by Harry BuererI had a dream the other night that seemed highly significant to me. As background let me say that I played soccer in college and developed a love for the game. Recently I’ve tried to watch most of the games of the local university team.
In my dream I had gone back to my college to play in an alumni soccer game. But when the game got started, everybody started throwing the ball around and running with it. I was totally disgusted. That was not the game I came to play. It had somehow turned into rugby or American football.
When I woke up, it occurred to me that such a transformation was a good metaphor for the origination of what became known as Christianity. Now of course a game is not the same as religious faith, and it’s fine to play any variation of a game that you want to. But imagine that soccer had been divinely revealed at some point in the past and the rules for it had been personally given by God to his representatives.
Imagine further that a master teacher had come later and continued to teach the game of soccer as previously revealed, but with the additional detail that he was to be the ultimate goalkeeper (or something like that). Then, not long after the master teacher departed, the players started to reason that, since the goalkeeper could pick up the ball, take steps with it, and even throw it, other players should be able to pick up the ball and run with it or throw it. You ended up with a significantly different game.
In this metaphor, as you’ve probably figured out, soccer represents Judaism and American football represents Christianity. God gave a revelation to his people in the Hebrew scriptures that came to be known as Judaism. Jesus came and taught Judaism as revealed by the scriptures with the addition that he was the ultimate king in God’s promised kingdom. Since the kingdom was rejected by the authorities, as God knew would happen, Jesus also became the ultimate sacrifice for sin.
But in the centuries that followed, some of the rules of the game were thrown out and a lot of new ones were added. Since Jesus stayed in the tomb (resting) during the Sabbath and was resurrected on the first day of the week, it was decided that they would honor that day as their holy day and ignore the Sabbath that God had instituted. Since their focus was, they thought, to be exclusively on Jesus, they would make major celebrations of his birth and death/resurrection, and cast aside the festivals that God had instructed his people to observe. Since Jesus, at his last Passover celebration, extended the symbolism of Passover to include not only the redemption from Egypt, but also the spiritual redemption that was to be provided by his sacrifice, it became commonplace to observe a kind of mini-Passover every week or month, and totally divorce it from the Passover that was the basis for it. It became a whole new ball game.
Now just as with American football, Christianity has become more widespread than Judaism in certain contexts. But it’s not the “faith once delivered to the saints” as the third verse of the epistle to Jude puts it. There have been many reformations that have made gestures to getting back to the faith of Jesus and the apostles, but they’ve all failed because they haven’t realized that Jesus was teaching the same Judaism that God revealed to Moses and the prophets. We need to throw out all the new rules and get back to the game that God introduced in the first place.