What are we seeking?

As I wrote my other blog this morning I was dealing with three passages, Ecclesiastes 2.1-15, Matthew 13.44-52 and Galatians 1.1-17.  In the first passage we hear Solomon reflecting on his life, essentially saying to whoever will listen, I had it all, I sought all manner of pleasure, and in the end I found it to be nothing more than a chasing after the wind.  My soul was never satisfied with stuff or relationships or anything else.  There was something missing in having everything, so nothing is worth setting up as ultimate.  In the Gospel passage Jesus tells parables of the kingdom of heaven, likening it to a treasure found in a field that the finder then sells everything they own to buy, or the pearl of great price that elicits the same response.  Finally, Paul writes to a church in Galatia he founded but now another group has come and preached a different Gospel.

Paul says that he was "extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers."  His one desire was to persecute and destroy "the church of God."  He had religion but he lacked relationship.  His efforts were to please God, he was on a jihad against the mission of the church that proclaimed Jesus as Messiah.  Unfortunately we can do the same, we can wage jihad in the name of the church and we can do so in two ways.


In our denomination we have some who, like Paul, are extremely zealous for the traditions of our fathers.  We can become traditionalists.  Jaroslav Pelikan defined the difference between tradition and traditionalism this way, ""Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition."  Traditionalism clings to the past either from superstition, if you change something you will lose the mojo it produces, or from some misguided sense of honoring your ancestors.  Tradition respects what has gone before but seeks to make it intelligible today.  Some traditionalists in our denomination set the traditional liturgy above all else and will dismiss those who do not perform according to the tradition.

The opposite problem is posed by those who will have nothing of the tradition, becoming iconoclasts and losing contact with historic Christianity.  Their mistake is described by GK Chesterton, "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about." 

When he met Jesus, Paul was willing to leave behind those traditions of his fathers and follow Jesus, just like the other disciples.  The traditions of his fathers, however, related primarily to the Pharisaic laws which Jesus frequently violated.  It was those traditions that Paul was zealous for and those traditions which he left behind because he saw Jesus as the pearl of great price.  An encounter with Jesus will reveal that compared with Him, nothing else has value.  Let us hold fast to those things which express His ultimate worth and let go of those things that do not draw us closer and higher but keep our eyes fixed on things "under the sun."