All I know is, if I don't care about the poor, if my church doesn't care about the poor, that's evil.

The targets of this story are not wayward sinners but religious people who do everything the Bible requires. Jesus is pleading not so much with immoral outsiders as with moral insiders. H wants to show them their blindness, narrowness, and self righteousness, and how these things are destroying both their own souls and the lives of the people around them.

Anything can serve as a counterfeit god, especially the very best things in life.

To say doctrine doesn't matter, only how you live matters, is itself a doctrine. It's the doctrine of salvation by works.

The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me.

While Christianity was able to agree with pagan writers that inordinate attachment to earthly goods can lead to unnecessary pain and grief, it also taught that the answer to this was not to love things less but to love God more than anything else. Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace. Grief was not to be eliminated but seasoned and buoyed up with love and hope.

Tolerance isn't about not having beliefs. It's about how your beliefs lead you to treat people who disagree with you.