More Like Jesus

Mini-Message

If you’ve waited tables, you’ve likely met the “Sunday Crowd”—churchgoers known for being loud, demanding, and poor tippers.

(Back in my day, to get good tips you had to go to the smoking section of the restaurant.)

The hypocrisy of the “Sunday Crowd” can make you embarrassed to call yourself a Christian.

Jesus faced the hypocrisy of the “righteous,” too. He asked, “What’s lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or evil?” Their silence revealed stubborn hearts.

It also revealed the social pressure of deciding to stick with Jesus. Following Jesus means leaving the crowd behind.

But maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

The Five Minute Version

When I waited tables in college, I learned an inconvenient truth: waiters hate the “Sunday Crowd”.

The “Sunday Crowd” was what my fellow wait staff called the nicely dressed groups who came in after church. They had a reputation for being loud, demanding, inconsiderate, tipping poorly, and lingering too long. Church people made Sunday lunch the hardest shift of the week.

I went to church, and my coworkers knew it. But they made me embarrassed to say I was a Christian.

Have you ever felt embarrassed to be a Christian because of how other Christians act? Sometimes, it’s more than embarrassment—it can cause real harm.

Mahatma Gandhi, intrigued by Jesus, once tried to visit a Christian church in Calcutta. He was turned away because of his caste. From that single experience, he rejected the church, saying, “If it weren’t for Christians, I’d be a Christian.”

This week in our story, Jesus faces something similar: the slings and arrows of the “righteous.” After a week of ministry in the villages, Jesus enters the synagogue. He wants to heal a man, but he is aware of the antagonism—and savvy—of his emerging enemies.

So, he asks a simple question: “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?”

Notice that he doesn’t debate the letter of the law on healing. He points to its spirit: to do good.

Seems like a simple question. Rhetorical, even.

As we have discussed, in the Jewish tradition of the day, usually a teacher develops a repartee with his subjects, but the religious leaders are silent. They refuse to engage with him. Rhetoric is not going to persuade them.

It hardly ever does.

(But then again, as we see in story after story in the gospels, miracles don’t persuade them either.)

Their silence is frightening, because it signals a shift. They are no longer engaging with him in a good faith conversation about the law. Instead, they are developing more sinister ideas.

Jesus “looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts,” he healed the man with the withered hand. Would you want Jesus to look at you in anger?

One of the best emotional insights I’ve learned is that anger often hides deep grief. Even Jesus experienced this. Doing the right thing can feel very alone.

If you’re interested in Jesus, you belong to one of two groups: the crowds or the disciples. Our congregation’s mission is to call the “Christian-ish” to become passionate servants of Jesus Christ. The “Christian-ish” may sting a little, but it’s just the modern-day equivalent of the biblical “crowd.”

The challenge is to move from being part of the crowd to becoming a true disciple.

Eventually, if you keep seeking Jesus, you’ll have to make that choice.

Becoming a disciple is a big shift, socially, and it can feel lonely. You will have to stand up when others stay silent.

It’s fitting to follow last week’s exploration of shame with today’s exploration of hypocrisy. The clear call of this story is to chose a path. If you call yourself a Christian, you must either make yourself vulnerable and let Jesus heal you, or opt for a life of hypocrisy, which leads to even darker things, as we will see next week.

If anger is masked sadness, Jesus was already grieving the stubborn refusal of the religious leaders to listen. Perhaps he was already seeing the inevitable conclusion that is to come.

Learning to live more like Jesus isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. To learn to live more like Jesus is to separate from the crowd. And the first crowd it may separate you from is the Sunday crowd.

But let’s be honest: you don’t really want to be one of the Sunday crowd anyway.

Pray
Lord, give me the courage to follow you completely, even when it may separate me from the
crowd around me. Amen.
Live It
Have you ever experienced religious hypocrisy? How did it make you feel?