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Traditional Interference
Ezekiel 28:11-19; Luke 6:1-11; Colossians 2:13-23
Perhaps the greatest difficulty in reading the Bible is knowing what it says. We don’t come to the text as though it were fresh and new. Rather, we come to it as an old friend we believe we already know. It becomes hard to hear those parts of its message that conflict with some of our traditions about the Bible. They may interfere with our understanding God’s word. How can we set tradition aside long enough to be sure it does not interfere with God’s message for us today?
Jesus often stood against the received traditions of his day. He especially had trouble with what was called the “traditions of the elders”. These traditions were not Scripture so much as traditions about Scripture. Though these interpretations were strongly linked in the popular mind as God’s word, they often masked the meaning of God’s message in the Scripture they professed to explain. Jesus’ way of interpreting God’s message did not fall in line with many of these traditions. Unfortunately, many people could not distinguish between interpretations of Scripture and the message of the Scripture itself.
One such tradition dealt with Sabbath observance. This issue became a sore spot in the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees. Scripture decreed the Sabbath to be set apart from the other six days as a day of rest. It was a day on which to rest from work—a day to recall and trust God’s provision. The “traditions of the elders” had added to this weekly holiday proclamation a definition of work, interpreting Sabbath as of a prohibition against work. We find various examples of Jesus standing against this tradition of viewing the Sabbath as a prohibition rather than as a release. The issue arises twice here as Jesus teaches that God’s Sabbath was designed to bless rather than to oppress. The Pharisees could not set aside their traditions long enough to assess Jesus’ perspective on its own merits. They considered that anyone who countered their received traditions stood against God’s word. Their traditions interfered with hearing the good news of God’s blessings.
Sabbath observance was still an issue that Paul confronted among believers in the Greco-Roman world. These believers had come to Christ Jesus and found redemption and freedom from the demands of an oppressive legalism. Even so, many reverted back to their received traditions to guide their living this new life under the grace of Christ Jesus. Rather than learn to live under grace and the freedom of God’s love, they looked back to legalistic traditions as the way to live the new life of the gospel.
Paul had trouble teaching new believers how to walk under grace. Some, especially in Corinth, wanted to throw all restraint to the winds, living it up as though grace were freedom from responsibility. More often, believers all too readily accepted the traditions of legalistic strains of Judaism as their guides to living out the gospel. These traditions clouded their understanding of gospel living. In the process, they missed the point of God’s grace, submitting to an oppressive yoke of legalistic tradition.
Jesus’ and Paul’s audiences were not alone having trouble discerning between God’s message and human traditions. Ezekiel’s words were misread by early theologians to refer not to the king of Tyre, but to a chief of the evil spiritual forces unknown to Ezekiel. Greco-roman believers looked to works of Virgil and Homer along with Apocryphal accounts to find depictions of a supposed satanic fall from heaven. These non-Biblical traditions distorted Ezekiel’s message, lending credibility to traditions already circulating. Reading the text like this, we miss its message.
Ezekiel did not write of Satan’s supposed fall from heaven. He wrote a series of critiques of kings and tyrants who ignored God. They failed to recognize that they existed and ruled under the will of Yahweh, Creator of heaven and earth, the only true king. Ezekiel’s words were a message about rulers of this world—mortals who needed to recognize their dependence upon Yahweh. Certainly, there were layers of meaning in the message, but not regarding celestial beings. It was the high priest in Jerusalem to whom the text alluded for the people in exile.
After hearing and recognizing the sinful nature of the King of Tyre, the exiles of Judah would have made a connection with the ornamentation of their own high priest and the cherubim in the holy of holies. Making this connection, would help them understand the nature of their own sinfulness. Ezekiel’s message was never simply about those far away kings with little connection to his own people. Rather, the message of the prophets always concerned the very people who claimed Yahweh as their God. Our traditions which read a depiction of Satan’s fall into texts like this and Isaiah fourteen move us one step away from the text’s true objective, rather than closer to it.
Ezekiel spoke of a tyrannical king who thought too much of himself. In his pride he was cast down to recognize that he was not so special after all. Deposed by the Almighty, he was forced to see his dependence upon God. Through this figure, Ezekiel wanted the exiled people to look next at their own rulers, then at their own lives. The progression of meaning in the prophet’s words takes us from a known figure we might safely accuse to one within our own tradition. As we transfer the accusation to apply it closer to home, we are then compelled to look at our own lives under the same critical lens.
The prophetic message generally ran the course from “Look how horrible those people over there behave,” to “Some of our own aren’t much better off,” eventually arriving at “So how do we measure up? Are we any less guilty?” This is true in Ezekiel, Amos, Jonah, and Nathan’s parable before King David. If this is God’s message for us, it is also God’s message about us.
We should hear warning sirens when our traditions about a text remove us as the targets of the prophetic message. God’s word is a message directed to each one of us as the people to whom God desires to speak. Those traditions which exempt us from becoming targets of the message interfere with hearing God’s word for our own lives.
We read Jesus’ words concerning Sabbath issues, responding either with traditions of legalism or of a freedom that ignores the very purpose of Sabbath rest. We concern ourselves so much with accusing the Pharisees of seeking a way to frame Jesus that we ignore the interference of our own traditions. We shy away from looking at how we use our own traditions to avoid the demands of Jesus’ gospel on our own lives. We ignore how our own sense of superior insight casts us in the position of the Pharisees who look down on those with differing interpretations. We hear Paul’s words about seemingly irrelevant discussions of moon-phase festivals and reflect little on how our own worship habits might distract us from living in close fellowship with Christ Jesus.
The gospel message is not about legalism. The gospel message is not about worship forms and traditions. The gospel is not about Satan or demons. It is a message about so living in the presence of Christ that we embody Jesus Christ to the world. How do our traditions interfere with living with Christ Jesus the essence of the gospel message? After all, that is what the world really needs to hear.
—©Copyright 2006 Christopher B. Harbin