Redemption from religiosity

­thoughts of József Farkas

We started from the premise that Jesus was heretic — heretical in a different way! He thinks differently, acts differently than the world around him. 

And, there is something more about this “otherness”. Something about salvation. 

Even in this great and beautiful cause, Jesus was different from his early theologians, believers. The public perception was that "the man has fallen, guilty: worthy of judgment, of death, of condemnation!" And some help must be given to one's sins, that the one can be forgiven. Salvation is to somehow settle the matter, a person's sin case.

Jesus was far more radical in this respect than the others. Because others have said that 'man has sins and has good qualities. For example, religiosity is the opposite of sin. It is in religiosity that the case of sin can be settled. When one prays, murmurs the Torah to himself, he is in a state of salvation, unlike when ... and here, they listed their sins.' The radicalism of Jesus was that he believed that one should be redeemed from religiosity. It was here that he came into a mortal clash with the theologians of his age. So we could say: one must be redeemed not only from bad qualities, from sins, from good qualities, but also from religiosity. (...) 

 Jesus went even further, was even more radical, and said that people also need to be redeemed for their religiosity!

What is religiosity? And what is salvation from religiosity?

In 1.John 3, we read this sentence: "For though our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart." It is my belief that this is the perfect description of salvation and religiosity. The essence of religiosity is that our hearts condemn. With the expressions of modern psychology: there is anxiety in our hearts, there is guilt, there are self-punishing tendencies and we live these - mentioning the name of God. This is religiosity. Let's observe religious people. People who are anxious, guilty, and always prone to self-punishment, people who are prone to penitence; and the church offers people through the wording /drafting of guilt, through ascetic practices, the survival of the self-punishment mechanism. This is religiosity. "Our hearts condemn us!"

And Jesus came and proclaimed that God is greater than all that is done in our hearts. This is the gospel: God is greater than this whole religious mechanism. Understandably, they couldn't forgive him for that. He preached the love of God and preached non-religious practices.

Jesus can even be confronted with John the Baptist. John the Baptist is about an unquenchable fire: they separate wheat and chaff and burn the latter with an unquenchable fire. So good people and bad people are separated; the sinners are burned with unquenchable fire. This “unquenchable fire” is characteristic of John’s spirit. 

In contrast, the royal wedding is most characteristic of Jesus ’spirit. He repeatedly mentions the wedding in various versions, where the truncated lame peoples are also official - the unworthy ones are also official. God invites the sinful world to the royal guest. Here is Jesus’ idea of salvation: people must also be saved from anxious religiosity. According to the terminology of mysticism, salvation is really nothing but "immersion in the love of God." And this is what Jesus preached and did, and helped the people in to the immersion of God.'s love. This is salvation, according to Jesus.

The second formulation: religious people at the time were characterized by being theo-centric at the expense of man; Jesus was anthropo-centric at the expense of religion.
Not at God’s expense, because it can’t be that someone is person-centric and meanwhile God is left out of it. Jesus was anthropocentric at the expense of religiosity. A lot of the Word could be quoted here.

Just think of the healing and outrage on the Sabbath-day caused by Jesus not being theo-centric enough, not honoring the Sabbath enough; he loved the sick man better, and healed them on Saturdays. Or think of the harsh parable of what Jesus said about the Good Samaritan: There is the bloodthirsty, wretched man, and a representative of religion passes by him: the priest and the Levite; and surely they came to him with a theological foundation: "Blood defiles you!" Other theological motives could be put forward to pass by - and they left. The other Samaritan stopped and took pity on him.

Another verb shows crystal clear Jesus' thinking. ..if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.”; If, while practicing religiosity, you remember that your human relationships are confused, stop the actions of religiosity and sort out your human relationships! It was a great heresy in that world, for – above all – that world said, "You shall love the Lord your God." thought the world also knew that "Love your neighbor!" came after the former. If we look dynamically, or even statistically, at the lives and actions of the pious and religious at the time, it must be said that they really lived out this: Love God! Above all, love God!
Jesus, so to speak, worked a "dynamic shift" in favor of man: "Love your neighbor!" A relationship with a neighbor is at least as important, or even more important, than fulfilling your religious duties. The clash was very hard here, and after all, it can be said that this journey took Jesus to the cross at Golgotha. He argued mockingly, sometimes through theological depths, with the pious of the time.

Also in Mark 7 is it a question of why Jesus’ disciples are not “religious”? Why are the rules of religion not followed? Jesus answered and said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,
‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
7 in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’
You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”

... You can put roughly, or with swearing aside the commandments, or simply deny God - atheism, etc .; but in religiosity there is always this temptation to put aside the will of God and bring up the human tradition to realize the human thought, the human religiosity. There is a parable in Matthew 21:31 that Jesus interpreted, “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you.”
“When the high priests heard these parables, they understood that he was talking about them. They wanted to capture Jesus, but they were afraid of the crowd because he considered him a prophet.”

