Church basics

The whole idea of the Christian church is enigmatic -- fraught with potential misunderstanding of what it's even there for. Jesus himself had no time for "religious" trappings, especially when they served to keep people in subjection or even to subvert God's loving will for people. For example, he healed people on the sabbath -- clearly God's will for people to be made whole -- but strictly speaking, outside the law on the sabbath. His Father was working on the sabbath and so was he.

He had harsh words for religious hypocrites who were (supposedly) devoted to the law, the prophets and other holy writings, but who's heart was so far from God's that he called them children of the devil. [This very utterance of Jesus was later used as a justification for anti-Semitism by people who should have realised that His words would be more applicable to themselves in their time].

This is the odd thing about the church: the more it becomes established as the voice of God and the moral arbiter over people, the further it drifts from the heart of God: His desire that all should be saved and none lost. The right likes to condemn the wrong: but Jesus doesn't condemn. He forgives.

The religious right is always wrong. And the righter it gets, the wronger it is, until the very zeal of the church for rightness makes it behave like children of the devil, defeating the very purpose it thought to achieve.

I don't know the answer to this. Is the church always going to have this tension -- constantly needing to be a revolutionary against itself? Needing, in each generation, to throw off the mantle of false human rightness, to humble itself under God's real righteousness?

Pat