Epiphany 6A
February 16, 2020
Matthew 5:21-37, Deuteronomy 30
INTRODUCTION
In this third
and final week of hearing from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, we will hear the
most difficult part yet. The Beatitudes we started with were so nice, with all
the blessing they held. Last week we were assured that we already are salt and
light, and God’s blessed and beloved children. Today? Today’s text is sure to
include some trigger for everyone here, and with extreme consequences to go
with it – teachings on anger, and holding grudges, and divorce, and adultery,
and lust, and lying. Anyone here ever experience any of those, maybe once or
twice? Yeah, me too. Get ready to squirm.
But these
teachings, though they seem on the surface to offer all judgment and no hope,
require a deeper look – one that is contextual, and one that keeps in mind that
always and forever, ours is a God of life. In fact, I like to read all these laws
through the lens of Moses’ exhortation in Deuteronomy today: “Choose life!”
A little bit about Moses: after all that
he had done to lead the Israelites through the wilderness for forty years and
to the edge of the Promised Land, God told him he would not get to enter that
land. Bummer, right? He would die and be buried just outside of it. The entire
book of Deuteronomy, then, is Moses’ farewell speech. In it, he reminds them of
who God is, who they are, and of the covenant God has made with them. What
we’ll hear today is the culmination of that speech, including that most
important lens for understanding God’s law: “Choose life, so that you and your
descendants may live.”
Hold that
phrase, “choose life,” as you listen today. What do you hear in these texts that
brings life, or could? What in your life the other six days of the week causes
you to experience life, as opposed to death and despair? Let’s listen.
[READ]
Grace to you and peace from God our
Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Last week, news
broke that an Ohio pastor had plans to sue the NFL. The reason? He believed
that the halftime show had imperiled his immortal soul, and put at risk his
entry into the kingdom of heaven, due, I presume, to the lustful feelings he
had watching what was admittedly pretty evocative dancing. His soul, he
determined, was worth $867 trillion, which is what he was hoping to get in a
settlement.
He must take
very seriously what Jesus says today about lust. “If your right eye causes you
to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your
members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.” Indeed, if we are to
take this literally, this preacher is absolutely right! Unless he’s willing to
cut out his eye, his soul is in immortal danger, and that’s worth at the
very least $867 trillion!
Of course, to
believe that is to discount the power of grace, so it’s rather unfortunate that
this guy is a preacher and doesn’t give grace its due power. Still, it can be
hard not to read texts like today’s from Jesus’ teachings and not feel
incredibly uneasy. Nearly everyone is affected by divorce, for instance, either
in your own family or in that of a close friend. Nearly every one of us has
experienced lust. Every one of us has felt anger, maybe even held a grudge or
found it difficult if not impossible to forgive someone. Every one of us has
misrepresented the truth at some point. And further, we may not have even
thought of those feelings and experiences as bad at the time, or even now – we
may have found them to be needful, or fun, or satisfying. But, if we took all
of what Jesus says here literally, we would have a whole lot of one-eyed,
one-handed people in prison… who would probably still be sinning,
because we are captive to sin and unable to free ourselves no matter how we may
try, and cutting out your eyes and hands won’t change that! And, I really doubt
that this is even what our God of life envisions for us, God’s beloved
creation.
So… if we are not
to take these tough commands literally, do we just toss them out entirely? I
mean, isn’t it a slippery slope to start deciding what commands to follow and which
to take with a grain of salt? Well, yes and no. It’s more complicated than
that. So first, a language note: in his sermon, Jesus utilizes a literary
device known as hyperbole. Just like we might say, “I’m starving to death,”
when really, we’re only an hour past lunchtime, Jesus is using this device to
get his point across more strongly. (Yes, people in first century Palestine,
even the Son of God himself, sometimes exaggerated, too!)
Second, an
interpretive, historical-critical note: the issues Jesus is addressing here
were very serious ones in the first century – like they are today, but in a
very different way from how we experience them. Take divorce, for instance: In
1st century Palestine, a man could divorce a woman for any reason at
all, from unfaithfulness to burning his morning toast. As you can imagine, this
put women in a pretty vulnerable position, socially and financially, because
her main support could drop her at any time. So, Jesus is urging faithfulness
in relationships, faithfulness and devotion to one another. Today, a divorced
woman is not in such a vulnerable position – in fact in some cases, she may be
in a more vulnerable position if she stays in a broken marriage – so
while Jesus’ main point about faithfulness in relationships is still
applicable, because God wants us to take care of one another, the situation to
which he is speaking is quite different. What I’m trying to get across here is
that while we should still take Jesus’ words here seriously, we must also
remember that the particular power structures and social norms he was speaking
to are considerably different from today.