If we put these next to each other and try to fit into the spirit of the other side, we will understand that there is no other way out here than to "die with Jesus, with this heretic!"

Next thought: Jesus and the Old Testament. How did Jesus think about the Old Testament, what path did the Old Testament guide him toward salvation? For Jesus, of course, the Word of God was the Old Testament, but in a free interpretation, for He did not come to the truth of God from the letters, but read the letters from the truth of God; that is why he could say, “what he said to the ancients ... and I say this ...” He was there without the Bible in the will of God, in God, in the love of God. That is why He interpreted the Old Testament well. It’s a long problem, I’ll just tell you the end result in this confrontation.

According to my faith — and, of course, many theologians believe that, not my invention — it was not Moses who was the center of the Old Testament for Jesus, but Isaiah, espec. Isaiah 53. The teaching of the Lord's "suffering Servant." It is almost something of a mysterious “deposit” in the Old Testament, it is a song about the suffering Servant of the Lord that is about carrying our sins. We believed that the beating of God was upon him, though he suffered for us. It is the conviction of theologians, and I share this belief, that this passage was much more at the center of Jesus ’Old Testament biblical science than the laws of Moses. Jesus did not oppose the Old Testament, but rose above him. In the outline of the Old Testament, he understood how some of God's peculiar guidance reached these "hiding places." During the loud revelations, there is a “suffering Servant” to redeem the world and not the loud prophecies about blood, earthquake, God’s revenge.

The triumphant messianic expectation that the Jewish people wanted to entrust to Jesus was fulfilled; but He did not accept. It is no coincidence that these other messianic expectations developed because they also had a biblical basis. But for Jesus, Isaiah 53 was more important and engaging than all the other prophecies. And this gives rise to the great unfinished and unfinishable debate: What did Jesus consider himself to be? Did he consider himself a messiah or not?
Increasingly, biblical research is heading in that direction that he did not consider himself to be the Messiah,* but rather to this "suffering Servant". But a different kind of desire burned in the people, even in the twelve, that They endowed him with the title of Messiah, and they were revering him as Messiah after the Passover. Slowly, it became clear that yes, He was the Anointed One of God (because that is what this word "Messiah" means in English), but not in the sense that popular beliefs demanded it.

* This is a bit inaccurate. Jesus knew exactly who he was. In John. 4:25-26. Jesus himself says to the Samaritan woman, I am he who speaks to you.
However, he did not consider himself a political messianic king, which would have meant the fulfillment of all promises to the Jews at the time, but was quite different to Jesus.

In verse 10:45 of the Gospel of Mark, there is this great verse that "the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve/minister." Jesus established the realm of ministry. Jesus was a ministering Messiah until he gave his life for the people. The culmination of his ministry, the completeness, was the crucifixion! I have spoken many times before that this crucifixion at Golgotha was not to reconcile or reconcile the angry God. "I and the Father are one!" - and when Jesus suffers, God suffers with Him! But he had to go this route to show the depth, the unimaginable richness of God’s love. So the cross on Calvary speaks of the love of God, not of the love of Jesus for the wrath of God. He speaks of the love of God Who identifies Himself with humanity. No matter how deep man is, God descends even deeper to lift him up. This was the salvation of Jesus: to be immersed in the love of God; and the love of God is best seen on the cross of Golgotha. There you can see who God is. And of course: there you can see who I am! What are religious, what are non-religious, what is man. It was there, on the cross, that it was most visible and experienced. There you can truly immerse yourself in the love of God.

I don’t think much needs to be said about the fact that the fruit of salvation is love again. Just as salvation is that I am immersed in the love of God, the fruit of salvation is that in me the love of God then bears fruit.
In this respect, too, Jesus has warning teachings in his parables. Perhaps the most shocking is the parable of the two debtors. One of them has ten thousand talents, is insolvent, the prison of debtors awaits him, but the king has mercy on him. And then there would be the commitment. He was immersed in the love of God, he received forgiveness. Then it would follow that he would pass on the love and, according to the parable, would instead start strangling the debtor who owed him a ridiculously small amount. Jesus gave such warnings that we might endanger the love of God with our unlove. So the fruit of salvation is love for our brothers and sisters.

Even this last thought is that Jesus says the path to salvation is not a nicely uphill line, but a break. 'Breaking', 'repenting' says the same thing. One very beautiful expression of this in the Gospel of Mark in chapter 8 is this part: “If anyone would come {has a desire to come} after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.

Deny ourself! It is a Breaking in the human life.
Again, this should be discussed at length, but the point is that it is not the Self itself that is the culprit, it is not the Self that needs to be destroyed! The distorted, sinful, bound nature of the Self is what must be denied in order for my true God-thought personality and life to unfold.

"Follow me!" This is the legacy of Jesus to us. Follow me! Not my letters, not the Bible! Follow me! Me, who died and rose again, who I live for! Follow me! This is the salvation - the doctrine of Jesus.

(Excerpt from the book "Plow a New Plow for Yourself! Alternative Theology" by József Farkas, Reformed Pastor)

☆