ReclaimJesus.net

Last time we determined that the original Yahoo is someone who is rude, unsophisticated, and uncouth. Somebody who might yell out “YAHOO!” or ‘EEEHAAA!” (see Blog 1 in this series) in the excitement of celebrating good news. Somebody who didn’t “know any better.”

And Jesus certainly didn’t know any better. He certainly didn’t know how to behave like the spiritual leaders of his day. He didn’t know how to think like them, act like them, be like them. Beginning at Matthew 23:13, Jesus speaks to the religious leaders of his day as follows:

“Woe to you, scribe and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the Kingdom of God . . . . Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hupocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves . . .” Translation: You’ve got all your silly rituals and procedures and rules for living that make your worship of God more like a straightjacket than like the freeing, uplifting experience that it is meant to be.

Jesus goes on, “ Woe to you, blind guides, who say, “Whoever swears by the sanctuary is bound by nothing, but whoever swears by the gold of the sanctuary is bound by the oath. You fools! For which is greater? The gold or the sanctuary that has made the gold sacred?” Translation: You’re so caught up in preserving the material assets of your fancy temples, hoarding as much gold as you possible can for as long as you can, no matter what the consequences. Even if it means selling yourselves out for what your temples stand for, forgetting all about why you are there in the first place – forgetting all about truth and justice, honor and integrity, fairness and righteousness. All that gets set aside in honor of the all-mighty buck!

But Jesus doesn’t stop there: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and indulgence. You blind, Pharisees! First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean.”

And he concludes, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. “

Geez, Jesus, don’t hold back. Tell us what’s bothering you, you yahoo.

And when it came to dealing with the governmental authorities of his day, Jesus was every bit as much of a yahoo. Remember his famous, “Render under Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s”? And what about his response when asked, under threat of being crucified as a traitor, “Are you “the King of the Jews?” “If you say I am,” he responded with yahoo like indifference to the consequences.

To this day Jesus remains a yahoo. In the finest sense of the term, that is. A yahoo as in one who rejects the status quo when the status quo is stacked in favor of the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and oppressed. Jesus is a yahoo, in the finest sense of the term, when he is willing to stand up and speak out against perceived injustice, to give voice to those who have no voice, to challenge the powers-that-be, whether they be the religious leaders, political leaders, or both.

But there’s more. Next time.

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