Contrary to popular belief, the death and resurrection of Jesus didn’t usher in a new religion. Rather, it marked the end of religiosity.
Religiosity, or the religious impulse, is based on if/then logic… IF you follow the rules, THEN God will favor you.
Jesus was not, in popular opinion, following the rules. He ate with, laughed with, befriended, and forgave sinners for Christ's sake!
But this, right here, is the scandalous good news of the gospel. And it’s why Jesus got hung up on a cross in the middle of the town square…
On that cross, Jesus didn’t change his tone. He doubled down. He proclaimed that even our violence against him, the Son of God himself, doesn’t change God’s mind about us.
God has eternally favored the entire world.
From the get-go.
God does not count our trespasses against us. This is the changeless promise of the gospel that echoes throughout time and space.
Which is fine for most of us when it comes to the one looking back at us in the mirror. But when that grace is extended to even them (yes, them!), things get hairy, indeed.
Faith, in this case, is not something you have to “do” in order to “get in.”
Faith is when the undeserved one-way gift of God’s love unexpectedly slams into us.
When it comes to religiosity - to the impulse that asks what we must do to be whole/right with God, Jesus says one simple phrase.
It is finished.
The only religion we have in Christianity is a weekly party to mark the end of religiosity. It cancels out the religious impulse because it gives us nothing else to do. We are invited to come together in the light of the joy that comes from people who really know that they’ve been undeservedly reconciled with God, the ground of their very being.
So now what? Well, now we have a reversal. Where we once went to church to sacrifice to the gods, we now go to receive God’s sacrifice for us. Where we once went to recite the things that were supposed to bring us into favor with God, we proclaim that there is nothing we can do to lose God’s favor.
And in that light, we can own up to the ways we fall short in loving service to our neighbor. When our ego ideals let us down - and they always will - we can humbly cast them away as false idols. And we can rejoice that it is God’s unflinching eternal forgiveness that puts us back together again and turns us outward in love towards our neighbors.
Christianity: A religion that ends religiosity