Jesus' sermon strategy

The Lord's dialog with the Pharisees in Matthew 23 is a powerful example of his teaching style.

An outline doesn't work, because Jesus doesn't make one point, then the next, then the next, in didactic fashion, but gradually moves from a logical diagnosis, with a long crescendo of pathos, to a conclusion containing the cure.

At first, he appealed to them as a doctor, naming their infirmity, hypocrisy, and proving that his diagnosis was correct with hard, indisputable logic. Then he gradually moved to more rhetorical language to appeal to their emotion .

Finally at the end, he concludes,

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! See! Your house is left to you desolate; for I say to you, you shall see Me no more till you say, `Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!' "

The cure is to accept Jesus, the cure for their hypocrisy and for the desolation it leads to. The strategy is to present the diagnosis logically, and prescribe the cure with utmost passion.

Jesus spent much time dealing with the Pharisees. He deeply cared about them, and really wanted to win them, but was not successful in the main. He scattered the seed in love. His strategy was love for those who he preached to.

To love people is easy for some, but not for me. I'm tempted to pray that God may stop giving us mercy, and rather give America what we deserve, justice, discipline, harsh adversity. Jesus didn't ask for such dreadful things to come upon Israel, but he most assuredly prophesied them. He also did not ask that these things would not happen. He never says, "Prosper Israel forever." or "God bless my country". Why not? God HAD blessed them. HE was right there with them, and they were rejecting Him. What blessing could he give them beside the one they were trampling?

As it was, so is it still, now with America and the Western world. We are becoming so secular, having no thought of God in our public life at all, and thus, no fear of God, that it is hard to pray or expect that God can bless America. Let those who fear God preach as Jesus preached, touching the problem directly and logically, and proclaiming the gospel cure with pathos and all the rhetorical powers we may muster.