There’s no way to make this lesson short, so buckle your seatbelts and hang on.
Somewhere between “abject submission” and “absolute contempt”, we can find a godly attitude about the organized Body of Believers commonly called “The Church.” Protestants are not referring to any particular earthly institution when we say “The Church.” It only gets confusing when our audience includes Catholics or Eastern Orthodox believers. For both of those groups, and a few others, “The Church” means their church organization. Indeed, the reason there is such a thing as Protestants is a perception by some individuals well-placed in human history that the institutional organization had failed, and it was time to start over, building a new organization. We call that period in history, when the outcasts were hugely successful in building a new church structure, “the Reformation.”
Depending on whom you ask, we could say that period in history ran from the early 1500s, lasting about 100 years. The complaint of the Reformers was the official Church had become hopelessly corrupt, and had long since left behind the simple faith and practice of the believers of the New Testament era. A great deal of pagan belief and ritual had been brought in, and the leadership was a carefully closed system which never officially admitted even the slightest mistake.
Oddly, so it seems from our perspective, the Reformers never addressed the underlying cause of this corruption: mixing church and politics. Many things the Reformers pointed out as evil in the Church hierarchy were but symptoms of this one error. It began as a good thing, where the government supported the Church. First, the government extended official recognition to the followers of Jesus as a tolerated religion. It became illegal to harass Christians simply for being Christian around AD 300.
Over the century following, the rulers came to realize what a marvelous, unifying force this religion was. One prince decided to unite his army under one of its symbols — the Cross — and was victorious in his dispute over who should become the next Roman Emperor: Constantine. Having gained his throne by such use of Christianity, he decided to make this the official religion, giving Christianity the highest status over all other religions. This, while secretly maintaining his worship of the sun god.
In the heady days shortly thereafter, the church leaders around the empire became greatly unified, developing a sort of political hierarchy of their own. At first, they were very cautious and responsible in exercising their new power. They stamped out some very popular heresies, collected enough money to produce far more copies of the Bible, built nicer church buildings, etc. Meanwhile, they had to play nice with their new chief supporter, the emperor. He expressed ever new wishes for things which seemed at first harmless, but eventually compromised the church leadership. In just a few centuries, the interplay between government and church made both little more than extensions of the other. For the most part, it was the government which changed the Church.
There are a lot of parallels here between the Reformers and Jesus. In His time, the official religion had become so corrupt and political it no longer bore any resemblance to the system Moses described in his writings, which we call “the Pentateuch” (the first five books of the Old Testament). Over the centuries, the leadership connected with the Temple built up a massive collection of interpretive precedents in what Moses may or may not have intended when the Covenant of the Law was written and published in about 1400 BC. When Jerusalem was captured and destroyed about 900 years later, the bulk of Judean population was taken into exile. While there in a foreign land, the power of the religious leadership became centered on the institution of the synagogue, which became somewhat the model for the Christian Church later.
The accretion of new layers of interpretive rules continued, and more and more of the leadership system became rigid, swathed in this mass of oral interpretive tradition. When the Jews were allowed to return home after some 70 years in exile, they rebuilt the Temple, and with it the iron bureaucracy. Over the next 500 years, various conquering empires came and went, each inflicting its own peculiar sickness on the Temple hierarchy. When Rome came, they simply carried on where others had left off. They found two entrenched political factions. One was liberal, wealthy and elite priests, ruling for the most part. The other was hide-bound conservative, and much closer to the people, and quite troublesome to Roman government. Naturally, Rome made sure the liberal elites — the Sadducees — remained in control. The Sadducees would deal; they could be bought.
The conservative Pharisees maintained their hold on the people by their claim to be true to Moses, to the letter of his Law. For them, this was The Law of God for all mankind. Sadly, they were mistaken. Much of what Jesus had to say in His teaching was a reaction to this false interpretation of Moses. Naturally, He had many harsh words for those who upheld the system blindly, because their motives were clearly selfish. Whatever it was they were seeking, it wasn’t the heart of God.
In two parables, The Two Sons (Matthew 21:28-32) and the Wicked Vinedressers (Matthew 21:33-41), Jesus was pointedly criticizing the religious leaders of His day, which was also the first level of government Jews faced. These leaders did not miss the point of these parables in the least. They were enraged, and wanted very much to arrest Him, but were held back by His popularity.
In the Two Sons, Jesus shows how no one is too good to repent. Those who recognize their sin and put their hands to making amends are closer to the heart of God than those who are smugly self-righteous. In the Vinedressers, Jesus points out how the religious leaders stood in the place of their predecessors, those who had rejected every prophet now officially honored. Even more infuriating, He was clearly referring to Himself as the Son of God. They had already worked out to the last detail what the Son of God would be like, a collection of ideas together called now “the Messianic Expectations.” Jesus matched none of those things, so He was clearly insulting God. Of course, they equated their perceptions with those of God; in this, they were the blasphemers.
It is an inescapable truth, evidenced throughout history, that nothing true and noble can long withstand the ravages of organization. A revolt which transitions to a stable institution becomes the establishment, no longer a revolt. Whatever else we may say of him, Thomas Jefferson was probably correct in a certain sense when he said the tree of liberty could only be prospered by frequent applications of the blood of tyrants, and a popular revolt should come every few decades, to keep human liberty alive (in his letter to William Smith from Paris, 13 November 1787). It was a gruesome way of recognizing the need for constant renewal, for frequently returning to the roots of what makes life worth living. Sadly, Jefferson meant it literally. I can’t imagine Jesus’ warning calls for periodic murder of our leadership. Against the necessity of constant renewal stands the human need for stability.
While there is no sin in finding comfort in our traditions, we should never become too comfortable. Our real anchor is the person of Jesus Christ, not some institutionalized expression of His teaching, statically linked to some forgotten historical context. Let us never forget: While God does not change, what He intends to use in one place and time may not be right in another. Nor do we glorify change for its own sake. We glorify God, and walk in the light He gives, wherever He gives it. No organization is sacred in itself. There will always be a church, and it will have varying degrees of human organization, because such is His chosen instrument. He has always worked through His people gathered in one heart of devotion to Him. Yet the very moment it becomes organized, it has already begun moving away from the simple purity of relying on His Spirit for fresh guidance.
This is one of the many paradoxes of God. In this fallen world, we can never be truly at rest. Where sin exists, life will be stormy. The storm is not the thing on which we focus, but we focus on Jesus while in the storm. We can, like Peter, walk out on the water to meet Jesus in that storm. Or we can, also like Peter, pay attention to the circumstances and sink below the waves.
