Sunday: The Mastery of Confusion
WEEK 25
SUNDAY
THE MASTERY OF CONFUSION
James 3:13-17
We come now to meditate upon another mastery in the Acts—the mastery of confusion: mental, moral, and spiritual confusion.
Think of the setting in which the gospel came into being. Palestine was the crossroads of the nations; everything went through it. Fierce Jewish monotheism prevailed; pagan cults, indigenous in countries around them, seeped in; Greek philosophy and Eastern mystery cults invaded their minds and culture; Roman law and Roman gods came in side by side. How could a faith arise out of that milieu that would be a world faith for all people everywhere? Wouldn’t it be weighted down with irrelevancies and misconceptions and moral misjudgments that would snuff out its life or cripple it? What miracle of clarification took place? What was the purifying center of reference that kept the movement steady and clean and adequate?
It wasn’t this, that, or the other—it was one thing—the Person of Jesus. Jesus had said, “You are already made clean by the word which I have spoken to you” (John 15:3 RSV). The words that Jesus had spoken to them had cleansed their thought of God from a vengeful Jehovah to God our Lord; their thought of life as a weary treadmill to life as a glorious open vista; their thought of the Law from meticulous legalism to love of God and love of humanity; their thought of clean and unclean food, transferring it from the ceremonial without to the moral within; their thought of marriage as a human-dominated arrangement to a lifelong partnership of one man and one woman; their thought of an exclusive race and class to a community of humanity; their thought of purity as ceremonial to purity that was moral; their idea of atonement by animal sacrifice to the majestic atonement of the Incarnate God giving self in atonement; their conception of earning salvation by works to salvation by faith and self-surrender; their thoughts of overcoming others by force to overcoming by love; their conception of a Jewish kingdom dominating others to a universal kingdom of God. Yes, they were clean through the word he had spoken, the cleanest group our planet had seen. But there was something deeper that was mastering their confusions.
O Jesus, your words are like pruning hooks that cut away the jungle of our overgrown confusions. You are reducing life to its great simplicities and its great clarifications. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I am ready for all irrelevancies to be pruned away. I would be clean through God’s Word.