Today’s gospel is about Jesus’ interpretation of scriptures. His critics argued frequently that he was cavalier about scriptural law and was frequent rulebreaker. But Jesus counters the charge, ”Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets but to fulfill them.” This emphatic statement indicates that Jesus is speaking to a pro-law and not a pro-prophet audience. The scripture just follows Jesus’ beatitudes, the core values of God’s kin-dom. He is reassuring his pro-law audience that his teachings are grounded in the Hebrew scriptures. Jesus argues two points: scripture’s authority will last “until heaven and earth passes away.” His second point is that they exercise authority “until all is accomplished” that refers to the coming of God’s kin-dom. God’s kin-dom’s arrival renders the law as completed and replaced. He continues to make his case: the authority of the law will pass when God’s compassion and justice requires exceptions.

Jesus’ principles may instruct our own readings. Such principles are important to me as I engage other Christians on Facebook and other situations, and they use narrow readings or fundamentalist interpretations to weaponize Jesus or narrow readings of Hebrew scriptural law against their opponents who do not fit their understanding of Christianity. They create outsiders by abusing and excluding.

Many of my Facebook friends have suffered the religious abuse and traumatic exclusion. Naturally, they are turned off by self-righteous, hate-filled, and aggressive Christians. I navigate the charged position of being a follower of Christ but do not weaponize Jesus or the scriptures. Mahatma Gandhi once said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” Gandhi’s indictment has often troubled and influenced me. I often respond in a similar vein, “I am not that type of Christian, I follow Jesus.” Or another important comment I write, ”Jesus was not a fundamentalist, he told stories and parables; he used metaphors, poetic language, and symbols.” In other words, Jesus did not interpret his scriptures literally. This is to undercut distorted literal interpretations of scripture turned against specific groups,

Weaponizing Jesus or the Bible betrays the historical ministry of Jesus. He often quotes the prophet Hosea (6:6), “What I want is mercy, not sacrifice.” The Hebrew word for mercy (hesed) is often translated as “steadfast love,” “kindness,” or “compassion.” In Luke’s sermon on the plain, Jesus instructs us, “Be compassionate as God is compassionate. (6:36)” For Jesus, all religious law must be strained through God’s compassion.

There are strong parallels between Jesus’ his pro-law, fundamentalist opponents, then and now. Jesus challenged religious law when it lost its heart and sense of grace, and it became rigidly interpreted against people and excluded violators. Jesus placed all law prescriptions through a strainer of compassion and justice. He tested many religious laws through the Great Commandment to love God and love neighbor. But Jesus also revolutionized the Leviticus commandment to “love your neighbor” whereas “neighbor” means fellow Israelite. Jesus expanded the commandment with his experience of a compassionate God. Jesus revolutionized the commandment to love neighbor by expanding the narrow definitions of neighbor. In his dialogue with a lawyer before the “Good Samaritan” parable, the lawyer interrogates Jesus, “who is my neighbor?” Jesus tells us a loaded parable, with a priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan. The lawyer is compelled by the story that structures to answer, the one who showed compassion, a member of a despised ethnic group. The lawyer refused to name the Samaritan, probably gagged at the thought of saying the words. So he uses the words “the one who showed compassion,” But Jesus transformed the definition of neighbor to include outsiders, outcasts, the poor, enemies, and Gentiles.

For the Pharisees, the scribes, and the Temple priests, Jesus consistently broke boundaries and religious laws. Jesus scholar Marcus Borg comments, “As one who knew God, Jesus knew God as the compassionate one, not as the God of requirements and boundaries.” God’s compassion must be brought to assess all religious laws in and out of the Bible. If we see Jesus as God incarnate Christ and a ruler-breaker, then what does that say about God? I have learned that the Spirit colors outside of religious doctrines and practice. The Spirit is a mischief maker or rule breaker. God breaks human rules all the time out of motive of compassion and justice.

