Monday reflection - the kind of righteousness of leadership.

Monday morning reflection.

Sometimes you think about church, and you wonder, is the blind pursuit of righteousness what makes some of us unbearable, insufferable? 

If you see an atheist living his life, you see someone who lives it the best way he knows how. He is not going to cite scriptures, but he is going to live by them, even without knowing it. 

Love thy neighbour. Check. Be patient, be kind. Check. Do not envy. Check. Give cheerfully. Check. Turn the other cheek. Check. Persevere to the end. Check. 

I am not saying that every atheist will live all that up. But, I have read and seen enough to know that some of them do live a scriptural life without professing to believing in a God of the scriptures. 

It is sad that we as Christians sometimes get more obsessed with how to be right than how to do right. 

The best example here is the crowd who caught the woman with a man, and was brought to the public square before Jesus to be stoned. 

The experts of the Mosaic law questioned Jesus, saying, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”

I can sense their jubilation when they smoked out a sinner in their midst. Compound that with a woman sinner caught in an act most of them are guilty of - if we would to apply Jesus’ standards concerning adultery or murder - and we have the perfect storm of the blind pursuit of righteousness, or better known as self-righteousness. 

Just as we inherited the seed of Adam, we also inherited this seed of self-righteousness, which is still very much alive in the church today. 

The irony is that self-righteousness is a very Christian thing because we often boast about how we are saved and how the rest are not. We see atheists as in need of help. We treat them as outside of the favour of God. We judge their every action as an action a person who is lost would naturally think about and unthinkingly do. 

It is almost like a one-upmanship whereby the believers perceive themselves as standing on the right side of history while the rest are, well, still groping in darkness. 

We may openly denounce such mindset, distancing ourselves from it, but in our daily living, especially when we are holding positions of leadership, we subconsciously show such prejudices not just against those who are unsaved, but also those (if not more so) we perceive as not living it up, that is, not demonstrating Christlikeness. 

The mob led by the respected teachers of the law demanding to stone the adulteress is a good example of how self-righteousness can turn into an obsession. 

In the modern church, such pursuit of what one think is right with unabated zeal has often turned tribalistic. 

One may have many hidden motives for it, whether it is for self-preservation, self-glorification or self-enrichment, but ultimately the means to achieving it is to use what is right (thy shall not commit adultery) to do what is wrong (stone her). 

It is often quite primitively binary, that is, if you sin, stone, if you fall, condemn, and if you threaten my position, raise a rebellion. 

In essence, it is the blind pursuit of righteousness in order to showcase how right one can be about it, not knowing how insufferable we have become as we allow the obsession to overtake or consume us. 

Let’s return to how Jesus managed the mob. 

We know what he said to them. “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her." 

While they challenged him to condemn, he challenged them back to reflect, that is, to do some soul searching. 

In a way, you can say that he turned the stone in their hands into the bread of a possible new life, a life that He led and died for; a life of overcoming, and not one where one is overcome by his petty quarrels, territorial contests and egoistical jostling. 

When one by one they left, some I believe realising the errors of their ways, and others disappointed that their zeal had backfired, Jesus turned to the woman and said, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" She said, "No one, sir." And he said, "Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again."

My takeaway is this. Jesus did not monopolise righteousness, albeit embodying it. Faultless, he did not use it as a means of oppression. He reversed that order: Righteousness is the end goal, and the means towards it is to exercise or demonstrate the fruits of the Spirit.

In that order, the pursuit is no longer a blind one, whereby it is turned into an instrument for self-glorification. And in that order, the pursuit is about submission, humility and dying to self, so that one may subject oneself to the ends of righteousness and not to lord over others by riding on it. 

This is my Monday morning reflection, and I hope to leave you with this impression - whether we claim to be believers or not, without love, that is, the love shown at Calvary, we are nothing, we still fall short.