Monday, February 18, 2013

Okay For Me But Not For You

The other day I was reading in Matthew 27, the story of Christ's crucifixion, the Last Supper, etc. and a story in there caught my attention. I've read it many times, but for some reason a piece of it just stuck out at me.

The story goes that Judas was approached by the religious leaders of the day to betray Christ, and to do so he was paid 30 pieces of silver. He is called out at the Last Supper, meets up with Jesus and the gang in the Garden of Gethsemane and kisses Jesus on the cheek telling the soldiers who to arrest. But later he feels some remorse and goes back to the religious leaders wanting to give them the money back.

Now here's where my attention was piqued. The religious leaders say "no", they don't take the money. Judas throws down the money anyway and goes and hangs himself. That I remembered, but it was what the priests did with the money that caught my attention.

The leading priests picked up the coins. "It wouldn’t be right to put this money in the Temple treasury," they said, "since it was payment for murder." (Matthew 27:6, NLT)
Now hold on a minute, it was okay for them to take money from the Treasury and use it to pay for murder, but to take it back on that same murder, unacceptable? Really?!

It got me thinking, do we do that in our faith with people around us? Actions or thoughts that are wrong for them, but okay for us. My favorite one in college was music, I couldn't listen to non-Christian rock because it was bad and ungodly, but the person telling me this could listen to secular country because, well, they liked country.

Maybe if we held ourselves to the standard we hold others, and offer others the benefit of the doubt we offer ourselves we would all get along a lot better.

T

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