A problem that seems almost inevitably inseparable from organised religion is well attested in the various encounters between Jesus and his professional critics narrated in the pages of the gospels.
It is the well-known problem that arises when the discrepancy becomes too great between what a religion teaches and how the people who follow it actually live. And the gulf between theory and practice becomes particularly glaring when the official representatives of any religion don’t practise what they preach, as was allegedly the case with the scribes and Pharisees who confronted Jesus in the gospels.
Clearly, this is not a problem that can be happily relegated to the ancient world. A couple of centuries ago a stringent critic of organised Christianity remarked sardonically that “the fact that sermons are preached in churches makes the presence of lightning conductors on such buildings not unnecessary”. And while the principal target of such a jibe was in all likelihood the doctrinal claims of the Church, it cannot be excluded that the contrast between high moral standards and low moral practice is also envisioned.
This is, of course, a very harsh judgment, almost as harsh as the judgments Jesus passed on the scribes and Pharisees in his day. And in the light of such judgments, we might even be tempted to think it would nearly be better not to have organised religion at all. If the danger of hypocrisy and corruption in religion is so great, might it perhaps not be better simply to leave religion’s organisation to God alone?
In order to do justice to past generations who passed their traditions on to us, religion needs to be organised so that its treasures, which we inherited and didn’t invent ourselves, don’t get lost
However, if we were to take a closer look at one specific exchange between Jesus and his censors (in Matthew 23:1-3), I don’t think we could say that he ever wished to abolish organised religion or that he thought it was in principle a bad thing for religion to be organised. Quite the contrary.
Religions and traditions
He appears to assume that religion should continue to be taught. For the Jewish religion, both before and at the time of Jesus, and thereafter, and the Christian religion for us still today, are both religions with traditions. They didn’t and don’t depend for their survival on arbitrary experiences that each age might be able to generate.
And in order to do justice to past generations who passed their traditions on to us, religion needs to be organised so that its treasures, which we inherited and didn’t invent ourselves, don’t get lost.
Admittedly, this may unavoidably leave the door open to possible corruption by religious ‘authorities’, who either wittingly or unwittingly pervert religion for their own self-seeking ends.
With perhaps such a depressing possibility in mind, Jesus criticised the scribes and the Pharisees in his own day, but he also said: “Practise and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do; for they preach, but do not practise.”
With this advice, Jesus pinpoints a decisive truth that continues to be valid today, namely the distinction between the message of a religion, and the messengers who are allowed to deliver it.
It’s perhaps rather like our relationship with the postal service, to borrow a comparison from the 20th century Swiss theologian, Karl Barth (1886-1968).
With this advice, Jesus pinpoints a decisive truth that continues to be valid today, namely the distinction between the message of a religion, and the messengers who are allowed to deliver it
Without postal workers, we wouldn’t get our letters. But the postal workers don’t write the letters in the first place. Similarly, with his advice Jesus underlines starkly the vital distinction between the heart of religion and the human attempt to live or embody it.
Essentially, what is at issue here is the basic difference between God and us, between God’s ways and our ways.
The difference between God and religion
What we can perhaps then take from Jesus’ confrontation with his foes is, on the one hand, a teaching that may not be particularly flattering to human beings, namely that we may continually tend to fall short of fulfilling the deepest demands of the Christian faith, or even pervert them.
On the other hand – and this is more encouraging – we can always rely on the belief that the heart of our religion will always remain true to itself because this heart is God.
If it weren’t so, if God were simply another name for our own religious lifestyles and preferences, then we would probably no longer be able to discern discrepancies between religious theory and practice, or between what religion tells us to do and the way we actually behave.
Above all, we would have little sensitivity to the warning implicit in a famous remark by St Anselm (c. 1033-1109): “You have not yet taken into consideration how great the weight of sin is” (Why did God become man?, I, 21). We would no longer, in short, be aware of sin with any sense of disappointment or sometimes even despair over its gravity.
But this in turn may help illuminate the redemptive truth and promise of the gospel: that human sin cannot extinguish the hope that God is greater than evil and, despite sin, still wishes to bring what he started with human lives here on earth to a blessed end in heaven.
:: Martin Henry, former lecturer in theology at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, is a priest of the diocese of Down and Connor
