Welcome to the Kitopedia. All entries are © 2001-2007 Christopher Sunami, unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. These entries are NOT publicly licensed. No entries may be reproduced without permission and attribution.
NOTE: Most essays on this site represent original theoretical work. If you find these articles interesting, inspiring or helpful, please let me know. If you refer to them, please give me and this website credit. In addition, links back to this page in blogs or from other sites are always appreciated!


Search



Forums


New Articles

Updates
•Websites 7/12/08
•Mandelbrot Set 6/24/08





Hero For Christ

Self Righteousness



© 2005 Christopher Sunami, all rights reserved

We modern Christians have become known for self-righteousness, an unshakeable sense of ourselves as good, right, and saved. Some of us take it to such extremes that we find pleasure in imagining the eternal torments awaiting those who are less good, less right and less saved than ourselves.

Such an attitude is not Christian. It is a corruption of the law of Moses. In the days of the ancient Israelites, it was easy for them to evaluate their own righteousness, because they lived under a physicalized covenant. Their law was entirely concerned with actions and behaviors, and gave unambiguous rules concerning both. A person either followed the law or broke it, so righteousness was an objective physical state.

Spiritual righteousness, as preached by Jesus, was not covered by the law. When the ancient Israelites spoke of “salvation,” they meant physical salvation, generally from hostile nations such as Egypt and Babylon. When they committed minor offences, they performed physical penances. When they were caught committing major offences they were killed, rather than damned, and suffered physical death rather than the death of the spirit.

The error of the Pharisees was retaining the attitudes of the ancient Israelites even after the advent of Christ. In other words, they sought to justify themselves by the flesh even after the dawning of the age of the spirit. In response, Jesus rebuked them, calling them “whitewashed tombs” (Matthew 23:27). This was a metaphor in which the beautiful outsides of the tombs corresponded to the physical righteousness of the Pharisees, and the rotting deadness inside was the corruption of their souls.

The error of modern Christians, however, is even worse than theirs, because we persist in thinking ourselves spiritually righteous, even though we were warned against doing so by Christ. The danger we thereby place ourselves in was shown most clearly in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5), where Jesus addressed a crowd of people who were accustomed to thinking of the Pharisees as the epitome of righteousness under the law. Rather than agreeing, however, Jesus established a standard of spiritual righteousness far beyond that practiced by the Pharisees or established in the law of Moses. The law forbade the physical unrighteousness of murder, but Jesus condemned the spiritual unrighteousness of unjustified anger. The law forbade the physical unrighteousness of adultery, but Jesus condemned the spiritual unrighteousness of a lustful heart.

Even had he gone no further, every member of his audience would already have sat condemned; for what human being has never been unreasonably angry, or never experienced a lustful thought? Nonetheless, Jesus continued in the same vein, until he culminated that portion of his sermon with an injunction that no ordinary human being could possibly hope to fulfill: “Be as perfect as God” (Matthew 5:48).

Had Jesus ended there, and had this been the sum total of Jesus’ teachings, we all assuredly would have been damned, for what mortal being could comprehend the perfection of God, much less embody it? Fortunately for us, however, Jesus went on to establish another pathway to spiritual salvation, saying: “If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you” (Matthew 6:14).

We modern Christians have a tendency to take the wrong lesson from the Sermon on the Mount. We still strive in our vanity to exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees, when the gentler lesson of Christ is that we should exceed them rather in their forgiveness. If we seek to avoid being their modern equivalent, we should pay attention to the following parable:

Luke 18:10-14 (spoken by Jesus)
Two men went up into the temple to pray;
the one a Pharisee, and the other a tax-collector.

The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself,
“God, I thank you that I am not as other men are,
“extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax-collector.
“I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.”

And the tax collector, standing afar off,
would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven,
but smote upon his breast, saying,
“God be merciful to me, a sinner.”

I tell you, the tax collector went down to his house justified
rather than the Pharisee:
for every one that exalts himself shall be brought low;
and he that humbles himself shall be exalted.
Comment on this Page or Read Guestbook