2014\/02\/22\/three-ignored-social-teachings\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/2014\/02\/22\/three-ignored-social-teachings\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Three highly ignored teachings of the New Testament: Sabbath healings, circumcision, and unclean food\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/\",\"name\":\"Mercy Not Sacrifice\",\"description\":\"The blog of Morgan Guyton\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/#\/schema\/person\/32bff953b247bf1885d0323f969d801d\",\"name\":\"Morgan Guyton\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/ccc7edabc6e70bd443d33eab0f05ce8d?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/ccc7edabc6e70bd443d33eab0f05ce8d?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Morgan Guyton\"},\"description\":\"I\u2019m the director of the NOLA Wesley Foundation, which is the United Methodist campus ministry at Tulane and Loyola University in New Orleans, LA. 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