For example, holiness was not a negative force of exclusion as used by Pharisees and priests who mapped and classified people and their actions into categories: clean and unclean, pure and impure, holy and sinful. Jesus understood God’s holiness foster an inclusive mandate. Jesus practiced and proclaimed God’s radical inclusive love as true holiness. Author Diarmuid O’Murchu writes,

Gospel based compassion tolerates no outsiders. It embraces and seeks to bring in all who are marginalized, oppressed, and excluded from empowering fellowship. It evokes a double response requiring a reawakened heart that knows it cannot withhold the just action that liberates and empowers. The transformation of the heart which might also be described as the contemplative gaze, asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless.

Jesus preached and practices God’s radical inclusive love because God is both compassionate and just. Jesus’ meals were inclusive of outcasts, prostitutes, tax collectors, and all those people that legally defined “holy people” feared and despised.
Another modern feature is the literalizing the Bible: This is relatively a modern phenomenon when the biblical cultures that formed the scriptures understood a good metaphor. Today for fundamentalists, the real is literal interpretation. People in Jesus’ culture understood what symbol and metaphor were, perhaps, better than fundamentalist Christians.
In his book, Creativity, Matthew Fox, a popular spiritual author, relates a story about the election of fundamentalist Christians as a majority of town school board in New Hampshire. Their first decree was directed to teachers: They were forbidden to use the word “imagination” in the classroom. When he asked “why,” they responded, “Satan lives in the imagination.” The UCC biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann, “Every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination to keep on conjuring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants urge as the only thinkable one.” God’s Spirit is operative in creativity, and to limit or ban creativity is to ban the Spirit.
Let me tell a classroom story. Usually, I have students introduce themselves during the first. One student had transferred from an evangelical fundamentalist college. I asked, “why.” She said that the school confiscated all her Harry Potter books from her dorm room because they promoted witchcraft. I asked, if that was the real issue. The Harry Potter books are full of values that Christian promote family values, friendships, self-sacrificing love, and compassionate care. The real issue for the confiscation goes back to the imagination. Why is imagination so dangerous? Imagination produces multiple meanings when interpret the story. Fundamentalists fear and bash the imagination, but they really fear the consequences of the imagination: The possibility that there is not one interpretation but plural interpretations. I lead a Bible study on Mondays, and there are more interpretations of a text than people in attendance. All are valuable as we discern the meanings of scriptures for our lives.
For Jesus, justice and compassion steered the imagination as they served the greater cause of God’s kin-dom. When we yoke compassion to our imagination, the Spirit assists us in the creative process of understanding.
One of my favorite stories is the woman caught in adultery in John’s Gospel (8:1-11). The men catch a couple in adultery but only bring the woman before Jesus to test his judgement. Blame the woman is typical in patriarchal dominated societies.
But Jesus enacts a parabolic action by writing in the sand. He tells the accusers that one without sin may cast the first stone. But Jesus continues to write in the sand. He symbolically communicates that religious laws are not written in stone, rigid and inflexible. They are written in the sand whereby the wind or rain may dissolve the writing. Laws need to be flexible and tentative as the sand, not rigid as stone. God’s heart-felted compassion must always be factored into religious regulations. God requires mercy, not sacrifice. God makes exceptions all the time: God wants mercy, not regulations. This becomes evident in his Sabbath controversies on healing a crippled woman on the Sabbath (Lk. 13:10-17) or explodes the logic of Sabbath fundamentalist in their critique on his disciples picking grain on Sabbath. He challenges their rigid interpretations of the Sabbath observance. They literalize the Sabbath while the Sabbath observance is grounded in God’s distributive justice and beloved love for the crippled women and hungry disciples. God inscribes compassion upon our hearts, it not a law but an invitation to imitate God: “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.”
Now back to our Gospel! Jesus was not a fundamentalist. He refused to interpret his scriptures from a perspective of fear and threat. Do we experience as ruler-maker, who expects to literally obey the rules and commandments? Do we box in God’s grace and mercy? Do we undo God’s radical inclusive love?