Who Do We Need?
Blog post by Matt McCoy
8 minute read
Who do we need in our churches in order to read and interpret the Bible?
Our Big Idea this growing season is…
“Jesus’ friendship with unexpected people transforms how we love each other,”
and one of the ways I’ve been transformed by Jesus’ friendships is by coming to this answer to the above question:
Outcasts, traitors, and invisible people are necessary in the church in order for us to interpret the Bible. Our interpretations are incomplete without their friendship.
Let me tell you a story…
When I was about thirty years old, my theology ran out of gas. As I was getting older and life was getting more complex, some of the forms of piety that I had been trained in became inadequate for the situations I found myself in. I used to love scripture and now I fell asleep reading it. My prayers felt like tossing coins into an ocean of indifference. I felt like an outsider at church. I was rather disoriented and couldn’t tell up from down anymore.
Some call it a “dark night of the soul,” some call it a “season in the desert,” and some call it a “midlife crisis.” Whatever term we might use to describe how I felt at that time, with the benefit of hindsight, today I can make two important observations that I was unable to make at the time:
I can affirm the importance of being taught simple forms of piety because that’s where we all start. How we relate to God begins, and often ends, with the basics.
Dante, at the beginning of The Divine Comedy, can sum up what I felt so well, which reminds us how these sorts of experiences are a fairly normal part of the human experience:
Midway upon the journey of our lifeI found myself within a forest dark
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
I needed to find my way back to myself again, and because I was (and still am) so weary of spiritual fads, I wanted something tried-and-true. I turned to the Psalms because people for thousands of years have prayed through the Psalms daily in order to walk in the direction Jesus is walking.
“The Book of Psalms is an anatomy of the soul,”
wrote John Calvin in the preface of his commentary on the book. It’s incredible. I know I will find myself in a space like that again in my life, and I intend to walk through those spaces with the Psalms again.
Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. Here’s how the book of Psalms kicks off (And I had a great time translating some of those Hebrew expressions into concepts that we would understand (the very idea of “24/7” didn’t exist back then):
Psalm 1:1-2
How fortunate is everyone who doesn’t take advice from those who’d pull you down, or hang out with shady characters, or sit down with sarcastic jerks. But God’s Word is our joy and God’s Word is on repeat in our hearts 24/7.
So, it seems that, if we’re going to walk in the direction Jesus is walking in, we’re not going to walk in the direction that some other people are walking in. Jesus is walking in a direction that is different than others... and we follow Jesus.
This theme is all over the Bible. While I could bring a myriad of examples, I’ll grab one more Psalm for us to look at. Besides, taking Hebrew words and locating them into a modern context is a hoot. Obviously, the Bible didn’t exist at a time when the internet was around, but as I look at those Hebrew words, and look at where we see those concepts in the world around us, this is what I came up with:
PSALM 26:4 -5
I won’t sit next to people spreading lies online, and I won’t go with the two-faced,
I really hate the people who are out to destroy the neighborhood, and won’t sit next to those Trolls.
We’re not gonna join in with those who are harming society, right? We’re gonna separate ourselves from them, right? We “unfollow” and “unsubscribe” from “those people,” right? We teach our children to be careful who they choose for friends, we encourage our community to watch out for bad influences, and we avoid those kinds of folks when we’re in public spaces, right?
And, hey, up until my thirtieth birthday, I was doing a dadgum good job of that. I remained faithful to my wife and kids and hung out with people who did, I paid my taxes and hung out with people who did, I went to church and hung out with people who did. I was living the life God wanted me to live!
But all the pain of my 20’s disrupted the way I was reading the Bible. Remember that question I asked at the beginning of the blog? Who do we need in our churches in order to read and interpret the Bible? Here’s where this question started to bubble up in me:
I had friends who weren’t faithful to their spouses, I had friends go to prison for pedophelia.
I had a friend lose his business due to tax evasion.
I had a lot of friends who quit going to church because it felt disconnected from life.
As my life got messier and uglier, I became deeply confused.
The pain of real life disrupted how I read the Bible, prayed, and experienced church.
And that’s precisely the space where Jesus shows up in the life of Matthew the apostle. Matthew was the shady character, the one who would pull us down, the one destroying the neighborhood, the one you would avoid in the grocery store. As a tax collector, he was actually worse than all that. And he’s certainly the kind of person the Psalms, and myself in my 20’s, knew I should avoid.
But Jesus reaches out to Matthew. And when Jesus reaches out to Matthew, he does so without Matthew ever doing anything right. Matthew doesn’t make any profession of faith, he doesn’t cry out, he doesn’t climb a sycamore tree, he doesn’t even stand up.
He. Does. Nothing.
Now before we read this story, I need to provide a definition for a term I translated. I translated the term “pharisee” as “Spiritually Mature” in this story, because it captures the essence of how Jesus has used uncommon friends to disciple me, and I’d like to do the same for our church. We’re all called to walk into spiritual maturity, the New Testament talks a lot about that. For the purposes of this blog post today, I define “spiritually mature” as folks who have attended church at least once a month for a few years now can name a few books of the Bible, and can pray on their own outside of church. Pause and ask yourself if that criteria describes you:
Attended church at least once a month for a few years
Can name a few books of the Bible.
Can pray on my own outside of church.
If so, then when you read this story, imagine yourself in the crowd of the Spiritually Mature, because hey, Spiritual Maturity is what we’re going for! It’s certainly what I was going for in my 20’s and 30’s, and it’s what I’m going for today, too. Spiritual Maturity is a good thing, and is what our two Psalms point us towards! Psalm 1:1-2 and Psalm 26:4-5 want us to become Spiritually Mature.
As someone who is Spiritually Mature, I find this story about Matthew to be annoying and offensive.
I would rather see Jesus go to eat at the house of the person who is faithful to his wife and kids, paid his taxes, and went to church. Obviously, Jesus should reward people like me (and probably you) for our years of faithfulness, right? I mean, just to prove the point, let’s reread our two Psalms before we read our story:
Psalm 1:1-2
How fortunate is everyone who doesn’t take advice from those who’d pull you down, or hang out with shady characters, or sit down with sarcastic jerks. But God’s Word is our joy and God’s Word is on repeat in our hearts 24/7.
PSALM 26:4 -5
I won’t sit next to people spreading lies online, and I won’t go with the two-faced,
I really hate the people who are out to destroy the neighborhood, and won’t sit next to those Trolls.
OK, so now that we know who the Spiritually Mature are, and how they’re not supposed to “hang out with shady characters,” let’s read what happens when Matthew encounters Jesus while he’s in the midst of destroying his neighborhood.
Matthew 9:9-13
As Jesus was passing through, he saw a man sitting in the tax booth. His name was Matthew. And he said to him, “walk in my steps,” and Matthew arose and followed him. And it just so happened, as he made himself at home in Matthew’s house, a bunch of other tax collectors and shady characters showed up and joined the feast. They talked long into the night.
And when the Spiritually Mature saw all this, they were shocked and asked his disciples, “Why does your Teacher eat with tax collectors and shady characters?”
Jesus, overhearing, shot back, “The strong don’t need a doctor, but the sick. Go and learn what this scripture means, ‘I want you to show mercy, and not just go through the motions.’ I’m not here to affirm, I’m here to forgive.”
Well, wait a sec…
Who’s right here: Jesus or the Psalms?
The Psalms clearly tell me not to give Matthew the time of day, and if I was in the crowd of the Spiritually Mature, I would certainly NOT go into Matthew’s house. Have you ever eaten in the home of a troll, of someone spewing lies online, of someone destroying the neighborhood (other than at a family gathering, when it’s impossible for you to get away from the family member who’s a vocal supporter of your political/social opponents)?
But there’s Jesus and his disciples, eating food inside a house that was bought with the blood money of their own oppressed people, alongside the people who’ve cozied up to the oppressors.
Within this story is an invitation from Jesus to go back to the scriptures (Jesus quotes from Hosea 6:6) and relearn what they mean, in light of who Jesus is and what Jesus is doing. So whatever interpretation I’ve come up with for Hosea 6:6, or Psalm 1:1-2, or Psalm 26:4-5, I have to reinterpret in the light of Jesus. And when I do that, I notice how Jesus is inviting into his community the sort of people that I would exclude, if I’m doing my own interpretation of these passages.
Therefore, to go back to what I said at the beginning of this blog:
Outcasts, traitors, and invisible people are necessary in the church in order for us to interpret the Bible. Our interpretation of the Bible is incomplete without their friendship.
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