Jesus has always been a threatening figure to all the defenders and keepers of traditions and institutions because he is both inside and outside their staid structures. Without rejecting them, he transcends, that is, moves beyond the low horizon necessitated by organizational thinking.
Jesus is not simply holding an opposite position of these proponents of the what has been the organized norm. Instead, he is emphasizing what those who think structurally and institutionally cannot imagine because of their commitments to the status quo.
Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. Matthew 5:17
For instance, when Jesus urges us to love our neighbors, to equate love of neighbor as indistinguishable from the love of God, and says that this is the sum meaning and purpose of all the law and the prophets (Matthew 22:37-40), he is both within the institutional framework of the law and prophets and transcending it at the same time. He hasn’t come to destroy either institution, but to fulfill them.
One way of thinking about the meaning of “fulfill” is that he meant that he would complete some inherent goal while operating only in the ways consistent with, and reflective of, those historic institutions. Instead, what Jesus had in mind is like what we see from the writer of Hebrews who describes everything in the law of Moses as a mere shadow, the fulfillment of which is not in terms of the shadow, but as a reality substantively and actually beyond what was hinted at in the shadow. Think of an oak tree as the fulfillment of an acorn.
When our emphasis is on a traditional understanding of the love of neighbor based on previous historical precedents, we will inevitably limit and attempt to “box in” the wild vibrancy and potential of divine love. Jesus pushed love of neighbor into new non-traditional territory where enemies are neighbors.
This is the really hard part when we come to our actual practice: Jesus cannot be understood as simply being against the historical and traditional institutions and structures. He is not an iconoclast, but rather one who opens a way to supersede the either/or and zero sum calculations evident in when he was asked questions such as “why do your disciples not fast?” Fasting is a tradition, an institution, and Jesus is frustratingly hard to pin down by institutionalists. He is not opposed to fasting, but he directs the practice in new ways to an intended expression, which is both old and new.
Traditions should be somewhat provisional because they exist to equip us to transcend them in expressions which are true to their inspiration, but exceed their limitations. Organization and tradition, institution and structure, should be like a womb which has only fulfilled its purpose when we leave it.
The problem is not institutions per se, but that too many view them as indispensable and what constrains us, and within which we find our ultimate pursuit. Of course, our ultimate concern is the infinite God, who cannot be found in temples built with human hands, and instead chooses to dwell in mystery in the temple of the human heart built by God himself.
Every structure, tradition, or institution, should have the purpose of emancipating us from our limited beginner’s mind, and sending us out into the expanse of the boundlessness of God’s own life of love. Then the law and the prophets are fulfilled.
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