25.04 | Tradition is Not the Mission
Mark 7:1-30
“You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”
Mark 7:8
For around two years, our daughter Estie’s favourite movie was Disney’s Moana.
The story for Moana begins on the fictional island of Motunui in ancient Polynesia. Despite their ancestors being great explorers and voyagers of the sea, the villagers fear the ocean. They cloak this fear in their village traditions, presenting these as their founding values and the structure that keeps their society strong. As the movie goes on, Moana interrupts these traditions of fear to give way to a new way of life for her people, back out onto the adventures of the ocean.
There’s a line in an early song that stuck with me: tradition is our mission.
There are many ways to define the difference between dead religion and the vibrant Way of Jesus. One good way of defining would religion would be this:
When tradition becomes the mission.
Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees today is exactly this. They have built up these many traditions—convoluted rules and regulations and habits and duties, ways for the strong to feel proud of their achievements, and for everyone else to feel like failures and outsiders. They’ve become so obsessive about their traditions, that they’ve not noticed that their rules run contrary to the actual commandments of God (such as honouring your parents), or a vision of holiness that actually brings life. They’re scandalised that Jesus isn’t washing His hands, and yet they miss that Jesus is bringing life and healing and hope to the most broken.
Tradition has become their mission.
So far all well and good. It’s easy to critique the Pharisees.
And yet, we have to bring this closer to home. The Pharisees don’t feature so heavily in the Gospels so that we can critique them from a distance;1 they feature to expose our own ever-lurking religious tendencies. They feature so that we can reject such schemas of fear and control and instead forge our our way into true freedom and living faith.
We all have rules and habits. These practices and structures and boundaries can help us on the way of faith, but the ever-present danger is for these outward structures (traditions) to steal our focus and end up as the ends rather than the means. Tradition becomes the mission.
We can do this as individuals or as organisations. It happens when we find ourselves critical about things external rather than insightful as to the truths of the heart. It happens when we care more about misdemeanour than we do about motive. It happens when we fail to see that what God is doing in the life of another may look different to how He did it in our own. It happens when we fail to see that the move of God in the coming generation will look different to the move of God in the last one. Tradition becomes our mission. And in doing so, we miss the untamed vibrancy of the movements of an eternally dynamic God.
Look back to the heart. Your external traditions may be a great help to you. But the purpose of them is always to nurture an interactive life with the Father, where His Spirit renews your heart from the inside out, in ever-increasing freedom and wholeness and life and glory.
Moana had it right. When tradition became the mission their lives reduced and they forgot their true destiny. The greater life lay beyond the traditions, lifting their eyes beyond the limitations of their regulations, and stepping out again onto the untamed waves of freedom.
Reflect:
How does your faith journey feel right now?
If it feels a little tired or dull, it may be that tradition has become your mission.
Bring this back to the Father. Ask Him if there are traditions that you need to lay down. And consider where the Spirit may be calling you out from the secure traditions of the island out onto the wild waves of the adventures of true faith.
Pray:
Father in heaven,
You are not the God of dead religion.
I know this.
And yet, Father,
I forget it.
Traditions are easier to grasp hold of;
They give me a feeling of control and achievement;
They give me the security of boundaries and predictability.
And yet, Father,
When they become my mission,
And I lose sight of you,
My soul withers
And I become not an adventurer
But a prisoner of fear.
And so, Father,
I again receive your invitation today.
Invite me again to the wild waves of adventure with you,
Where my soul can breathe,
And faith takes the great plunges,
And I recall the vastness of your heart.
For here, Lord Jesus,
Is the wild and expansive life of faith to which you have called me,
Where every tradition is so vastly secondary
To the inhabitation
Of the untameable vision of God.
In Jesus’ Name,
Amen
Old Testament:
For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:
Ruth 3-4 | Psalm 54
Which is, somewhat ironically, a very pharisaical thing to do.