John 1:35-51;Luke 6:12-17;John 13:34-35; Galatians 5:1-6; Matthew 11:25-30

          One of the perplexing questions that faces Christianity in the 21st century is exactly how we can follow Jesus faithfully in such a different context than that of Jesus himself and his first followers. I know I speak about this quite a bit, but it really bears repeating often, that we live in such a different historical, linguistic, religious, cultural, and social context, that almost every act that we take trying to be faithful to the Scriptures requires of us an act of translation. Yes, they were human just like us; they had families, and jobs, and they needed food– they talked about their plans and goals, had possessions, etc. But the WAY they viewed those things, talked about them, expectations, are what were the big difference is—that’s the culture and the social context. Therefore, it’s not always just as simple as saying, “The Bible tells me so. This is what it says, and this is what I’ll do.”. Now, don’t get me wrong. For some things, it really is that simple. For instance, “Thou shalt not murder” seems to make sense in just about any context. Now, I feel obliged to provide a nuanced explanation of what I just mentioned.

There are two types of law found in the Bible. The first is called Apodictic Law. That is the law of command. These are commands to do and do not. Perhaps the most famous example of this type of law is the Ten Commandments.  “Thou shalt not murder.”  “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” “Thou shalt love thy father and thy mother.”  These types of laws have an enduring appeal. They exist for all times and all generations. Here, I would argue that the “how” of implementing the law changes from one place to another, one generation to the next, one person to another. So that’s the first type of law that we find in Scripture. The second type of law is called Casuistic Law. And as you might hear in the name “casuistic”, this type of law is case law. The description pertains to a specific instance and provides guidance on how to handle it. Casuistic or case law describes daily life in the culture of ancient Israel or among the first disciples. In the scenario where your ox gores your neighbor, it outlines what occurs in consequence. What happens if you find a donkey that is lame on the Sabbath? These are all practical applications of scriptural principles aimed at the culture to which the Bible was first passed on.

Now, with this distinction firmly in hand, we can safely begin to talk about applying the Bible to our lives.  As you perhaps are now beginning to see, these two types of law really have a unique flavor to them. The law of divine command, the commands of thou shalt and thou shalt not, differs greatly from these case laws that were given to a specific culture in a specific time.  And among interpreters, this has led to a distinction between what some call the moral law and what some call ceremonial law. For these interpreters, it’s very easy to distinguish what is relevant to us as modern day Christians and what remains in the past. For them, anything that sounds like a command is eternally relevant and binding on us. And anything that sounds too culturally specific was obviously given just for Israel during the time in which they walked the earth and no longer is binding on us in the light of Jesus Christ.

So, from that little discussion, I think you can see that these answers to how do we apply the Bible are not always satisfying.  There seems to be too much room for gray.  Too much room for opinion. Too much room for, “Well, this works for me, so I’m going to go with this.” But it might not work for you. Shouldn’t questions about morality and law be binding on everyone? And it is from these discussions that discussions surrounding moral behaviors in our own context have their beginning. This is why interpreters differ on application. This is why some think it illegitimate to import passages from the Old Testament into a discussion of what a Christian morality might look like. Everyone draws the line a little differently. Because of their culture, because of their experience, because of their desires. The argument goes, “This is for them, but not for us.” And I know, having had conversations with many of you over my time here, that it is precisely at this point that things get frustrating, that things get uncomfortable. This is the point in which some doubts and fears enter into our psyche. If I believe that God has given us this law, how can I live it as a Christian? For some others, it is precisely this that feels like God’s love and freedom, to be understood and guided in very personal, specific ways.

And so, for any moral issue that faces the church, there is always the task of searching the scriptures, finding out what God has said about a particular topic, what the early church has said about a particular topic, and then wrestling, an intense wrestling with the text and the context. This is what it means to be faithful to the scriptures. On one hand, it doesn’t mean setting them aside as timelessly irrelevant. In other words, because they were written so long ago, they are no longer relevant for us, so we can safely ignore them. That is to err on the side of cultural pride, thinking that we know better because we are so advanced. On the other hand, there is the extreme of saying, “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” Taking every passage of scripture as literally as possible in an attempt to be faithful. This extreme ignores cultural context. Perhaps it made sense in the first century for a man to have several wives because it was a patriarchal context, and women had limited agency to provide for themselves. Because of the culture, the expectations, the institution of polygamy then was a divine accommodation to the limitations of ancient society—and not divine will for all time.

