WHAT JESUS THOUGHT OF RELIGION

by Adam Harbinson

When I was a lad I wanted to be a missionary. In those long ago days, now lost in the mists of time, missionaries were real men, explorers; none of this poncy GAP year business where your home congregation coughs up the readies, and off you trot to Outer Mongolia for an Oriental tan, or to Brazil for the Latin look. No, when these guys disappeared up the Yangtze or the Amazon, often they were never seen or heard from again.

Sometimes the only evidence that they’d been wherever they were would emerge a hundred years later when descendants of their converts would come from there to evangelise us. And I’m not kidding, there’s an explosive growth of New Churches in the UK, at least 70% of which have been established by people of African or Caribbean origin.

Anyway, I changed my mind about being a missionary. When I was in my late teens I looked around one day and saw the religion I had wanted to share with folk in what used to be called the Third World. It was a self-righteous and hypocritical religion – and those dear people had trouble enough of their own. And then I began to ask myself; if I don’t want them to have this religion, do I want it?  

Just about this time a friend of my dad’s, a loyal and committed member of a little assembly in South Armagh, got into financial difficulties. Eventually he was declared bankrupt, and his saintly brothers, ever so gently, kicked him out of their holy huddle – something to do with a Scripture that says; ‘Owe no man anything’.

I never could understand that, partly because many of them had mortgages or bank overdrafts – a tad inconsistent – but more importantly because none of them seemed to have bothered to read the rest of the verse; ‘Owe no man anything, except a debt of love’. And love was a bit thin on the ground, just a boot in the face for a suffering brother.

Then another friend of the family, a seventeen year-old girl, got pregnant. Her parents were nice, decent, God-fearing people – and that sort of thing doesn’t happen to daughters of nice, decent, God-fearing people. So the young lady disappeared for a while, and when she returned she wasn’t pregnant anymore. They had sacrificed an innocent, unborn child to their god of respectability. And that was the straw that broke my camel’s back. If that’s Christianity, thought, I want no part of it. So I dumped it. And I have no regrets.

But where was Jesus in all this? Well, I believed he was appalled by it, and that was my breakthrough. It wasn’t the Roman authorities that called for Jesus to be crucified, nor was it an unruly criminal element in the Roman army that had him murdered. No, it was religious leaders, those whom he called ‘whitened sepulchres’, ‘brood of snakes’, ‘sons of hell.’ Why did they want rid of him? He was an untidy, unpredictable trouble-maker who just would not conform, whose teaching undermined their lofty position that was based on a system of rules. They made the common people feel dirty, Jesus spoke the truth and set them free. A thin veneer of self-righteousness covered the corruption in their seedy lives, and they hated Jesus because he saw through the façade.  

Most people never break free from their religious straight jacket, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, they fail to see that Jesus did not come to build a religion or a denomination. He came to build a family based on the principles of his kingdom; love, mercy, forgiveness and grace. And secondly because they believe the lie that the whole religious system unites to tell you; 'You have to be like us to be accepted by God.'

But Jesus wasn’t religious and he’s the one we should resemble. I honestly believe that there are many people who are Christians but they don’t know it because they think they have to be religious. You don't!

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