"You have heard it said do not murder," Jesus preached.
Yep. Got that. Haven't killed anyone yet. Good for me….
“But I say - do not be angry”….Uh-oh.
“You have heard it said do not commit adultery," Jesus exhorted.
Haven't done that either. I am a faithful sort, so I am totally clean in this regard. Yay, me!…..
"But I say - do not look with lust" …Uh-oh.
Look at these verses, will you! Did you really listen to this third in three weeks excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount that we just read? Murder, anger, lust, adultery, swearing - all lumped together in one scriptural passage!
This is hardly easy material for any pastor or congregation to really delve into on a Sunday morning. Were you expecting to feel so uncomfortable when you walked in the door today?
You might never have been divorced – and maybe you have never experienced lust – and maybe you have never said a swear word – out loud, at least – but surely all of us have experienced anger at one time or another. No, this passage is a very difficult, almost downright scary, one on which to preach – or about which to be preached to.
What is Jesus thinking – laying out these exacting demands which, over the millennia since he spoke them, have formed if not official church policy then surely informal church culture. Are they meant to be taken literally? Are they even really meant to be taken seriously?
There are a couple of notions we must be aware of from the outset as we try to make sense of these verses for our own lives. First, the Gospel writer of Matthew starts with what is known – and that is the Jewish law. You might recall the final verse of Scripture that we read last week. As Jesus finished up talking about salt and light, he said that he had come not to abolish the law but rather to fulfill it.
Though Jesus does not specifically mention the Ten Commandments, he indirectly refers to them and, in doing so, shows the utmost respect for those ten holy phrases. In other words, let’s remember that Jesus’ role was not to replace or belittle or water down the Ten Commandments – the core of Jewish discipline.
Five years ago, when I was called to be pastor of this church and many of you were on the tail end of some pretty destructive theological conflicts, the rumor “out there” was that here at RVCC we did not believe in the Ten Commandments. Now how silly is that?
I like to think that we intuitively understood that living in the footsteps of Jesus involved a moral and ethical code that is not less than the Ten Commandments but significantly more. As Presbyterian pastor Susan Andrews writes, “Jesus is embodying the law, putting flesh on the law, and digging underneath the law in order to find God's deeper values and vision which the law points to….
Then Jesus….makes it concrete, giving…examples of how the (law, the) word becomes flesh in…our everyday lives. And as usual Jesus is neither polite nor politic. He takes on murder, adultery, divorce, lust.” Jesus is not throwing out the Jewish law, but rather he is looking above and below, in and around the ancient words, in order to tease out their deeper meaning about how God wants us to live.
The second thing to be aware of is the historical context in which Jesus spoke these words about anger and lust and divorce. We need to understand a bit about the culture in which Jesus’ listeners lived and to which the Ten Commandments had originally been given.
According to social scientist and theology professor, Bruce Mallina, Jewish society was an “honor-shame” society. It was conflict-driven and centered on a person’s honor, which was to be defended at all costs. Revenge was commonplace and expected.
Individual and family honor could suffer for many reasons - the dissolution of a marriage, adulterous behavior, or even debt leading to loss of land. These discords often led to war-like conflicts.
In fact, Bruce Mallina would say that the historical purpose of the Ten Commandments was to prevent inbred feuding because such community dissension could actually lead to annihilation of that community – not a good thing to have happen to God’s chosen people.
What Jesus offers in these verses from the Sermon on the Mount is a way out of the honor-shame impasses that had long dogged his people – and I would submit to a greater or lesser extent still characterize our world. Jesus suggests a new way of living, one grounded not in retaliation, but rather in reconciliation and restored relationships.
In these highly charged verses, Jesus is speaking to the difficulties of living within a community and to the rigors of maintaining healthy relationships. He does so through the lens of God’s personal code of morality. Without a doubt, it is a radicalized ethic.
As Eugene Petersen writes in his Biblical translation called “The Message,” “Trivialize even the smallest item in God's Law and you will only have trivialized yourself. But take it seriously, show the way for others, and you will find honor in the kingdom.”
Without a doubt, then, these verses surely are meant to be taken seriously. But are they meant to be taken literally? Poking out your eye and cutting off your right hand when you do something wrong seems a bit out of line. Let’s look for a moment at what a couple of these admonitions might have meant to Jesus’ listeners – and what they might mean for us?
First and foremost, Jesus is not in punishment mode. Rather, he is seeking a way to restore relationships. When Jesus uses that common pattern of “You have heard that it was said . . ." contrasted with "But I say to you . . . ." he is focusing our attention, not on the act itself, but instead on the intention behind the act.
In this part of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is grappling with motivation – the reason why someone would commit murder, be adulterous, insist upon divorce or even take oaths. Jesus is focusing our attention on what lies beyond the act itself – and what lies beyond is our relationships and ultimately how we treat one another.
And so, for example, Jesus looks beyond the act of murder to the reason behind it, which, in the end, is anger gone wild - not the occasional burst of ire, but rather the long term brooding outrage that eats away at us like a cancer. Such dark insidious anger is a barrier to restoring relationships. Such fury destroys rather than build ups our bonds with one another.
As UCC pastor, Patricia de Jong reminds us, “Our relationships with each other are crucial elements of our spiritual life. We cannot seek to know and understand God apart from our activity and our actions in human community.” We come to know God and God’s love through knowing and loving one another.
And so Jesus calls us to the radical ethic of reconciliation. He even puts this commitment to healing what is broken before the required temple offerings – and that is huge.
Now, Leigh, our new treasurer, might not be so keen on this – so I will say just imagine not putting your offering in the plate this morning but rather carrying it around with you for this next week, reminding you to consciously seek out peace and reconciliation in your life. Would you be different next Sunday?
Jesus lifts up divorce in the same way, perhaps because it is a most graphic example of a broken relationship. Divorce is a pain-filled acknowledgement that a particular human connection was not as God intended and did not reflect the covenant grounded in love that each one of us has with our Creator.
Divorce is an anguished example of what happens when reconciliation does not work or is not attempted. As Patricia de Jong reminds us, “Jesus is not trying to enhance the pain of divorce, but rather, he is upholding God's intentions for the marriage…covenant, a covenant of love which reflects the covenant between God and God's own people.”
In a way, Jesus shifts our attention from the actions we must avoid to the attitudes we must cultivate within ourselves. And at the root of those attitudes is love, not the Valentine’s Day kind of love that might be born out of in chemistry or mood, but rather the love that goes beyond what seems right according to the letter of the law and enters into the Spirit of what God wants for us, the love that heals and restores others, the love that values others.
When he speaks those difficult verses we read this morning, Jesus is announcing a new ethic. He is challenging us to create human relationships in a cutting edge, state of the art way by striving to express in those relationships the kind of love God has for us – that love which has such patience, such mercy, and such concern for what is best for the other. Jesus sets before us not the prohibitions of the law, but rather the beautiful vision of what is possible – and what will surely be – when we begin to doing our part to usher in God’s kingdom.
by Rev. Nancy Foran
Raymond Village Community Church, Raymond, Maine
www.rvccme.org
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