True and False Piety

Matthew 3:1-12 and Romans 15:4-13

John is preaching in the wilderness. In the Scriptures, wilderness is primarily a place of preparation. God sends people to the wilderness to get them ready for the work he has ahead of them. And John is preaching there because he is tasked with getting people ready for the coming of Messiah.

But Bible scholars agree that there is another meaning to John being in the wilderness. It’s a protest. It’s a rejection of the “establishment,” a silent criticism of the religious elites in Jerusalem. The religious elites think of themselves as the only real people of God. They spend their lives looking down on others as unworthy of God, unable to receive any grace from him.

The crowds flocked to John. This suggests that there was a real hunger for a new expression of faith. People longed for something real, and they also did not see it in the religious elites.

But the religious elites go to John, as well. The Pharisees and Sadducees came down from Jerusalem to the wilderness of Judea.

We’re pretty familiar with the Pharisees and their ways of thinking. They imagine that they are the ones who keep God’s Law and their traditions perfectly, and as such they are the only real people of God.

The Sadducees were quite different. They were highly influenced by the world, especially by the Greek culture that had permeated life in the ancient Near East world for more than three centuries. They had at least as much in common with the Greek world, as they did with the Scriptures.

John turns them both back. I imagine that he does so because he knows they are only there for the sake of appearances. Crowds are going out to hear John. They don’t want to be seen as missing out on this religious expression. They want everyone to know they are pious. But John knows it’s a false piety.

The true gospel stands as a contrast to false piety.

In Romans 15, Paul notes that real piety is rooted in Scripture. All Scripture is written to teach us. It is the source of our religious understanding.

The Sadducees had stripped Scripture away from their faith. They rejected most of the Old Testament. They only held on to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, Genesis to Deuteronomy. And even then, what they believed was as influenced by the world around them as by those books they did keep.

In a way, the Pharisees also denied the primacy of Scripture. They held onto Scripture, but their understanding of Scripture was rooted in their endless lists of traditions. The Scriptures got lost in the midst of traditions, especially when sometimes those traditions contradicted the plain and obvious meaning of Scripture.

Real faith must be rooted in Scripture, in the Word that comes from God. If our faith is rooted in anything else, then it’s really idolatry. It is the worship of something people created rather than what is received from God.

Scripture is also meant to encourage us and give us hope. Learning and remembering are both essentials of our faith. We should read the Scriptures not just to learn, but also to remember the things we have learned but forgotten.

“Live in complete harmony with each other.” Harmony is only possible when we have the attitude of Christ toward each other, when we accept each other as Christ accepted us. Christ had the attitude of loving service toward others, and so must we. Again, this stands in contrast to the attitudes of the Pharisees and Sadducees who saw themselves as higher and better than others, and who were not willing to accept that they had any fellowship with “sinners.”

Jesus always sought the good of others. That doesn’t mean that he never chastised or corrected. Jesus certainly did those things, but he always did so for the good of others. Sometimes we need to be chastised and hear words of correction.

Real faith is defined by a loving community of service to one another and acceptance of each other, in spite of each of us having faults and failures. And real faith must be informed and sustained by God’s Holy Word, not by our own ideas or the ways of the world around us. In these ways, the gospel and the Church stand as a counterpoint to false piety.