Woe.

Maybe you have seen it? It’s that picture of Jesus that hangs in countless numbers of church sunday school classrooms around the country. You know which one I am talking about, right? The one where Jesus looks longingly off to the side? I have this picture hanging in my office. I love it. But, if I can be honest? He looks gaunt. Seriously. Kind of sickly, actually. Like, if I ran into Jesus in this condition, I would offer Him a protein shake or an ensure and encourage Him to get more sun.

Truth be told, Jesus was a carpenter. Have you ever seen a carpenter? They are not frail, gaunt, weakly little individuals. They work with wood. They use their hands which, i’m guessing here, repeatedly take a hammer to the finger while nailing wood. This was Jesus’ occupation and his stature matched His work. See, I don’t really think Jesus walked around with a lamb around His neck looking longingly off to the side while people walked by. Do you? And, if He did, do you really think people would follow Him?

As I read the gospels, here’s the picture I get: Jesus was passionate. He shook the world of twelve ordinary men and challenged them to be more. He touched lepers and those with disease when the rest of the world made them shout “unclean” and kept their distance from them. He entered into conversation with the adulterers, tax collectors and prostitutes when others chose to have their conversations about the sinners behind their backs. Jesus walked THROUGH the untraveled places (Samaria) when other Jews chose to walk around them because some people located in those regions were just not worth the effort of loving. And then there’s the religious. The Pharisees and Sadducees. Jesus didn’t hesitate to call them out on their pride, their misconceptions and where they were missing the greater picture of God’s love, God’s grace, and God’s mercy.

So, let’s have some fun.

For the next couple of weeks, I want to take some blog post time to look at a passage of scripture where we find Jesus reclining in the home of some religious Pharisees. As Jesus reclines, He clearly has had enough. He had seen an ugly pattern with the religious elite saying one thing but their lives didn’t match the picture of God they were portraying and it was time to set the record straight. So what does Jesus do? He calls them out. I mean, BIG TIME calls them out. It’s within these verses that we find the seven woes of Jesus.

READ THEM HERE…

A word of warning. It’s easy to separate ourselves from the Gospels because that was “so then” and this is “so now”. But, careful. If i’m honest with myself, I see myself inside some of these woes. And, you just might find the same.

My thoughts? If these issues were important enough for Jesus to bring to the surface then, they are certainly worthy of looking at in relationship to ourselves and where we are today.

So, the next post? We’ll start with this one in Matthew 23:13:

Woe to you, you teachers of the law and Pharisees. There is such a gulf between what you say and what you do. You will stand before a crowd and lock the door of the kingdom of heaven right in front of everyone; you won’t enter the Kingdom yourselves, and you prevent others from doing so.