We started out on our previous program by looking at the confusing words of Jesus in Matthew 18:8-9 where He said that if your hand, foot or eye causes you to sin, you should cut them off or pluck it out because it would be better to enter eternal life with some body parts missing rather than go to hell with your body intact. We looked at whether or not such words were to be taken literally and this is valid, because we’ve been learning that Judaism is in fact a very literal, physical religion, taking God at His Word.
What we learned was that while Judaism is very practical and literal in many respects, it’s also a religion based on life and mercy and the rabbinic teachings of both the Mishna and Talmud’s were written to help God’s people come to a clear and proper understanding of God’s Word so they could live it out in very practical terms, especially with regard to how we should treat others.
But these additional teachings also acknowledged that there were many times when God’s Word contained idioms and figures of speech, as well as parables that were used to teach eternal truths. We learned about a particular passage in the Talmud that said, “The pain of humiliation is more bitter than death. Therefore, one should rather fling himself into a fiery furnace than humiliate someone in public.” Now, nowhere in the Bible or even in rabbinic teaching would such an action ever be sanctioned, but the severity of that image is given to demonstrate just how treacherous it is to publicly humiliate someone. We looked at some real life examples and here’s another one.
A 13 year old girl committed suicide after her father posted a humiliating video clip online of him shaming her for bad behaviour.
Teenagers who bully their peers in public forums, humiliating them in dreadful ways that then leads them to the point where they feel they can’t go to school or out in public, have caused some to kill themselves. Social media is public humiliation potential on steroids!
Humiliating other people, especially in a public forum is unconscionable and the passage from the Talmud tries to teach this by using such an extreme example so that the lesson will be understood: humiliating others can have extreme and catastrophic consequences….so don’t every do it!!!
Here’s another example of something Jesus said that really confuses and confounds people when they read it.
Luke 14:26, “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.”
What? Is the Lord really saying that anyone who wants to be His disciple has to hate everyone in his entire family and even himself?
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matt 5:43-44)
If you put these verses together you come away thinking that the Lord wants us to hate every member of our family – people whom we love and are very close to, but we’re supposed to love our enemies and do good things for them…it’s confusing!
The Apostle John adds more confusion to this dilemma by saying, ‘Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer; and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.’ (1 John 3:15) He also said, ‘If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.’ (1 John 4:20)
Which is it? Should I hate my family or should I love my family? Should I love or should I hate because these verses seem to be very contradictory?
Actually, the Lord wasn’t presenting His disciples with an expectation for them to hate anybody at all, to do so would have been completely opposite of all He had taught them and would continue to teach them during the remainder of His earthly ministry. The point He was making to them was that being His disciple comes at a cost and sometimes the cost can be extreme. Being devoted to Him can cost us even our closest relationships and our love and commitment to Him must be so strong that not one person and not one thing will ever cause us to turn away from Him.
This has been the experience of believers from the days of Jesus to the present. They hear the Gospel, they come to faith and begin following Him and their family and friends become irritated and then hostile giving an ultimatum…if you don’t stop being a religious fanatic or a ‘Jesus Freak’ then we want nothing to do with you…make your choice…it’s Him or us! It’s happening throughout the world every single day.
Many believers over the centuries, who have refused to forsake their love and faith in Jesus have been ostracised and even murdered for their faith, even at the hands of their own families, and it’s still happening today. The extreme example Jesus used was communicating to His disciples the extreme cost that comes to those who follow Him. So extreme that it can seemingly be equated to ‘hatred’. In actuality, those who love Jesus, would and should give up all others, even their loved ones who are precious to them, in order to live their lives with and for Him.
All these examples show us how important it is to understand these rabbinic teaching methods to demonstrate the importance of the point they were trying to make. This was culturally understood and those listening knew very well that they were ‘dramatic overstatements’ used only to reinforce and emphasis the point of the lesson. Extreme examples pointed to immensely important lessons.
In fact, this method of teaching; using extreme examples to communicate important truths and life lessons isn’t as foreign to us as we might think because we use them ourselves in various settings.
For example, a mother might raise her voice to her son or daughter who has just done something really, really naughty and say something like, “Wait until your father sees what you’ve done, he’s going to go through the roof when he gets home!”
The father isn’t going to literally go through the roof with explosive anger, but the mother is conveying to her child that their father is going to be furious when he discovers their misdemeanor…he’ll be absolutely livid.
Or what about a parent who confronts their teenager over dangerous or foolish behaviour that could result in death or ending up in a wheelchair for the rest of their life? The teen responds by saying that it’s no big deal and all their friends do it so the parent might retort back and say, “If your friends told you to jump off a cliff would you do it?”
Of course they would never do something so obviously dangerous and both the parent and the teenager are equally aware of how ludicrous the question is and that the answer is obviously ‘No’, but the parent uses this extreme example in a bid to emphasise to their teenager the gravity of and potential for disaster that could come from their behaviour because they blindly follow the foolish example of others.
Our Messiah never used careless or frivolous words, in fact every word He spoke was perfect and righteous and absolutely true, and as such, we must be very careful to never minimize some of the hard things He said. What He said is critically important, but it’s incumbent upon us to dig a little deeper than the surface and place His words and statements back in their context and their cultural setting so that we understand clearly His intention and the message He was communicating to His disciples.
If He used extreme overstatements, it’s because He was emphasising how critically important the lesson is that He was making. We mustn’t gloss over them because they’re challenging, rather, we need to dig deeper to find out what His intent was so that we don’t miss it.
When we make that effort, we not only grow in our understanding of His Word and how we are supposed to live out our faith, but we also become more educated and informed enabling us to give a defense of our faith to those who would mock and ridicule what we believe when they use examples such as the ones we’ve looked at, accusing our Saviour of being a hypocrite or a charlatan who demands that His followers mutilate themselves or commit suicide or hate people. That’s categorically NOT what He was saying at all.
In the next program we’ll learn about what it means to be cracked pots.
Shalom
Mandy
