The Problem of Complacency

Pilate asked him, "Are you the king of the Jews?" And he answered him, "The words are yours." Pilate said to the head cohanim (priests) and the crowds, "I find no ground for a charge against this man." Luke 23:3-4

 In this moment, Pilate questions Jesus by asking if He is the King of the Jews. Jesus says neither yes or no, but instead says, depending on translation, "The words are yours," or, "You have said so."
 The question Pilate asked Jesus was now turning back to him, just as when Peter was telling Him who the people said Jesus was; the real question was, "Who do you say that I am?" Jesus answers Pilate by stating something rather unexpected, "You have said so." Jesus, i believe, is saying that Pilate had at some point acknowledged Jesus as the Christ.

 So how does Pilate react? He turns from Jesus and tells the Jews that he finds no guilt in Jesus. Jesus has been charged with claiming to be the Messiah, and so Pilate asks him a simple question--and he finds no guilt in Him. Jesus didn't deny the charges. It was common knowledge that He was going around preaching the Gospel, healing the sick, raising the dead, making broken people whole. If He called Himself the Christ or the King of the Jews, He was in stark opposition to Caesar, yet He did make the claim.
 Pilate found Him innocent because He was not subverting the government. Speaking truth gives no guilt. So he turns to the crowds, "I find no ground for a charge against this Man." In other words, He claims to be the King, which puts Him at odds with the Emperor, but He is not wrong in Pilate's eyes.

 When the crowd demanded that Pilate carry on his tradition of releasing one prisoner during a festival, he succumbed; he looked for a murderous rebel. He picked someone the crowds would've hated worse. He picked someone who would safeguard Jesus' release.
 Nevertheless, the Jews were stirred into a commotion and asking for Barabbas.

Pilate appealed to them again, because he wanted to release Yeshua. But they yelled, “Put him to death on the stake! Put him to death on the stake!” A third time he asked them, “But what has this man done wrong? I haven’t found any reason to put him to death. So I’m going to have him flogged and set free.” But they went on yelling insistently, demanding that he be executed on the stake; and their shouting prevailed.

 "Why?" he asks. What crime did Jesus commit? Pilate still saw no guilt in the Accused. He didn't see Him as having done a thing wrong, not even in His claiming to be the Christ ("Everyone who claims to be a king is opposing the Emperor!" - John 19:12; in saying he found no guilt in Jesus, he was claiming that Jesus was not wrong in opposing Caesar).
 Even as they demanded Christ's death, Pilate still asked their reason, but according to Matthew's account, they only got louder in demanding His death, to the point that a riot was starting. So in order to keep the peace, he gives in and allows Jesus to be crucified.

When Pilate saw that he was accomplishing nothing, but rather that a riot was starting, he took water, washed his hands in front of the crowd, and said, “My hands are clean of this man’s blood; it’s your responsibility.” (Matthew 27:24)

 He washed his hands because he didn't want the death of the Messiah on his head. Let someone else take the blame. And the Jews agreed to shoulder the responsibility. It would appear as though Pilate got with compliance Scot-free.

 It may seem i'm defending Pilate in all of this, but such is not the case. This particular perspective creates something perhaps worse than seeing him as an accuser.
 He washed his hands. He didn't want the burden. He didn't want the blame. He didn't want the guilt. He wasn't willing to risk his reputation for the man he himself had admitted to believing in. He wasn't willing to change for the sake of the Lord.
 He embodied the modern Church's stance; "I won't let acknowledging Him change my life; won't let it make me uncomfortable or hated."

 What's worse: to not believe, or to believe and not act? Surely the man who can see evil and does nothing about it is far greater an accomplice than the man ignorant of it. If Pilate had not known, that would've been one thing. But to believe and yet still allow it falls on an entirely different order of complacency.

 If we truly believe Jesus to be the Messiah, we better be ready to defend that belief. We must be ready to lay down our reputation, find enmity in our friends, become an enemy of the government, and to lose everything we know and care about for His sake. Because if we don't, we will appease the crowd, wash our hands, and say, "Don't let this affect me."
 In doing so, we are as guilty (nay, more guilty!) as those who don't believe.
 The only way to have clean hands is to have them bathed in Christ's redemptive blood.

Cliché Jesus

There was an interesting image that came to mind earlier at work. It was like a very short scene played out in front of me, and it seems that it could make others think about their own personal idea of Christ.

There were two men before me, and there was a choice that had to be made; follow one, or follow the other.
The first one was the idea i all-too-often have of Christ: handsome face, chiseled jaw, groomed facial hair, you name it. His hair was immaculate, long and tangle-free, wavy and smooth. He was quite muscular, wearing a royal purple sash, a brilliant crown on his head, and he had thousands of followers in nice clothes, preachers and well-to-do people all rather urbanely dressed, and he told me that he was Christ. From his voice and manner, it seemed wasn't a decision for me to make, he simply was the Messiah, and he said it with authority.
The second man was really ragged looking. He was skinny, like a homeless man. His hands were cut up, scabbed, scarred, blistered and calloused, with split fingernails to top them off. His face was weak and feeble, covered mostly by a muddy and matted beard, His face had all manner of sun-damage and weariness. His clothes were torn and stained like a mechanic's favorite t-shirt, His hair was shaggy, and He somewhat ugly in the way that you'd walk around this person while purposefully avoiding eye-contact. His followers were few, but looked much like Him. He asked me who i believed He was.