At this point you’re probably thinking, “Where is he going? I thought this was supposed to be about discipleship and following Jesus. How in the world does interpretation have anything to do with that?” Well, I’m glad you asked, because here we must talk about what discipleship is. What it means for us to follow Jesus into the world. To do that we need to talk about what discipleship meant in Jesus’ own day, how that was lived out in the early church, and then we can safely apply it to our own time after having grounded it in the historical past.

I want to preface this by saying I do not think there is a more important issue to focus on in our modern context than the concept of discipleship. I believe it is one of the most neglected topics in Christian literature, particularly the popular Christian literature that is aimed at a specific market. The majority of Christians are the target audience for these books and resources. You see, Christianity and the scholarly arm of Christianity has become woefully separated from what you might call everyday Christians. It has become an ivory tower sport in which people will talk about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and make no actual connection to Christian living on a daily basis. And I must admit, the temptation is great to enter into those waters. This is where professorships come from, and one can make big money doing it. This is where people can make a name for themselves, arguing and publishing, collecting and claiming followers. This is how denominations and even cults start, and how many new churches are planted. But it is not how faithful discipleship is carried on in the name of Jesus.

So, let’s talk about ancient discipleship. Let’s talk about what a disciple was in Jesus’ own day. Let’s start with an admission. Jesus was not the first person to have disciples. In fact, the concept of disciple and discipleship was quite common in Jesus’ day, particularly among Jewish rabbis and teachers. Each Jewish rabbi would have several disciples. And to these disciples, the rabbi would pass on his wisdom, knowledge, and understanding of the Torah. And I say “his” because rabbis and teachers were always men, and so were their disciples. Women were not educated, not included in religious discussions.

And how did one become a disciple of a rabbi? You walked up to the rabbi, and you asked him to become his disciple; if he thought that you were fit or had potential, you were in. You would follow that rabbi until that rabbi thought that you yourself could make your own disciples, to become a rabbi yourself. In ancient Judaism, discipleship was voluntary. You entered a relationship with a rabbi of your own choice, at your own will. You simply chose the rabbi you would follow, perhaps because his understanding of the law resonated with you, or your parents knew the rabbi, or he was prominent in your town, etc. Hmmm… maybe not so different from now, now that I think of it…

And now let’s contrast that with the discipleship that Jesus modeled. Jesus turned things 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Discipleship was no longer voluntary. It was a command. “Follow me,” Jesus said. That has the flavor of apodictic law that we talked about earlier. That is the flavor of divine command. Discipleship, therefore, is not optional for those who follow Jesus. It is an instruction to follow. And that might make us a little uncomfortable because we live in a culture in which freedom and liberty is highly valued. And perhaps that is one reason that our culture subtly resists the teaching of Jesus. Liberty and freedom rub against the sense of obligation that Jesus asks for, and indeed commands us to have for his teachings.

