About Jesus     Steve Sweetman

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My Journey Through The Ecclesiastical Maze

Part 35

The Institutionalization Of Relationships

 

I wish they had tape recorders and mp3 players back in the days when Jesus was on earth.  I’d love to hear everything He said in the fifty days leading up to His ascension.  Not much is written about those days.  Luke does tell us in Acts 1:5 that He spoke about the Kingdom of God .  I suppose that if Jesus’ words had been recorded on tape or disk some Christian ministry would be selling them and making a fortune. 

 

I’ve heard it said that Jesus is the only religious leader in history that didn’t promote buildings of worship, a grand ecclesiastical structure, or a complicated liturgy.     What He did promote was more relational than anything else.  From the record we have I’ve concluded that what Jesus talked about during those last fifty days was more relational than institutional.  Jesus said nothing about His people becoming the ecclesiastical maze that presently exists.  Let’s look at what He said and see if you come to the same conclusion.       

 

I’ll start with Matthew’s account.  Jesus told the women at the grave site, “tell my brothers to meet me in Galilee ”.  Note that Jesus called His male disciples “His brothers”, not “His board of directors”. (Matthew 28:11)  How comforting it is to know that Jesus, the Lord of all there is, views you and I who are real Christians as His brothers and sisters.  Now that’s relational.

 

Once in Galilee Jesus told His followers to “disciple all nations”.  The way in which they’d do this was to baptize people and teach them to obey Jesus, just as they were to obey Jesus.  So they did just that.  Unless you believe these disciples had a powerful hose and sprayed crowds of people with water all at once, baptism is a pretty personal activity.  One individual person would be put under the water at a time by one or two other individuals.  That’s relational.  As these disciples taught and baptized, Jesus promised them that He’d be with them. (Matthew 28:16-20)  I’d say that’s relational as well.  Jesus gave them a job to do, and He promised to personally help them do the job.    

 

Besides what Matthew states, Mark adds a few other things.  First of all, Jesus rebuked the disciples for not trusting Him. (Mark 16:14)  Lack of trust in another person is a relational issue. 

 

Along with the instruction to disciple nations, Mark says that Jesus told His followers that He’d help them in the discipling process by confirming their words with miracles.  As I’ve always said, the disciples did the manual work while Jesus provided the spiritual ability.  So this is the discipling process.  First, trust Jesus.  Second, we work with each other in a trusting relationship.  Third, Jesus works with all of us providing the supernatural evidence to what we speak.    (Mark 16 :14-20)  Once again, that’s all relational.  I’d suggest that if one of these three aspects of discipling is ignored then the discipling process is faulty.  When all three aspects are intact, the Body of Christ is “in action” as it should be, with emphasis on the words “in action”.  A live body consists of body parts that function together for the health of the body.   If  body parts aren’t found “in action”, the body is dead, or soon will be dead.      

 

Luke, in chapter 24 verses 13 to 35 records Jesus walking with two men to Emmaus, which was seven miles from Jerusalem , which might take about two hours to walk.  Can you imagine having a two hour personal conversation with Jesus after He rose from the dead?  These men had Jesus’ undivided attention for all that time.  That’s pretty personal, don’t you think?  After hearing what these men said, Jesus said a few things to them.  He called them “foolish and slow of heart to believe”.  Oh, maybe that’s getting a little too personal.  Jesus also spoke to these men about His death and resurrection from Old Testament passages.  Now I’d love to have the rights to those words for my web site.  I promise I wouldn’t make you sign up for a PayPal account in order to read His words.  You have to admit, this was one very personal and relational event.    

 

In Luke 24, verses 36 to 50 Jesus had to prove to His followers that He was really Himself.  After showing them His scars, He rebuked them for not trusting Him.  Trust is clearly the foundation of any relationship.  “Trust me” was one of Jesus’ main messages. 

 

After this rebuke, He told the disciples that repentance and forgiveness (in that order) must be preached to all nations.  This was clearly meant to be part of the discipling process.  Jesus simply sits down and talks with His brothers concerning what needed to be done after He left.  I believe that if repentance is left out of the discipling process, then your discipling isn’t really discipling, and the Body of Christ is greatly weakened.  One cannot trust his life to Jesus without first acknowledging that he needs to stop trusting in himself.

 

Luke also wrote the book of Acts.  In Acts 1:5 we see that Jesus spoke about the Kingdom of God during those last fifty days.  It was this Kingdom that the disciples were to represent once He left.  In the next few verses Jesus also told the disciples to stay in Jerusalem until they received the Holy Spirit into their lives.  Only then could they effectively disciple nations and represent God’s Kingdom.  At that point they would become a living body of people. (Acts 1:8)   Without the Holy Spirit, there is no body of Christ.  

 

John, in chapters 20 and 21 records a number of post resurrection appearances by Jesus.  Besides what I’ve noted from the other gospel writers, John records that Jesus told the disciples that as His Father had  sent Him, so He was sending them.  One thing this meant was that Jesus gave them the authority and responsibility to forgive sins, and if they didn’t follow through on this, sins wouldn’t be forgiven. (John 20:21-23)  I won’t get off topic and discuss that here because I’ve done that elsewhere.  I’ll  just say that forgiving sins is a relational issue.        

 

In John 21 we see Jesus asking Peter three times if he loved Him.  You can’t get more relational than that.  Then He tells Peter to feed, or care for, His sheep.  This was a personal call by Jesus to Peter to perform a very relational task.  More than simply being in a place of leadership, Peter was called to care for God’s people.  Both Peter’s call to care, and the process of caring for God’s people is relational.  The act of caring was more important to Jesus than any office of leadership.  That’s not necessarily so with us.  We’ve turned “God’s call” into “our careers”.  We’ve institutionalized something that was meant to be relational.  What was intended to be the simple act of caring has become an ecclesiastical office. 

 

So that’s about it.  As I said, there’s not a lot written about all that Jesus said and did during those last fifty days.  I suggest that what Jesus said and did during those days was relational in nature.  I see nothing that even closely resembles institutionalism.  What Jesus was doing in those days before His ascension was instilling a new mindset into His followers.  Jesus wanted His followers to know that God’s people looked nothing like the religious structure of the day.  The “old wineskin” of religiosity was to be discarded.  The “new wineskin” would be a body of  caring people, united to each other by the Holy Spirit.  This is the Body of Christ, where each part of the body has a working relationship with Jesus and with a few others.  It’s sad, but we’ve institutionalized this union, and in the process we’ve dragged out the old wineskin Jesus wanted us to discard.    

 

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