A Good Confession

Transcript of the segment on How God Hates Religion:

Their religious scruples did not allow them to go into Gentile territory. The Gentiles were ‘dogs’. Pilate’s palace was Gentile territory. They couldn’t go there in a religious festival. They couldn’t participate in their own religious feast of the Passover, one of the high holy days. So they kept outside, while delivering Jesus into the hands of a Gentile to be examined and to be tried. You know, a little aside here, it’s the feature of bigots and legalists to this day, that they cannot see the ‘wood’ [forest] for the trees. So here were people who paid absolutely no attention to the minute details of their own law in processing this man’s trial, who were absolutely concerned about this detail, about their own religious ceremonial performance. They were prepared to negotiate with the rules, but in such a way as to preserve their own kudos in the community. This is why God sometimes hates religion. Sometimes God hates our religion when he sees our religion as a meticulous observance of details that don’t matter, to the exclusion of a heart that is renewed by the Holy Spirit and engaged with the worship of God. And we need to pause for a moment, I think, as we look at this: that it is very easy for humanity, for us even, to take a good thing – pure religion -- and turn it into an occasion of power or bullying, to use it for our own advantage rather than to use it for the glory of God. It’s the easiest thing in the world.
“He [the Son of God] is allowing himself to be ceremonially defiled at the Passover; he will allow himself to be placed upon the cross and thus becomes a curse so that he might be the Passover Lamb,