Nobody likes to think that they might have areas of hypocrisy in their life. That is an indictment we give to insincere Christians or money making charlatans. However, hypocrisy isn’t just unethical actions. Often, hypocrisy is mixed motives intertwined with good practices.
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Jesus delivers “blessings and woes” to the rich and the poor in Luke 6:20-26. The woes are for the rich. Jesus didn’t give a nod to the rich people who were merely hard workers or well-meaning. He didn’t take the time to differentiate between those who were abusing their privileges or not.
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I’ve heard the story in Luke 5:1-11 most of my life, as far back as pre-K, in Sunday School. This is where Jesus tells Peter to put his nets back in the water after a night of unsuccessful fishing. Peter then gets the biggest catch he’s ever pulled in. At the end of this interaction, Jesus says, from now on you will be catching people. This story is a children’s Sunday School favorite. It’s easy to turn into pictures. Someone even turned it into a catchy children’s song, “I will make you fishers of men, fishers of men, fishers of men…if you follow meeeeee.” Jesus makes a side comment to one guy and it got turned into bad theology, that we peddle to toddlers.
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In Paul’s famous love chapter, 1 Corinthians 13, he’s writing to a group of people who are having multiple disagreements and divisions. This snippet of Paul’s letter has become the focus of poems, cards, and wedding ceremonies, so the context can easily get lost in all the sentimentality. Although it’s often called “the love chapter” only a few verses in the middle get the focus.
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3rd Sunday after the Epiphany; 1 Cor. 12:12-31
If there’s one word that describes the Christian church the least, it would be the noun “unity.” This unfortunate reality seems to stretch all the way back to the earliest iteration of the Christian church. This lack of unity is the basis for Paul’s well-known metaphor, that the church is like one body. He creates a picture in which everyone can relate because we all have bodies. He’s appealing to them to see their relatedness because the Corinthian church had a variety of divisions.
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2nd Sunday after the Epiphany: John 2:1-11
The Gospel of John follows the miracles of Jesus that act as signs of his role as the Messiah. The other gospels record Jesus as saying he won’t give the people a sign. John is detailing the things Jesus did right under their noses that were signs.
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