Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Drawing Apart Part II: Jesus dealing with Rules and Guidelines

For those of you coming from or actively a part of a religious tradition, or interested in Jesus, here's some more thoughts coming out of last weeks blog about days off, rest, "sabbaths" and religion and rules. If you're not interested in those things you may want to skip this post:

I think one challenge with religion is that because practices are tied to God and the Eternal and the Holy and Sacred we feel like we don't have the right to change anything. We don't want to step on God's turf -- which makes sense -- so we become cautious, conservative and sometimes fearful. We can end up getting stuck with rules that don't achieve the purposes they were established for. Then you have people like Jesus coming around challenging the system and getting hammered for it because people think he's challenging God when he's really giving people a chance to get back to God and the original point behind the rules...

It's not that Jesus was destroying all rules and guidelines, just busting up the ones that had calcified to the point that they were actually doing the opposite of what they were established for. For instance, people jumping through all kind of strange hoops to not work on the sabbath -- which ended up taking more effort than a normal day and getting the focus way off of God and rest to the point that you needed a day of rest after the day of rest.

No comments: