"And He asked, 'is it lawful to do good or harm, to save a life or to kill, on your holy day?'. They said nothing. And He looked upon them with anger, grieved at the hardness of their hearts". Mark 3:4,5.
Mark's gospel presents the Son of God as someone prescribed religion simply cannot swallow.
A few verses before this, the disciples of Jesus had been marked as lawbreakers by a similar company because of the way they picked and ate grain on the Sabbath, but Jesus would have none of it. On the occasion of His statements quoted (above), Jesus went out of His way to heal a crippled in front of these people on the holy day of the week, asking them why this was wrong. After refusing to reply to His query, they then went on to begin to plot how they could rid themselves of Him, purely because He was seeking to show that truth in effect operates outside of the 'box' they had invented for themselves.
Their practices would never allow them to cross the line and rescue a tax collector or a woman of the street, and to then actually visit their homes and eat with them would have been abominable. They could not speak with actual authority because their interests were so very far from the Lord they presumed that they served (who clearly wanted to draw alongside those so ruined by whatever plagued them, be it adversity or sin).
The 'rules' alone (especially as defined by such religion) were not made to make us righteous by themselves, but to point us beyond ourselves to the one who can truly aid us, deliver us from the 'strong man' that ruins us and turns us into creatures that cannot contain what is truly good. The most dreadful estate is when we fail to see that truth - that we think we 'contain' what is truly necessary when, in truth, we're an entire universe away from what is necessary to remedy the alienation of our souls.
The Jesus we encounter is more than willing to help those who know they need Him, but He is only angered and dismayed by the ones who see that aid as nothing but a hindrance to their own contrivances ruling themselves and everyone else.
The confines of misplaced religion are truly terrifying. They cause these people to be entirely paralysed when it comes to seeing what matters - that God is breaking into their day and acting before their eyes, and yet, all they can do is renounce such a marvel - they cannot grant what is beyond their own prescribed boundaries of what is proper and virtuous.
We are all too familiar with those who seek to evaluate things through such a lens. Jesus is angered and grieved at the consequence of this affliction, because it dreadfully nullifies, indeed murders, the vital value and significance of truth, however obvious it is, and leaves a person so defined incapable of opening themselves to what truly counts.
The Kingdom of God is a realm where what is seen (in word and deed) affirms the true presence and work of God in what it seeks to show (God's great care and mercy towards us). The powers that work against such are those which seek to repudiate the presence and worth of such in the world - they would act to silence such truth.
It is clearly commonplace today to see this negation in so much that presents itself as meaningful and right, but Jesus calls us to see better, deeper, further than this - to look and grasp the splendour of the one who makes us whole by a redeeming mercy that makes us what our own religions never will.
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