“Nothing happens until something moves.”
-Albert Einstein
A newly married man was out buying groceries when his wife called. She said, “Hey honey, can you pick up a ham while you’re at the supermarket?” When he returned home with the ham, his wife asked, “Why didn’t you get the butcher to cut off the end of the ham?” “Why cut the end of the ham off?” He asked. “Because my mom always did it that way,” she replied.
Later in the day the man asked his mother-in-law, who just happened to be visiting, why she always cut off the end of the ham. She said she didn’t know why, just that her mom had always done it that way and taught her to do the same. With all their curiosities piqued, the three of them decided to call the wife’s eighty-six year old grandmother to see if she could solve this mystery. When they asked her why she cut off the end of the ham, the grandmother let out a big laugh and said, “Because my oven was too small to cook it all in one piece!”
Traditions are rarely questioned and hard to break. When I was growing up I thought our church’s mission statement was: “We’ve never done it that way.” Tradition means the handing down of beliefs and customs from generation to generation. And that’s a good thing. Traditionalism is where things get problematic. Traditionalism is the adherence to tradition as authority. In other words, “We always cut off the end of the ham, because everybody knows that cutting off the end of the ham is the only way you can cook a ham.”
Says who?
Jesus came to fulfill the tradition – The Mosaic Law – and uproot traditionalism. The religious leaders said to Jesus, “We’ve never done it that way.” Jesus said, “I know. You’ve been doing it wrong. You started out right, but you’ve opted out of tradition and into traditionalism. You’ve lost the whole meaning of tradition. Your inertia has made you blind and made your hearts impenetrable (see Mk 7:1-23).”
Inertia is a fundamental principle of classical physics. Its name originates from the Latin word, iners, which means to remain idle or sluggish. Inertia is the tendency of any physical object (including us humans!) to do nothing or remain unchanged. It means to resist change. Inertia seeks to preserve the present state, regardless of its benefit or lack thereof.
Jesus challenged the “why” of the religious elites of His day, and He challenges our “why” today – the purpose behind our traditions, or perhaps better stated, the inertia of our traditions, the things we’ve turned into traditionalism. God created us to be anything but sluggish. We were made to be change agents, not change inhibitors. He does not delight in our attempts to maintain the status quo. He made us co-creators with Himself (since God is Creator, and He made us in His own image, we are creators as well.) Idly biding our time is a terrible waste of the natural resources our Lord has entrusted to us.
The law of inertia says resist change. The law of the Spirit says be changed. Romans 8:2 puts it this way: “For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” Jesus fulfilled the tradition while shattering traditionalism, breaking the inertia of the power of sin and death over us.
We must remember that we are not left on our own when it comes to battling inertia. Our role is to take our everyday, ordinary lives – our sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around lives – and place them before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him (Rm 12:1 MSG).
Go ahead, cook the whole ham. You may find that you’ve been cutting off the best part!
Play to win this week in the game that really counts!