Entitlement Versus Harm

 

Over the last year, and through the years I have been pastoring among you, we have continually looked at the Gospels in Holy Scripture regarding the teachings of Jesus. We have reflected on the reality that much of his teaching about truth, righteousness, and love was very hard to hear for those watching him and following him. Most who came to him, wanted him to fit into their “boxes” of belief, expectation, and hope. They overwhelmingly left disappointed (I readily welcome any discussion or clarity needed on this statement from Holy Scripture).

The Scriptures teach us that “he came unto his own (the Covenant People of Israel), and his own received him not”. The multiple thousands who had previously followed him, enamored by his healings, miracles, and free provisions, soon scattered when the “hard sayings of Jesus” began to pile up. Jesus expected too much, undermined current and established national and family understandings, and required a discipleship that expected the embrace of pain and a frightening form of authenticity and humility. The answer to the teachings of Jesus for most in the end? “Um, no thank you.”

Many influential forms of Christianity today (and their groupthink that requires enmeshed conformity), try to file the rough edges off of the Jesus of Holy Scripture. They have little sympathy that his teachings and discipleship apply to their learned culture, values, or assumptions. For others? (especially, the “other side”) Maybe. But to the “entitled”, well, that is another story.

Listen to the words of Dr. Karl Barth, one of the most influential theologians of the modern period (on almost all established Christian Traditions):

“It is not merely that the world exists side by side with God: it has taken His place, and has itself become God, and demands ‘the same devotion which the old-fashioned believer offered to his God’ (Dr. F. Strauss). Contradictions within the deified world—Nature and Civilization, Materialism and Idealism, Capitalism and Socialism, Secularism and Ecclesiasticism, Imperialism and Democracy—are not so serious as they give themselves out to be. Such contradictions are contradictions within the world, and there is for them no paradox, no negation, no eternity.”

In other words, they require simplicity not complexity (paradox), conformance not careful thinking and honesty (negation), and temporal pleasure not a transcendent transformative salvation (eternity).

One of the greatest examples of an entitled, performance-oriented, and angry-victim “character” in the Gospels is the Older Brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son. But it was only the Prodigal Son in his honesty, repentance, and humility that received honor, glory, and salvation.

This Sunday as we look at the Parable of the Landowner and the Laborers, we come face to face with the important definitions of what is just and unjust, fair and unfair, righteous or unrighteous. In contrast to the ultimate righteous, good, and holy judge, is the entitled, rebellious and self-centered view of the world and it’s system.

In reflecting on Matthew 20:1-16, I wonder if we will have anything to apply to our own lives, that might open us up to less self-pity, less emptiness, and less loneliness? Something that may give us more contentment, peace, and a trust in a God who calls us to accept his love and our inability on our own to receive it?

I am confident that we have much to receive with joy, if this is our desire.

 

Fr. Tom