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The System

         Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. But John tried to deter him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”

      Jesus replied, “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.” Then John consented. (Matthew 3:13-15) 

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples:  “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. (Matthew 23:1-3) 

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. (Matthew 5:7)

 Jesus’ ministry didn’t start off with a fireworks demonstration signaling the start of something new and different. His life started that way, but His ministry didn’t. As John pointed out, it began in the reverse. Jesus worked within the infrastructure God provided both in terms of John and the Jews, wherever possible. He paid taxes. He told others to do what the Pharisees and teachers of the Law said (but not what they did.) He specifically stated that He was not there to abolish the Law. He attended the festivals. Though there doesn’t seem to be any record of His having presented a sacrifice to the priests, and while He didn’t need to present a sin sacrifice, there were fellowship sacrifices that could be made, and I suspect He participated because not doing so would have been a violation of the Law. Yes, there were times when He and the powers that were butted heads over interpretations and applications, but He didn’t reject the Law.

This humility is our example. Jesus would have been justified to have tossed Israel and the Law into a dumpster and set it on fire, in terms of His ministry, but He didn’t. And if He is our model, then neither should we. We are called to work within God’s principles/Laws, which includes working within the governmental/legal environment in which we find ourselves. For some of us, this humility is a bigger challenge than for others. There are times and people who are called to violate the customs and culture of the day (Esther, for example) but let’s describe them a one-in-a-million so that we aren’t a likely to get puffed up and assume we’re among them. Even they tend to work within the system or accept punishment for not doing so.

Humility may be the first lesson in ministry, and it repeats as we need it. It does not mean that we must be a carbon copy as dictated by the system. Jesus wasn’t John the Baptist. He didn’t ally Himself with the Pharisees or teachers of the Law. But He did work within the same framework that they claimed to. His ministry remained connected, even when it came to reprimanding disciples who wanted to destroy towns that didn’t please them. 

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