Missional as the New Legalism, Part Two

Mark told a story in his gospel about a controversy between Jesus and a few religious experts (See Mark 7.1-23). The controversy surrounded the issue of ritually washing one’s hands before eating food. In this story, Jesus’ disciples were not washing their hands before they ate. This caused the religious experts to ask Jesus why they were not “living according to the tradition of the elders.”

Jesus told them that it was not about the rituals, traditions, rules, and lifestyle that religion offers. None of these things made someone clean or unclean. It was about what’s inside you, namely the heart. Jesus told them that out of the heart came “evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.” He said that these things come from inside and defile a person.”

Let’s be honest, if that is what lurks inside of us why even go there? It’s messy, dirty, and shameful. Perhaps it’s better to just cover it up and not disturb it, which is what propels legalism forward. Legalism allows you to perform without ever asking questions about what is inside. So we get busy doing all sorts of things and ignoring our hearts, but when we ignore what’s in our hearts it doesn’t go away. It festers, it grows, and at some point it will spill out.

A family that I know spent their entire lives working for a Christian Evangelistic Ministry. This particular ministry was very concerned with how people on their staff were performing. A few years ago the father of this family I know was diagnosed with a terminal illness. He died shortly after. It was then that all the dirty laundry of their life came out.

He was an alcoholic. He was abusive. Their marriage was a sham. All of this and they lived next door to another family who worked for the same ministry. His wife confessed that while they both knew things were bad they could never have said anything. No one wanted to know what was in that man’s heart. Probably because those in leadership of that ministry did not want to talk about what was in their heart.

Unfortunately stories like this are rather common. Men and women saying all the right things, doing all the right tasks, and acting out a beautiful spirituality, but in the end all of these things are only a mask. Which is why Jesus called those religious experts “hypocrites.”

Hypocrites were actors in the theater who wore masks. Their masks bore exaggerated features so people could tell what kind of character they were. Yet, while people saw the mask they never knew who the actor behind the mask was.

When it comes to acting, what matters is the mask. When it comes to legalism what matters is the performance. But when it comes to Jesus what matters is the heart.

The more people in the church are only told “go and do” the more in danger we are of overlooking the heart. If the insistence from pastors to their people is only to “be missional” we may ignore the transformative journey. It’s easy to do.

Being missional is good and right. But sometimes, the cleverest trick the Evil One plays is getting the people of God to do a lot of things that are good and right so we fail to see the one thing.

A few weeks ago I sat with some pastors who were talking about being missional. They were telling stories of their sermons that challenged their congregation to be missional. They spoke of this book or that book that gave good insights on being missional. They spoke of a conference that was all about the missional movement.

Eventually the talk of transformation arose. One pastor commented, “Just be careful, the more you tell people to focus on their own transformation, the more focused on yourselves you will be, and the less missional you will become.” This is true only if we are teaching them to be transformed into something other than Christ. It is impossible to become more like Jesus and not live missionally.

Beyond that, why, for so many, is this an “either-or” proposition? It is, and must always be, a “both-and.” Mission and transformation cannot be separated, one leads to the other and the other to the one. However, if it is only about “doing” then we may just have the one or the other, in which case we miss the heart – the very thing that matters to Jesus.