I find myself more and more looking at scripture and the truth of the Gospel through the eyes of the cultural context in which we live. But this approach is wrong. Instead of looking at scripture through the eyes of popular culture, let us look at culture through the lens of scripture and truth. In Christ we see the perfect ministry of grace and truth played out where each person is just as important as any other. In my Christian life, sometimes I find myself shying away from this truth because it rubs against the popular notions of our culture.
We see in Matthew 15 where Jesus stood for truth in His conflicts with the religious establishment of the day. I often think of Jesus, the meek and mild, sent to die on the cross as a ransom for our iniquities so that we might know eternal life with the Father. Yet somehow I forget that when Christ stood up for the truth and went against the religious leaders of the Temple, the Pharisees crucified Him. In Matthew 15 we read how those Pharisees traveled from all the way from Jerusalem to Gennesaret just to confront Jesus and His disciples and question them about the simple act of washing their hands.
While there is doubtless more cultural context here that we could examine, if this story simply seems ridiculous, it is. Jesus’s response to this event was revealing. Instead of stooping to the Pharisees’ low level, Jesus called them out for their manipulation of the law for their own benefit. He said it wasn’t their hands that made them unclean but rather what came from their hearts: “What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.” Jesus goes on to speak to the crowd that had formed, knowing that the Pharisees could probably still hear Him saying, “Leave them; they are blind guides. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”
Now more than ever it seems that the truth can be muddied and hard to discern. So where should we go to for truth? To whom should we turn for information and affirmation? Let us be a people shaped and molded by the truth of the Gospel and the authority of scripture so that we will not be led by the blind into a pit but instead by the truth to eternal life.