So with all
that in mind: what can we take from this list of laws that seem to paint
God as judgmental and transactional? As I mentioned in my introduction today,
this whole section can and should be read through the lens of Moses’ closing words
of his farewell speech: “Choose life, so that you and your descendants may live.”
That is, Jesus is painting us a picture of what it looks like to live as God’s
blessed and beloved community, a vision of a community that embodies the life
that God so dearly wants for us. He does this in a couple of ways.
First, Jesus
urges some personal accountability for us. I think our tendency is often, when
we make a mistake, to quickly look for anything else we can blame it on. “I
wouldn’t have broken this dish if you had just put it away like I asked!” or,
“I forgot that meeting because I didn’t sleep well last night.” But Jesus does
not say, “If your eye causes you to sin, tell that woman to dress more
modestly, or sue the NFL!” No, he says, “If your eye causes you to sin, turn
off the TV! Take some responsibility. Repent that you just viewed another
beloved child as God as an object there for your pleasure. Treat that person
with dignity, seek reconciliation, ask forgiveness where it is needed, make
some changes where you have to, and do what is required to restore the
relationships God has entrusted to you.”
Woosh, it would be a lot easier to
just cut out the eye, right? All that repenting, and self-reflection, and
asking forgiveness, and reconciling, is hard work. But that’s the other
move that Jesus is making here. He is calling this beloved community to do more
than the bare minimum required of civil society. So yes, it is great that you
are not literally committing homicide. But we all know that it takes more than
that to cultivate a life-giving community. There are many other ways to “kill”
relationships: resentment, rage, spite, and contempt, for instance. Treating
people as less than human, as we talked a bit about last week, attacking their humanity
instead of criticizing their actions. We refuse forgiveness, preferring to hold
grudges indeterminately, because after all, we are in the right here, and they
should definitely make the first move. Any of that sound familiar?
So here Jesus calls us to something
more than the bare minimum:
Jesus is not only calling us not to
kill, but also, to bring about life in our communities: by seeking
reconciliation, and listening to understand and not just to respond, and doing
some self-work to see where we, too, can grow closer to God in our
relationships.
Jesus is not only calling us to not
sleep with each other’s wives, but to honor each other’s human dignity by
refusing in any way to cheapen or objectify other people for our own pleasure,
and encouraging each other in our most intimate relationships, and to
take seriously our responsibility toward living that is faithful, abundant, and
life-giving.
Jesus is not only calling us not to
take oaths, for example to have to swear on something in order to be trusted to
tell the truth. He is saying, “Imagine a society in which telling the truth is
the default assumption, in which people keep their promises and don’t deceive
each other.” Wouldn’t that be nice, if we could actually trust one another,
even trust our leaders, simply to tell us the truth! Not to accept “all politicians
lie” as the default!
You see, Jesus calls us again and
again into more than the bare minimum. He calls us to “choose life” at every
turn, to constantly discern what would uplift this beloved community, what
would cause it to flourish, what would bring about its life. As God’s beloved,
who are saved by God’s own self-giving, we are being beckoned into a life that
reflects the fullness of divine love, grace, mercy, and generosity. Sometimes,
unfortunately, that means ending a relationship that is causing more brokenness
than life, and then grieving that loss accordingly. And sometimes it means
working your behind off to find the life in it – which is no less than God did
to bring about life for us.
We are called
to this way of living because, if we are being honest, that place Jesus calls
hell is all too real – we experience it and create it for each other whenever
we choose self-satisfaction or self-promotion over love of neighbor and
uplifting one another, or when we choose legalism over radical love. Sure, we
may get a quick dopamine hit from that clever insult we flung, or from the
excitement of the possibility of pleasure, or from what we see as righteous
anger. But this is no life compared to what we have in Jesus Christ, who went
to all lengths to bring about for us the possibility of a life that cannot be
overcome by any death or despair.
Christ has
already won that life for us. The question before us is, will we work to live
in it, and bring it about, in our day-to-day lives on earth? Will we align our
priorities, choices, and decisions with the vision of the beloved community
that Jesus describes, and died to bring about?
Let us pray… Gracious
God, you paint a vision of a beloved community that has life and love as its
core and its goal. Let our lives reflect that vision in our relationships with
one another, and with you. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy
Spirit. Amen.
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