Inside, outside

[Jesus said,] ‘Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean’ (Matthew 23:27).

Read Matthew 23:27–39

In the middle of the acreage where I grew up, there was a little white building next to a large red one. Both buildings were used significantly during the summer when our spring chickens would arrive on the postal truck, chirping away at the top of their voices. My father would take us kids out to the white building, where, after unloading the crates of chicks, we would get them settled into their new life.

Throughout the summer, before they moved from their little white house to the large red one, the chicks spent their days scratching through the henyard, digging for insects and worms. Then, when the day was over, they would retreat into the white house for the evening.

In there, they would sleep, yes, but with 350 of them, they would also deposit plenty of … er … you know … fertiliser.

It is for this reason that I, to this day, dislike chickens because it was the kids’ job to get out the shovel and dispose of said fertiliser.

One summer after the chicks had moved, my father said we were going to paint the white house, but he asked us to muck it out first. Unwilling (and unwanting) to shovel any more fertiliser, I painted the outside first. Unfortunately, as the summer sun came up, an overwhelming stench arose from the unmucked chickenhouse, and what would have been an easier job before the painting was now a trial at best. It was one thing to whitewash the outside but another thing to clean out the shed first.

So Jesus puts it to the hypocritical Pharisees and teachers of the law. What good does it do to make the outside nice and shiny if the inside is full of … fertiliser. Woe to our contemporary Western culture and, in some ways, Christian culture, which has made the visible surface seem beautiful but failed to clean up and clean out the rubbish inside. I could enumerate the ways in which our social media culture has influenced (an ironic word, don’t you think?) the organised religions. Instead, I’ll pose the question to you today.

If Jesus were to inspect Christianity, what things do you think he would say were whitewashed tombs? What kinds of things are we called to clean up and clean out so that God’s holy presence can continue to inhabit the body of Christ?

Jesus, speaker of truth, open my eyes to the beauty of a temple cleaned both inside and out. Give me the strength to be part of change. Amen.