[Transcript of a midweek message published by Horley Baptist Church on YouTube[1], September 2020]
Is it ok for a Christian to break the COVID rules in order to meet as a church? Are we bowing to ‘Caesar’ and allowing our personal religious freedoms to be impinged?
What would Jesus do?
Are you a rule follower or a rule breaker? Now that we’ve got all these extra rules from the governments around COVID – you know the rule of six for example – a lot of people are complaining about the fact that it impinges on their personal freedom. In the States in particular churches are bucking the trend, they’re going against government advice and still seeking to meet in their normal way and it leaves that question “Do we follow the rules or do we break them?”
[00:33] We’re going to talk about what would Jesus do in that situation. Psychologists say that the sort of personality you have says a lot about whether you’re a rule breaker or a rule follower. I mean, if you see a sign that says “keep off the grass” do you ignore it or do you definitely not go on the grass? A lot of it just depends on the type of person that you are. I think Jesus was a bit of a rule breaker but maybe for different reasons to why we break the rules. Jesus lived in a society 2,000 years ago which was full of rules and regulations and a lot of these rules and regulations found their foundation in the Torah, in God’s rule book in the Old Testament. These were rules that God gave to his people, to the nation of Israel in order to create a healthy and a Godly society, a society that God could and would live in the midst of but by the time we get to Jesus’s days these rules have massively grown so that there are hundreds of rules about every aspect of life. It was almost as if they were ring fencing the rules that God gave them just so that they came nowhere near breaking them so you have a society that had rules for absolutely everything.
[02:17] The problem was the way it worked. The people who were the least likely to be able to follow those rules were the poor, the ill, the sick, the disabled, and actually if you couldn’t follow those rules you found that you were ostracized from society; you were looked down on, you were left out, you were kept separate because you were viewed as being unclean. This was endorsed by the Jewish teachers, it was endorsed by particularly by a group called the Pharisees who were the law keepers. They were the strict Jews that followed every letter of the law; every ‘t’ was crossed, every ‘i’ was dotted. They prided themselves in the fact that they followed God’s rules for their life.
[03:15] Then Jesus came along and he reveals something about his way of life in these words from Matthew chapter 11 verses 28 to 30. “Come to me all who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light”. When Jesus was talking about his yoke he was talking about his teachings as a rabbi, as a teacher. He was talking about his rules and his regulations but unlike the rules and regulations of the rest of society, He was saying “I don’t want to put an unnecessary burden on you”.
[04:04] As if to illustrate what Jesus was talking about, Matthew then tells of a story immediately after these verses of when Jesus and his disciples were walking alongside the field and disciples picked some ears of corn and started to eat them and the Pharisees – those law experts – see what’s happening and say “You can’t do that. It’s the Sabbath today!” Sabbath was the holy day, the day when God’s people set aside for God and it’s a day when they weren’t supposed to do any work. They said “you can’t do that, you’re harvesting, you’re working” and Jesus gets into a big discourse and, almost as if to rub it in, he heals a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath. The Pharisees are absolutely livid about this because it was work, you can’t do that on the Sabbath on the holy day.
[05:04] What they’ve done was taken a rule from God about keeping the Sabbath day holy and they had taken the fact that it was supposed to be a time of rest of relaxation, a time of joy and a time of worship and instead they turned it into a burden. Jesus was a rule breaker not because he was trying to protect his own personal individual freedoms. He didn’t do it just to annoy people, he did it because he saw rules that were causing the least and the lost to be left out, to be rejected in society. Instead he wanted to recapture the purpose of the rules in the first place; to create healthy people, to create a healthy society and to create a healthy relationship between people and God, and that’s often a different reason to why we break rules.
[06:20] We break rules for selfish reasons. We break rules because we want to do what we want to do; Jesus broke rules because he wanted people to live as God intended. He saw the problems in society and shone a light on them. So ask yourself, why do you want to break the rules – is it for others or is it just for yourself?
[1] YouTube link: Can I Break the Rules?
Bible references: Matthew ch11 v28-30
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Contributed by Martin Shorey; © the Author