Perhaps the most glaring difference, though, between Jesus’ model of discipleship and that of the other ancient rabbis was Jesus’ own understanding of the Law. By the time Jesus entered the scene, the rabbis had had several hundred years lead time to develop their own understanding of the law. And among the various parties, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the people who lived at the Dead Sea called Essenes, etc., there were varying schools of thought and various types of rabbi. But all were agreed that the centrality of discipleship focused on the Law of Moses and following it as faithfully as possible. Some of these groups even went beyond the Law of Moses, and to preserve and protect that Law, they built a hedge around it by making the law even more strict. If you were to do no work on the Sabbath, then we need to lay out some case law and tell you exactly what you can and cannot do on the Sabbath. This was most common among the Pharisees, and you can still hear some of the flavor if you read the medieval Jewish texts known as the Talmud, where the rabbis discuss precisely the nuances of interpreting the law and protecting the intent of the Torah. From these discussions, modern-day Judaism takes its lead. If you know an Orthodox Jew, you know that on the Sabbath, they will not press a button, so they buy appliances and stay in hotels in which the elevators have a Sabbath mode, that they can use them, they stop on every floor, therefore negating the need to press a button. I mention this not to denigrate modern understandings among our friends in Judaism. I highly respect their devotion to God and their devotion to wrestling with Scripture; It is something we can learn from and even emulate at times, however, the approach that we take to the Scriptures must be different. We must always face the Scriptures in the light of the revelation of Jesus Christ. And what did Jesus say about the law? Jesus said that he had come not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. In his life, ministry, death, and resurrection, Jesus fulfilled the law and worked out its purpose. And what was that purpose? What was the purpose of the law? The purpose of the law was to guide the people of Israel into loving God and loving neighbor. Each time Jesus was asked to summarize the law or to expand on his understanding of the law, he would emphasize these twin goals. Loving God and loving neighbor is therefore central to the life of discipleship.

This is what Jesus meant when he said, “His yoke is easy, and his burden is light.” This is not just some quaint metaphor having to do with oxen. Of course, in the ancient world, people would know that to pull your agricultural implements, you would engage the service of two oxen. And to keep them working together, you would put a yoke between them, which is basically a device that goes around the neck so that they can bear the burden of whatever you’re pulling. And the yoke allows it to happen together in tandem. Jesus used the phrase, though, to refer to the summary and the impact of his teaching. And in doing so, he was using the word the way the rabbis would. When you became a disciple of a rabbi, you accepted the yoke or the burden of their teaching. If you felt that you were called to a life of turning away from the way of the world, you would find a rabbi with a heavy burden, a rabbi that had a view of the law that perhaps we would even consider extreme. But Jesus says, “My burden is light. My yoke is easy.” He is inviting us not to get weighed down in the minutia of legalism, but to turn towards the intent, the motive, the guiding principle of the law, which is love. Love of God and Love of Neighbor.

Now we have a definition of a disciple considering our discussion. A disciple is a follower of Jesus who has come to answer the summons that Jesus gives when he says, “Follow me.” It is a life of setting aside other agendas, whether they be moral, social, political, or even religious, and setting aside that yoke, that burden, and taking up the one Jesus presents to us. It is a life of radical departure from our own understanding of reality and life to accepting the wild and wonderful world that the Bible presents to us. It is to look at everything through the lens of God’s revelation to us in Scripture and in nature. It is to look with Godward eyes as we seek to live our lives. It is to live simply to love, to love God and love neighbor. And this must happen most intimately among fellow Christians. That is why Jesus said in John chapter 13, “A new commandment I give you, to love one another.” It is not that love of neighbor is such a radical concept, it is found in the ancient Jewish Scriptures. But among disciples of rabbis there tended to be competition, and friction, and fighting. Jesus demands that that not be so among his disciples. That they live a life of cooperation, mutual support, and love for each other. That sets aside the pursuit of superiority, privilege, power, or prestige, and works for the benefit of the other. This is picked up over and over again in the New Testament by Paul and the other writers, and can be summarized as, “Do for others in a way that is not self-serving, in a way that works for their good, and in so doing good will come to you as God will reward you for your selflessness.”

And that is why it is fitting that we end today’s message by turning towards what Jesus commanded us all to do regularly. To remember, to remember his death, to remember his life, to remember his teachings. This is the sacrament of Holy Communion that the Lord commanded. This is one way we can follow him. This is one way we speak to one another as we remember the sacrifice, as we remember the self-giving that is at the heart of our discipleship. Jesus was a king, but he did not lord it over others. Jesus was the great teacher, but he did not add heavy burdens to the law. Jesus was God in the flesh but did not use it to advance his own agenda, but to demonstrate what has always been true and right and moral and holy. In other words, to demonstrate love, because it is love that is the essence of God, God’s self, and it is love that makes the universe function as it should. Amen.