A friend of mine posted this link the other day:
If you don’t read the article, here is the synopsis. A guy in Michigan named Ed Dobson decided to live for an entire year just like Jesus. He read through the gospels every week and did everything that Jesus did or said to do minus the miracles. He lived like a Jew following the Torah. But, he also adopted ever habit that Jesus had during his three-year ministry. He went to prisons, helped the poor and he ate and drank with “sinners” … if Jesus said it, Ed did it. There is a line in the article that says if he was at a party and someone handed him a beer, he drank it. Jesus had a reputation with the Pharisees. He was known as a drunk and glutton.
Alicia and I had a discussion about the article this morning. Seems relevant to my reading today. In Matthew 9, it says this:
"No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved."
Jesus was here to do a “new” thing (suddenly old DC Talk lyrics come to mind). The religious right was unprepared for it. The love that Jesus is talking about is radical. It’s crazy. Flip back a couple pages and re-read the Sermon on the Mount. We’re so familiar with it; we forget that it blew people’s minds. If you try to add Jesus to the old set of rules and regulations, you go crazy… you’ll blow up.
The rules were always the patch never the solution.
Posts
If you ever feel like reading another book, try "The Year of Living Biblically" by A.J. Jacobs. He did a similar thing where he went for an entire year living by the Bible's rules. He's a good writer so it's a fun read, but thought provoking too. It's kind of odd seeing a non-believer taking the Bible more seriously than I do most days.
ReplyDeleteIronically, that was the book that Ed Dobson read that gave him the idea to do his project.
ReplyDelete"The rules were always the patch never the solution"
ReplyDeletewow. that's exactly it.
- alicia*