From John 5:16-47

It gave me no small amount of joy to read as Jesus tells the religious leaders that he has no time for their particular Sabbath standards; he is too busy getting stuff done.

At the risk of making a ridiculous comparison, I will admit that the image in my head was of a scene from the show Mad Men in which the character Peggy Olson shows up at her new NYC advertising job.  Peggy is talented, but she works in a field in which the old, wealthy, established male executives run the show and young women are expected to follow the rules and not rock the boat.  Peggy, of course, shows up wearing a loud dress and cool sunglasses, smoking a cigarette, and strutting down the hallways like the star she knows she is.  She has zero time for the stuffy rules of the guys in the gray suits; she has awesome stuff to do.

Jesus in this passage not only tells the leaders that he is too busy doing good works to observe every tiny Sabbath detail that had been established over the centuries, but he also says he doesn't have to listen to them because he's here working on the authority of his father, a certain someone named God, have they heard of Him?  In fact, they all have to listen to and follow him now, too.  

It is an extremely bold, almost cocky, passage.  Jesus really takes all the starch out of the leaders' shirts and tells them exactly how worthless all their academic, theological, and political accomplishments are.  As someone with lots of animosity towards burdensome and unworthy authority figures, and as someone who has admittedly gotten into more angry arguments with teachers, professors, and police officers than is wise, this rebellious aspect of the passage really got me cheering Jesus on and putting myself on his side.

But then verse 45 undercut all my enthusiasm and made me take a second look at myself.  Jesus says that the leaders will ultimately be accused by Moses because Moses is who they really set their hopes upon through trying to follow the religious laws as perfectly and sanctimoniously as possible.  When I read this, it seemed to me that the standards Jesus is overturning are not the standards of any external authority figure, but the standards that we each adopt and impose on ourselves.  In my attempts to create my own personal standards by which to live, I always end up becoming for myself the same burdensome, unworthy, and hypocritical authority figure that the religious leaders were to ancient Jewish society.

As a brief example: speech.  I have had times when I resolved to completely refrain from using any "bad" language, and other times when I was convinced that most "bad" words weren't really bad and that I should try to just say whatever I wanted.  I have tried to police myself with regard to possibly offensive jokes and sarcastic comments, and have also tried to be more outgoing and confident with my humor under the rationale that if people don't like it, too bad.  Sometimes I think I overshare too much and and try to be more discreet; other times I think I hide myself in secrecy and command myself to be more open and honest.

Whether it involves matters of sin or just the ordinary choices of how to live, I can never create or adopt for myself any workable or coherent set of standards.  I always violate the standards I set and get mad at myself; I always create standards that conflict with each other; I always flip-flop.

It seems impossible to ever create a single set of rules for living that is worth fully putting our hopes in. There are literally tons of philosophical books about ethics and right living and they all say some of the same stuff and some different stuff.

What does seem to provide hope is to follow Jesus as he appears in this passage: to follow him in seeking to do God's work, glorifying Him by loving our neighbors; and to follow him from death to life, out of the inevitable failure of trying to live up to a set of rules and into the judgment-free zone of grace.