Valentine’s
Day: Maybe you bought a cute or funny
card or incredibly romantic one for the person you love – be it spouse,
partner, parent, or child. Maybe you
arranged to have flowers – a dozen red roses or a springtime bouquet - delivered. Perhaps you celebrated the role of love in
your life by going out for a candlelight dinner or by feasting on a special meal
at home. If you were really lucky, the
one you love gave you delicious chocolate truffles – that is what Joe did.
But
that was Valentine’s Day. That was
Friday. This is Sunday, and today we are
sitting here in church about to reflect on anger, adultery, divorce, and the
swearing of oaths. It hardly seems like
an appropriate follow up to the Day of Love.
Oh,
that Jesus! What was he thinking as we
move ever more deeply into the Sermon on the Mount? He said in the passage we read just last week
that he had not come to do away with the Jewish laws handed down by Moses, but
rather to fulfill them – whatever that means.
Beef them up a bit perhaps? Make
us inwardly squirm?
After
all, as we read this passage, it seems that he has become awfully
nitpicky. You see, Jesus covers in just
a few verses a wide range of topics that are predestined to make us feel really
uncomfortable: murder, anger, adultery, lust, divorce, swearing.
Though
some people have thought that, in this passage, he is contradicting the Jewish
laws, how could that be so? After all, Jesus
was a good Jew himself, and we have no evidence that he had any intention of
being otherwise.
However,
certainly what Jesus is saying is going to really rile up the temple
Pharisees. After all, he takes a bunch
of straightforward and clear rules and challenges anyone who was listening
(maybe even us?) to recalibrate those moral compasses.
What
is Jesus trying to do here? Is he attempting to “out-Pharisee” the Pharisees by
showing us that we can never uphold all of the law’s demands? After all, it was that group of religious
elites who interpreted these rules and regulations in the first place with all
their tedious and hairsplitting requirements.
Or is he telling us that we should be taking these laws far more
seriously than we ever imagined we would have to?
Listen
to what he is saying as he goes into his singsong “You have heard it said”
countered with “But I say to you,” a cadence he uses for just about every
single one of these topics. You have heard it said – don’t murder. But I say to you – don’t even get angry. You have heard it said – don’t commit adultery. But I say to you – don’t even look at another
man’s wife and fantasize what might be.
And
that is only some of it! There are his
words about oaths – let your yes simply be yes and your no be no. And, of course, he really stirs the pot in
our times when he speaks about divorce.
And it is these words about that topic that, down through the centuries,
have perhaps inflicted more pain and heaped up more guilt and burdened women
and men alike with a greater sense of alienation than just about any other
verses in the Bible. What are we to make
of this Jesus who speaks to us this morning?
Methodist
pastor William Willimon tells the story of a woman who came to a church he
served. One day in a small group, people were telling their own stories of
Jesus – testimonies in a way, I guess. One man said he was feeling confused
about his life, but Jesus had helped him work things out. A woman said she felt
Jesus near her when she sang in the choir.
Then
another woman started talking. She said, “Look, I don’t know what kind of Jesus
you all met, but my life was going along just fine before he showed up. I
wasn’t looking for anything.
And
now, now I’ve lost control of my whole life. I’ve been to Haiti twice to do
mission work. I never wanted to go to Haiti. I think all the time about how I’m
spending my time and my money. Before you go telling people they should be
getting close to Jesus, you should warn them. He’ll mess things up.”
And
yes, the woman is right. If we take it
seriously, the Gospel message of Jesus will mess us up because Jesus is
perfectly capable of turning our world and our lives upside down and inside out
– but not in the way we might think – not by burdening us with the specter of
microscopic legal infractions of laws we do not understand in the first place,
but rather by freeing us to catch a glimpse of God’s dream and passion for the
world.
In
these troubling verses we just read, what if Jesus is inviting us to see the
Jewish law as a doorway through which we might step to experience the Kingdom
of God? Episcopal priest Roy Almquist puts it this way: “I would challenge you to think
about the law of God not in terms of doing a certain number of impossible
things before breakfast, but in terms of being in the right relationship … with
God and with those around us. It is not about your need to do the right thing,
color within the lines, keep your nose clean; no, it is about loving your
neighbor, controlling your anger, modifying your drives for personal
fulfillment, all to the end that you might be an instrument for deepening and
strengthening the community in which you live.”