I've actually thought of this quite a bit and always figured Jesus was of the more lowly type, but until this came to mind, it never struck me just how lowly.
He was a carpenter, which results in lots of cuts and scrapes, many callouses, splinters, and the like. Foxes (these are wild scavengers, mind you), have holes, but the King has no place for His head; He was homeless. When the disciples asked what there was for Him to eat, He said doing the will of His Father was His food. He walked from town to town, not always on a donkey. He was without money, and so most likely without clean water the majority of the time.
We glamorize Jesus, even when we attempt to portray Him as a "nobody" from that time--clean (or at least without tear) clothes, clean face, soft beard, flowing hair. These things were for those in the houses of royalty of that era, not workers, carpenters, wanderers.

The thing that hit me most about that little image was that the one stated He was Christ, the other asked who I said He was.
After all, it doesn't matter to the non-believer whether or not Jesus was the Christ; it matters to those who call Him the Son of God. It matters who I say He is. It matters who you say He is. He could walk around proclaiming to be the Christ all day long, and yet it wouldn't matter if nobody else said He was the Christ.
In the same way, we can proclaim to be Christians day in and day out, bumper stickers plastered on our cars, t-shirts with "edgy" Christian slogans or Bible verse, cross and fish jewelry adorning our necks and fingers, and it won't matter. It won't matter one bit.
If someone can't look at our lives and tell who we follow, are we actually following Him? Does His light really shine from us, or are we just perpetuating the Christianity Machine?

Here's a question i am asking, paraphrasing a question Christ presented His disciples, and i implore each and every one of you to ask it to a close friend, preferably a non-believing one; aside from my shouting, aside from my claims, aside from my apparel, who do you say that i follow?

Concerning Consecration

Firstly, i am not going to say that Sunday is a less important day of the week. It's the day we honor the Sabbath, though orthodoxically the Sabbath falls on a Saturday, not a Sunday. Then again, Easter and Christmas don't fall on the days of Christ's birth or resurrection; those are merely when we observe them.
I understand the importance of observation, and that Sundays, being the day we honor the Sabbath, are important.
So without further ado, carrying on.

I want to bring to mind a certain fellow from the New Testament, perhaps the last of the Old Testament prophets. To know what i mean by "Old Testament prophets," those that lived before Christ were often the sort that lived as recluses, living outside of society, in hills, wildernesses, and the like. They were revered, probably even feared by some for their seeming mystical lifestyle and nature. They didn't dress nice, they didn't eat the same things as everybody else; they lived by the provision of God, and relied only on it. They could've taken to fame and grew in wealth, but they did just the opposite. Above all else, they knew who they were in God. They spoke with no authority of their own, but rather said "This is what the Lord says," invoking nothing of their own but rather the words God had given them.
And John the Baptist was of this lot.
He knew who he was, what God called him to, and set himself on (or rather, was called to) the same path as these prophets; "A voice of one calling in the wilderness, 'Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for Him.'".
He was a prophet who had been prophesied about.

We are not called to simply live good on Sundays. I'm not talking about smoking, cussing, drinking; i'm talking about living as though God was alive in your heart!
We are a bipolar Church. We raise our hands on Sunday morning, we go up front for prayer, we may even shed tears, enough to fill a well, but come Monday many seem to have forgotten it.
Consecration is not merely living good. It's living in faith. It's trusting in God's providence. It's having faith that, though we may be homeless, orphans, abused, alone, starving, that God has providence to get His will completed, be it in our rags, or in our riches. It is the casting off of everything society expects of us. It is living without shame, not being afraid to be seen as a strange mystic to someone who doesn't understand the power flowing through us from Christ. It is being renewed according to Romans 12:1-2, offering ourselves as a living sacrifice should our Father in Heaven decide we should be required to die for His name. It is losing all inhibition, abiding by every faintest conviction of behavior we may receive from the Holy Spirit. It's being radically compliant to the Word of God, seeing God's place for us in Scripture and stripping ourselves away until we are fashioned into His decrees, set down by His prophets.

Yes, one of the Ten Commandments is to remember the Sabbath to keep it holy. In context, it is a law regarding work, not behavior. We are not told to live holier on this day, nor are we told to be a bolder follower of Christ on this day. No, instead we are told that the Sabbath is our day of rest.
I would dare say it more important to live in a consecrated manner for six days and then be laxed on the one--but that would be a falsity. The only truly Christian way to live is seven days a week. To live as though we were inside of the church every single moment, because we are the Church. The Church meets at a building on Sundays. We call it the House of the Lord, but that term was for the Temple of God set up by David if i'm not mistaken. The House of the Lord is, since the tearing of the veil, the Temple of God, is within us. It inhabits the church building only when we, the Church, occupies it, and only by proxy then.
Our sin is not in treating the building as less than absolutely holy. It is in treating our daily life as somehow less sanctified.
You carry the Church with you on Sundays when you are at the meeting place we call church, and also Monday through Saturday as you work, shop, eat, play games, sleep, read, breathe; in all things, you are the living and breathing Church, the tangible Body of Christ to the world.
It is your consecration to behave that way.
Our commission is to make disciples of all the nations--but this commission begins within us. We are the nations, too. Make disciples of yourselves first.
We are each called to be the next John The Baptist, the one who cries out to all who pass by, "Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for Him."