Messengers Not Gate-Keepers
By Stephan Collishaw
The desire to exclude others from the presence of God seems to be as endemic to the spiritual condition of mankind as is the desire to bring others to a knowledge of Him.
Jesus was well aware of this, of course.
In the gospel of Luke 18, it prefaces one of his parables with the following words, ‘To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable…’
It was of course the parable of the two men who had gone up to the temple to pray. While one of them acknowledged that he was unworthy to stand in the presence of God, the other took a markedly different attitude. And, unfortunately, one that is only too prevalent in Christianity today. He prayed the following words, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people — robbers, evildoers, adulterers — or even like this tax collector.’
Only one went away justified.
Jesus had no time for those convinced of their rightness in comparison with others they regarded as ‘sinners’.
It’s not coincidental that the very next incident in Luke 18 is the story of the disciples ‘gate-keeping’ access to Christ, keeping away those they felt should not be wasting his time.
But Christ did not call us to be gate-keepers to his kingdom.
Christ, in his incredible grace and love, threw open the way into the temple — that is, into the presence of God.
But let’s step back a moment and consider.
The temple, too, was governed in a manner that excluded others. It was defined more by who could not get into it rather than who could.
The Jews in the gospels were obsessed about being pure.
Ritually pure — so that they could enter the temple.
They were hyper-sensitive to anything that might sully their purity. Anything that might make them unclean, which would bar them from entering the temple to pray.
This was, of course, the problem of the priests and the levities on their way up to Jerusalem from Jericho in another of Jesus’ tales.
They were on their way up to the temple to worship and they were determined that nothing should get in the way of that. To such an extent that they passed by the Jew lying half dead on the side of the road.
To touch a dead body would make them unclean.
And why get involved in the things of this world, when you are concerned with getting up to the temple to worship God?
This was anathema to Jesus. Jesus preached — and lived — something wildly different.
Jesus went out of his way to ‘defile’ himself — to make himself ceremonially unclean. He embraced the leper. He touched dead bodies. He allowed himself to be touched by the woman with the issue of blood. All these things made him ‘unclean’. He ate with sinners (and by ate, we mean ‘broke bread’ which is the same term that is used by the early church — he fellowshipped sinners) and this outraged the religious Jews of his time.
They challenged him about it: ‘Why does your teacher eat [fellowship] with tax collectors and sinners?’ Matt 9:11
Jesus came to call everyone. His message of joy and liberation was not for the ‘clean’ or the ‘righteous’, it was for the prostitute, it was for the fraudster, it was for the Samaritan woman, it was for the woman caught in adultery.
Jesus loved these people. He wanted to offer them hope and the promise of God’s love.
And he was prepared to make himself unclean for them.
Indeed, he became the ultimate example of uncleanness: naked and shamed on the cross dying as a sinner.
And in that glorious moment, when the world was turned on its head — when the instrument of torture became a glorious lifting up — something profound and dramatic happened. The curtain in the temple was ripped apart.
‘At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook.’ Matt 27:51
The way into the temple of God was ripped open by the death of Christ.
The temple had become a symbol of exclusion. It defined who could not come in to approach God. The death of Jesus put an end to that.
And the Book of Acts exemplifies the outworking of this wonderful moment.
Towards the beginning of the Book of Acts we have a few ‘conversion’ stories. They are of course not random. They are the elucidation of this glorious grace of God, throwing open the way into the most holy through the death of Christ.
The first of these is in Acts 8 when Philip converts the eunuch. Eunuch’s, having gone through a sex-change operation (yes, they had had a gender-reassignment operation, though we don’t like to think of it this way today — they had moved from being ‘men’ to a ‘neuter’ gender) were denied entry into the presence of God under the law.
‘No one who has been emasculated…may enter the assembly of the LORD.’ Deuteronomy 23:1
Following the next story, which features the conversion of an ultra-orthodox Jew, the next tale of conversion is that of the gentile Roman soldier.
‘Do not call anything impure that God has made clean’. Acts 10:15
(Incidentally, note in the previous verse that Peter was still tied up with his obsession with being ‘clean’)
Luke, in his record, is of course reminding us of the glorious promise of Isaiah 56.
God is not a restrictive God.
He does not call upon us to be gate-keepers deciding who should stay out of his kingdom. He does not call upon us to be like the rabid Jewish temple worshippers who were about to pull Paul apart later in the books of Acts because they suspected that he had brought a non-Jew into the temple.
But unfortunately, that is what too many of us do.
We police the gates of God’s new temple, deciding who should be allowed in. We are those Jews in Acts 21 concerned about those we consider to have ‘defiled this holy place’. We are the Pharisees who Jesus castigates for laying heavy [spiritual] burdens on the backs of the people, preventing them from approaching God in his grace.
God has called all through the wonderful love of Jesus.
It is not ours to decide who should be called, or who should be allowed into the temple of God. He demands only that having been called into the temple — into the body of Christ — we should allow that to begin to transform us into his glorious image.
The image of love.
So let us reach out to everyone: without exception.
We are not God’s gate-keepers — we are the messengers sent out into the high-ways and the by-ways to invite whoever we meet to the great banquet put on by our Heavenly Father [Matt 22]
