The Pharisees, as I never grow tired of saying, are not the bad guys. They are us guys! They are the ones who have decided that the way to winning God's approval is by following the laws. 612 of them to be exact. They range from the obvious ones about killing and stealing to the more obscure...how far you can walk on the Sabbath or how far your glass of milk must be kept from your piece of meat. And before you laugh consider the same strangeness from a slightly different perspective. How many of us have been told that unless a baby is washed in a particular kind of water he or she will spend eternity apart from God? How many of us have been told somewhere along the line that if you waver from believing exactly as our ancient ancestors believed the same fate awaits you?

The problem with the Pharisees is the same problem with all of us.

We have forgotten the real reasons why we do any of this in the first place. Someone once said that the Bible is a really great love story. It is the tale of God's love being rejected over and over and over again and still God continues to love. No matter how many times or how many ways we find to reject grace, grace still comes. The problem is we don't believe the Bible. We think the Bible is about rules and regulations, about what you must believe and what you must not. No, the Bible is about God's unconditional love being offered over and over and over again.

Forgive me for repeating myself but we just don't believe in grace.

Oh, we sing about it and talk about it and preach about it but we don't believe in it. We believe that grace only comes if you deserve it. If you follow the rules or believe the right things, then grace will be yours. But that's not grace that's just a payment for services rendered. Someone told me recently that they believed in God more or less to hedge their bets. That is, if there really is a God then it would pay to believe in him and if there isn't then nothing's really lost. Such reasoning may make rational sense but it has nothing to do with our God. Ours is a God of grace who bestows that blessing whether you believe or not, follow the rules or not, hedge your bets or not.