Jesus
is asking us to take a good look at what is going on in our hearts. He is making the point that our “heartsong”
is what is important. You see, it is in
our hearts that the bonds between us and the rest of humanity as well as the
bonds between the Holy One and us are forged.
What if this passage then is less about legalism and more about
relationships, relationships that lie at the very foundation of community?
As
Episcopal priest David Sellery wrote, “Jesus is quick to tell us that he has
not come to contradict the law. Rather he is here to give us a fresh
perspective on God’s law... Instead of governing our lives by constant
reference to an encyclopedic canon of regulations, he would have us look for
God’s love in all things…In Christ, our focus shifts from the dos
and don’ts, to actively witnessing his love, looking not only to the letter of
the law, but to the spirit of the Lord. What would he do? What would he have us
do?”
This
passage is about strengthening our relationship with God and with one another.
As he deals with these tough topics, Jesus is reminding us that we do not live
in isolation from each other. There is
always a neighbor. There is always a
“you” at the end of our thoughts. There
is always a “you” in our sphere of vision.
There is always a “you” at the conclusion of every action we take.
And
so, as Presbyterian pastor Mary Harris Todd reminds us, “The way we look at
others truly matters, for behavior starts in the heart, in the way we regard
the other person. It’s not enough to refrain from murder. Regarding
others with contempt, scorning them, nursing anger against them, speaking of
them using insulting terminology (we even call it ‘stabbing someone in the
back’) is deadly serious in Jesus’ view…That is a “you,” a human being, a
person, a neighbor you are speaking about.”
What’s
more, it’s not enough not to technically commit adultery. That woman
whose body you want to possess, that is a “you,” a human being, a person, a
neighbor.”
And,
of course, Jesus also talks about divorce, and that has been such a stickler
for so many of us: that somehow we are a flawed and failed human being if our
marriage, flawed as it might have been, has failed. So let’s take just a moment to better
understand what Jesus had in mind when he spoke these verses about
divorce.
In
the patriarchal society in which Jesus lived, men had the upper hand, and it
was exemplified perhaps best when it came to divorce. As Mary Harris Todd explains, “If you think
divorce is easy now, then it was a piece of cake, for men, anyway. For
just about any reason men could draw up a statement of divorce, sign it in the
presence of witnesses, and that was it. The ex-wife is out on the
street. Women, being considered property, had no possibility of
divorce. Too bad if your husband beats you. You’re stuck.
‘No!’ declared Jesus, ‘Women and wives are not objects!’” You cannot put your wife out with the trash.
I
believe that, in the end, this passage is pointed at people who grow tired of
being married, their lives too constrained with those little rug rats running
around, who never (if they had given it an iota of serious thought) really
intended to make the relationship work in the tough times.
This passage is pointed at the deadbeats,
the self-involved, the lazy, the ones who do not want to try, the ones who when
push came to shove really were not looking for a relationship that would last for
as long as we both shall live. Is
divorce wrong? Jesus does not say that,
but I think he does say that marriage is a very important matter of the heart.
It
is all about relationships, about how you interact with the other. It is all about your “heartsong.” One of the great dangers in being a
Christian, you know, can be the inclination to get so caught up in keeping the
letter of the law in order to keep your own nose clean in the apparent sight of
God that you forget about your neighbor, the one you are called to serve. And when you do, you do not hear your
“heartsong.”
Jesus’
teaching in these difficult verses is direct, to the point, and very, very
challenging. He calls us to reflect on
our own lives, on our attitudes and value system, on what is going on in our
own hearts. And that is not easy. Self-examination seldom is. So what do we do with these hard words of
Jesus? Give up because we can never
attain such an ideal?
No
– rather than give up, let’s embrace these opportunities to glimpse the world
as God dreams it can be, and let’s walk through the doorway of the Law. Because if we do, there we will find that
Jesus himself beckons us as he reorders the world and challenges us to break
open our hearts and listen to our heartsong,
And
in the notes of that song, he assures us, we will find a new way of living, a
kingdom so to speak, and a God who loves us, who has promised to embrace us and
heal us even as we reach out to embrace and to heal those around us.
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church (U.C.C.)
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