Some five hundred years ago, on October 31, 1517, an Augustinian monk by the name of Martin Luther posted ninety-five theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. Luther was on the university faculty, the church was the university chapel, and its door was commonly used as a bulletin board. Posting the theses was a public invitation to debate, but this wasn’t merely an academic exercise. Luther challenged the power of the papacy, and he may have chosen October 31 to post his theses because it was the day before All Saints Day, and the meaning and role of saints was at the heart of Luther’s argument with Rome. The church taught that certain believers were saints, and the saints were so good, so perfect in belief and obedience, that they accumulated more righteousness than they needed to enter the gates of heaven. So there was excess righteousness sitting around in heavenly storage, as it were, and somebody in Rome came up with the clever idea to make that surplus available to common sinners. The church issued documents called indulgences, the purchase of which allowed sinners to make deposits to their heavenly accounts, reducing the time they would have to spend in purgatory and expediting their journey to the great assembly of the saints in glory. As an added bonus, people could purchase indulgences not only for themselves but for family members and friends who had died.
Fear of damnation is a terrible fear, and any fear gives great power to those who know how to manipulate it. The leadership of the church certainly knew how to turn the gift of forgiveness into a lucrative business. In the early sixteenth century, the pope sent out a sales force all across the Holy Roman Empire to peddle indulgences—and the campaign was very successful: St. Peter’s basilica in Rome was completed with the lush revenue created by the sale of get-out-of-purgatory cards.
Luther wanted to debate that practice. He understood Scripture to teach that salvation is God’s gracious gift to humanity in Jesus Christ, a gift we do not deserve and cannot earn, let alone purchase, but only need to gratefully embrace in faith. To us it may sound obvious, but at the time it was a revolutionary idea: The Christian faith is not about accumulating points in one’s heavenly savings account, but about living in gratitude to God for the gift of God’s grace.
The corrupt practice of the church leadership meant that any talk of saints and the whole concept of sainthood became suspicious and eventually disappeared almost completely from Protestant life. But only almost, because many of the New Testament writings not only mentioned the saints, but were literally addressed to them. The apostle Paul addressed his letter to the Philippians, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi; and his letter to the Romans, to all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints. And Paul wasn’t writing to the few, the proud, the shining stars among God’s people, to the winners in the great playoff of life, awaiting their introduction into the Discipleship Hall of Fame, no, he was writing to all who had found new life through faith in Jesus Christ.[1]
The writer of Hebrews reminds us that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses,[2] that we are not alone on the journey of faith. Those who have gone before us, surround us; and to me it’s a beautiful thing to imagine them watching us and cheering us on as we continue the journey to the fullness of God’s reign. Saints, Frederick Buechner wrote, are not “plaster statues, men and women of such paralyzing virtue that they never thought a nasty thought or did an evil thing their whole life long. Saints are essentially life givers. To be with them is to become more alive.”[3] They are the men and women who told us the good news of God’s love for the world; who reminded us of our freedom in Christ as sons and daughters of God; who modeled for us what faithful living can look like; who inspired and encouraged us. Most of them weren’t faith celebrities but ordinary people whose lives showed extraordinary courage and integrity in response to God’s grace, particularly in trying times. They moved forward in hope, trusting the promise and presence of God.
I know I wouldn’t be standing here talking about keeping the faith through these tumultuous days without the example of my grandfather or the women and men who told me the stories of Jesus when I was a kid, or the people who modeled discipleship for me as I got older; people of life-giving generosity, kindness, and faithfulness. None of them were people of ostentatious piety.
Jesus says, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach.” We know, of course, what he’s talking about, and we know that the challenges of walking the walk, and not merely talking the talk, are not limited to just one or two groups of people. Preachers preach forgiveness, and struggle with living it. Teachers teach being kind to others, and start yelling when they’re frustrated. Parents get to the end of their rope and tell their kids, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
But that’s not all. His opponents, Jesus says, “do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long.” Phylacteries are small leather boxes with passages of scripture in them. To this day, many Jewish men strap them around the arm and on the forehead during morning prayer. The practice is inspired by a passage in the book of Deuteronomy:
Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.[4]
The boxes and straps remind those who wear them of the sacred obligation to keep God’s commandments: the one on the arm, a reminder to act justly; and the one on the forehead, a reminder to let God’s commandments guide the wearer’s thinking. Jesus accused his opponents of wearing their phylacteries to display their piety, that they had turned a small object — meant to remind them to keep God’s words in their heart — into yet another status symbol for garnering the admiration of others.
Faithfulness has nothing to do with ostentatious piety, and everything with keeping the words of God at the center of our knowing, thinking, and doing. We remember the saints not for the size of the crosses they wore around the neck, but for how they bore the cross of Christ on their shoulders, how their lives embodied the servant love of God.
Many of us get very uncomfortable listening to Jesus paint his opponents in such broad strokes as uniformly reprehensible hypocrites. I worry that his stereotyping language contributed to normalizing such rhetoric among his followers, with terrible consequences for the relationship between Christians and Jews. The scholars say Jesus only did what was to be expected of a leader in the Hellenistic world of that time, that it was common practice. Maybe it was, but I find little comfort in that statement; to me that sounds like saying, “Jesus was just giving a campaign speech,” when throughout his ministry he has refused to play the campaign game.
His primary concern, though, in this passage, is not the characterization of his opponents, but the description of the community he came to gather around himself. Call no one rabbi or teacher, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. Call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven. Call no one instructor, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. Title by title, Jesus removes layers of hierarchy and authority until all that is left are the Father in heaven, the Messiah, and the people of God. The greatest among you will be your servant, he says.
In such a community, the race to the top, the jealous competition for the best seats, is turned into the equally demanding work of creating relationships of mutual care where the needs of others are at least as important to us as our own. And that, my friends, goes against just about everything we have been taught in school and at work and in the marketplace — meaning that some of us will simply dismiss it as unrealistic.
But not all of us. A good number of us will hear it as a necessary challenge to the standard narrative of who we are and who we are meant to be. A good number of us will hear it as an urgent word of encouragement to push back against that standard narrative and to seek ways to embody the servant love of God. And not because it gets us points in heaven, but because a life in tune with the Giver of life is the true life of all.
[1] Romans 1:7; 1 Corinthians 1:2; 2 Corinthians 1:1; Philippians 1:1
[2] Hebrews 12:1
[3] Wishful Thinking, 102.
[4] Deuteronomy 6:6-9