C.S. Lewis writes "Our faith in Christ wavers not so much when real arguments come against it as when it it looks improbable -- when the whole world takes on that desolate look which really tells us much more about the state of our passions and even our digestion than about reality (Christian Reflections, Religion: Reality or Substitute). Simply put, faith becomes difficult when we are forced into those moments of self-reflection and solitude which cause us to question the foundations upon which our faith is built. It is easy to believe, as T. S. Eliot posits, when we are persecuted. Persecution makes faith easy. But when our faith comes under attack as a result of our own expectations and ideological definitions of who and what God is, then we are shaken to the core of our spiritual identity. We have all been in these situational trials created by our expectation of when, where and how God is to manifest Himself or rescue us from the tribulation at hand. However, God rarely works according to our expectations. In the Gospels, the Pharisees are taught this lesson on a continuous basis. Their constant attempts to entrap Jesus are not foiled by Jesus' ability to legally reason His way out of each difficult situation, but by clear and defined demonstrations of His manifest power over all things. In front of their eyes, He demonstrates His Messiahship.
Why would the Pharisees find Jesus' demonstrations of power and authority so very troubling? I find the answer very simple and yet full meaningful displacement and mystification. The simple answer is this: The Pharisees were upset simply because Jesus highlighted the limitations of their authority and power. They could not heal nor had they the power to undo the physical and spiritual constraints of the law. Jesus' ability to heal the man with the withered hand in Mark 3:1-6 and the posited question, "Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save a life or to kill?" emphasize the fact the Pharisees have the power to do neither save nor kill; do good nor do evil. They only have the power to continue to limit the Divine intention of Sabbath rest. They cannot pass law nor define work in such a way as to inspire men to right action. Their constant defining and redefining lead only to the increasing burden, under which, no one is found righteous. In this way, the Sabbath rest becomes a god which must be appeased through stillness and a lack of spiritual productivity. In the legalistic mind of the Pharisees, man was created for the Sabbath.
In contrast, Jesus demonstrates that neither the Pharisees nor those present have a clear understanding of Divine intent. The imperative at the end of Mark 2, "The Sabbath was created for man, not man for the Sabbath" makes clear the intent of Sabbath rest. God did not created a day of rest to limit spiritual productivity. The simple fact that the day had been so heavily weighted with restrictions removed such possibility. Yet, Sabbath was created for man implying that man has some power over the day. The day is therefore a day for man to be reflective, contemplative, and focus on Him who has made all things by the utterance of His Word. The day is intended for spiritual productivity and how we are spiritually productive is, in some way, left to us to define. In this way, as is intended, Sabbath becomes a freeing day, a small realization of the freedom we might experience through Christ, and not another day of legal bondage.
Now, an attempt at the hard answer; the one which some commentators shy away from simply because it's really no answer at all. (Perhaps this answer is even sinful? Who knows?) So here it goes: within the context of the Roman occupation of Israel and rule of King Herod, the Jew hopefully awaited the coming of a promised Messiah who comes in glory as a king and to rescue and restore them to the promised land under Messianic rule. This preconception or expectation of who the Messiah is to be and be like created an allegory for which the Pharisees patiently waited for. Paul De Man, a Belgian deconstructionist, writes in Rhetoric and Temporality allegory demystifies and creates metonymic enjambments which are clearly meant to signify "this is that." Yet, Jesus does fit into these neat and tidy allegorical categories which the Pharisees so eagerly created to make the identification of the Messiah a logical sight based process. Jesus did not come to meet their expectations. He was not the part which came to represent the whole of their preconceived notions of Messiah. The incarnation did not happen so that the Law and the Prophets might be justified but fulfilled. Jesus came to show the inadequacies of the Mossaic legal system which could not justify men who could meet the expectations of God. He wasn't as simple as they wanted Him to be.
Jesus came more as a symbol. Symbols, unlike allegory according to De Mann, by nature are fragmentary and often decenter or displace their meaning. Symbols become synecdochal representations. These synecdochal representation, unlike allegory, serve only to mystify, fragment and displace what we hope to be easily understood. In this case, who the Messiah is. Yet, the Pharisees are unable to draw the connection between the incarnate Christ who rules the universe as the Messiah simply because they were looking for a man to come in and kick out the Romans. Their allegory only allowed them to accept strict human constructions and ideals of kingship when they needed to be asserting the loose and unstable enjambments of symbol. Instead of fighting telling the Jewish community when "this" comes it will look like "that" they should have concluded when "this" comes we don't know what "that" will look like, but we will know when we see it. For this reason, they killed the "that" they had been waiting for. They killed Him because He did not meet their expectation simply because He did not come as representative equivalent but as a representative part of a whole.
For modern day readers of fundamental belief, there is little question who Jesus is. For others, their expectations of Jesus quickly subverts Who and what He represents. They have created tidy allegorical pictures of the benevolent Shepard carrying the lamb and have missed out on the factual Christ. Like the Pharisees, we cannot limit Christ to what we think He ought to be and manifestations of His power to what we want them to be. Jesus Christ manifests Himself in our live in very real, and relevant ways on a daily basis. We won't always get His love. Sometimes it will be His reproach, correction, or punishment, but this Him none the less. We must be able to couple our faith with reason and sight to see Him at work in every area of our lives; even the areas we don't want Him to work on. We must avoid letting the Pharisee in all of us kill the work of Jesus in our lives before it is finished simply because it is not being done the way we expected.
But, in the end, I'm just sayin' is all.
