Pulled

Mark 7:5

      I drive a seventeen year old car. It is paid for, and still runs with very little maintenance. It shows its age. The paint no longer has a shine to it and the driver’s side door interior handle has seen better days. But it still runs. I could afford a newer vehicle, but choose to continue using the Camry. But when I am out driving and see all the shiny new cars riding around, I get pulled. I have to fight against the purchase.

       Do you ever feel pulled between embracing the future and holding onto the past? I am comfortable with Windows Vista and Seven, so I don’t want to move onto Windows Eight. Of course I really want a MacBook Pro, but do I really need that much power? My clothes are getting older. Should I go out and get some new ones? Where would I wear them? What is the need?

      Everyone gets stuck in the past at times. We do things a certain way and won’t give it up until we are forced to change. We have are favorite seats at church. We travel the same roads almost every time we travel. We have our choices of restaurants and entertainment. We are creatures of habit.

      The religious leaders of Jesus’ day were not different. Their world was the professional religious world. Their whole lives centered around their role in the religious community. And when someone, namely Jesus, came around and tried to take away their traditions, they resisted. One area of resistance came in the guise of ritual washings. They had a certain way of doing these, certain times and certain circumstances, and when someone didn’t follow their guidelines, they got upset.

      I am glad that surgeons maintain a ritual around the washing of hands. They do it a very specific way to minimize the possibility of infection contamination. They have to learn this behavior as part of their training. I can bet that if someone came up with a new way to wash their hands, that they would have difficulty accepting the new routine. This would be true even if the new way was better.

      One other tidbit. Traditions can be added onto almost any activity, even religious ones, or should I say especially religious ones. That is what had happened to the religious folks of Jesus day. They had added so many traditions that the original Law and God’s intent had been lost. It was more important to keep the tradition than to keep the Law. And the traditions, those added sets of rules and rituals, ended up invalidating their standing before the LORD.

Family!

Mark 3:20-35

      Sometimes people just don’t understand you. It is not that they don’t speak the same language. That would be easy to absorb. But sometimes they don’t get you. They don’t understand what motivates you, what really matters to you, the things you would die for. We expect outsiders to not get us, but family is supposed to be in our corner. It is one thing to be accused by outsiders of being nuts, and another thing when those closest to us do the same.

      Jesus family thinks He is nuts. The religious leaders think He is demon possessed, the religious equivalent of nuts. And yet the people are crowding to be in His presence. Perfect strangers accept Jesus.

      Sometimes family are not as supportive as you want and need them to be. Sometime you have to continue without family. This can be really hard to do, especially if family has been supportive in the past. Going ahead with that support can be scary.

      We expect the establishment to get in the way. This is especially true when God is really on the move. Jesus is obviously doing things unheard of in His day. The teaching backup up by the miracles threatened their way of thinking about God and themselves. They thought they had this thing all worked out in their heads. And then Jesus shows up and flips the whole thing over. Everything they have come to believe is now in question. No wonder they attack Jesus.

      Jesus in His powerful way tells a story to drive home His message. He uses the story, the parable, to defend His actions and force the religious leaders to reevaluate their deeply held beliefs and their hasty conclusion about Him.

      I want you to know that sometimes people oppose you because sometimes you are nuts, or at least your ideas are! Sometime what we are doing is so off base that they are trying to protect you from yourself. I know I have had some pretty nutty ideas over these many years. I am so glad I had some people in my life who were willing to tell me my idea were nuts. They saved me so much pain and sorrow.

      Sometimes we oppose other people because with think their ideas are nuts. What they are trying to do seems so foreign to the way that things have been done in the past that our brain can’t wrap our minds around the change. And we like stability, so we oppose the change. We might need to take a few steps back and reevaluate the situation. Our knee jerk reactions might not lead us to the most productive outcome. Sometimes slow is good.