From the Heart

Scripture:        Deuteronomy 30:15-20, Psalm 119:1-8

I Corinthians 3:1-9,  Matthew 5:21-37

We are continuing in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.   We started two weeks ago with the gentle but countercultural blessings of the Beatitudes, and last week heard Jesus’ call on his followers to be like salt and light in the world, enhancing that of God in the world and preserving what is good.  Today’s reading gives us some of Jesus’ most difficult teachings, because they go beyond actions to attitudes, from outward behavior to our inner thoughts.

Jesus begins by quoting established law, from the Ten Commandments or elsewhere in Scripture:  Do not kill.  Do not commit adultery.  Divorce requires the giving of a certificate of divorce.  Keep one’s oaths.  Some of these are harder to keep than others, but none are impossible, and most quite easy.   What Jesus recognizes is that each of these situations is the end-point of a downward slippery slope of negative attitudes, which Jesus names.  For example, before one sinks to committing murder, one must slide down a long slippery mental and emotional slope, to the point where hate or greed or some other motive leads one to conclude that another human being, created in God’s image, is unfit to live.   Before one commits adultery, one must be mentally prepared to devalue one’s own partner, if they are partnered, and also devalue the spouse of the person one covets – and, often, look on the desired person as an object to be possessed rather than as a whole person, before these devaluing attitudes result in action.   These same attitudes lead to divorce.  The inclusion of swearing oaths seems like an odd thing to condemn on the same level as murder, adultery, and divorce.  But Jesus recognizes that a request that someone take an oath comes from a place of distrust, that one’s simple “yes” and “no” can’t be trusted, so that the additional words of an oath are required.

What is Jesus doing here?  Many preachers would say – I guess this is my version of Jesus saying “you have heard it said” – many preachers would say that the point of these teachings is to drive us to realize the extent of our sinfulness before God, the extent of our need for grace.  And I agree – in part.  But only in part.  I agree to the extent that if we believe that rule-keeping is the key to righteousness before God, being able to say, “Well, I didn’t kill anyone, didn’t sleep with anyone else’s spouse, didn’t file for divorce, didn’t break my promise” is really a fairly attainable standard.  It’s not that high a bar.  With this fairly attainable standard, we can easily become self-righteous, congratulating ourselves on having checked off all the boxes, and looking down on those whose life journeys have been more complicated.  We may feel that we’ve arrived, that no further spiritual growth is necessary. But Jesus gets to the heart of the matter, and asks us to respond from the heart.   Jesus’ teachings raise the bar, to the point where virtually everyone has fallen short at one time or another.  Jesus’ command not to be angry – heck, I fell short of that while driving to church in traffic this morning.  And so we are all need God’s grace, are all “standing in the need of prayer”, in the words of an old hymn.

To this point, I agree with those who see Jesus’ words as a catalyst to drive us to implore God’s grace.  Many preachers would say, though, that once one has accepted God’s grace, we need no longer take these teachings of Jesus seriously – and that’s where I part company.  While Jesus’ teachings surely hold up a mirror to enable us to see our sinfulness, I also believe they’re meant to be taken seriously on their own terms, meant to be followed, not ignored.   All of these teachings of Jesus point to the importance before God of the quality of our relationships.  Anger, lust, being untrustworthy and undependable – all of these damage relationships.  And while many of the religious leaders of his day were all about rules, it was relationships – our relationship with God, our relationships with one another – that were crucial to Jesus.

One of Paul’s letters may help us understand Jesus’ teaching on anger.  Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, wrote, “Be angry and do not sin, do not let the sun go down on your anger.”   Anger is a natural emotional response to something that threatens or intrudes on us in some way.  Nobody stays in their lane perfectly all the time, so we sometimes bump into one another or even crash into one another on our life’s journeys, and when that happens, we get angry.  For Paul, the sin is in hanging on to the anger, letting it harden into bitterness, letting it damage relationships.  And maybe this is Paul’s way of saying the same thing that Jesus is saying when he says, if you remember that someone has something against you – that there’s some brokenness in relationship – to go to that person and patch it up.  Go now – today – because tomorrow, after bitterness has set in and we’ve thought of a dozen ways to justify our bitterness, it’ll be so much harder.

 Jesus’ teaching on lust seems extreme – and I’m pretty sure Jesus didn’t literally intend for his followers to dismember themselves.  But one thing it does is to put the blame on the lustful person, and not on that person’s object of desire.  We’ve read many accounts of sexual assault, where the victim and not the perpetrator is blamed – “well, if she hadn’t dressed like that”…”well, she should have known better than to hang out in that nightclub, what did she expect?”  But Jesus’ words put the blame where it belongs, on the perpetrator, not the victim, forcing the perpetrator to take ownership of his or her own actions.

Jesus’ teaching on divorce again may seem extreme – a spouse’s adultery is the only reason for which he would allow divorce.  Mark’s gospel doesn’t even allow for that.   I can think of quite a few other reasons – physical, emotional, or sexual abuse among them – for which I would counsel a spouse to run, not walk, away from that relationship.   I don’t think people should be punching bags, and I don’t believe a marriage should be a prison.  But I do believe Jesus’ intent was to value the marital relationship, to encourage spouses to work through their problems rather than giving up on a marriage too quickly.  It’s also true that in Jesus’ day, unlike ours, a man who divorced would probably be fine, but the woman he divorced would wind up destitute, because there were very limited options for women to earn a living.  And so Jesus was trying to protect women from abandonment. 

Jesus spoke against using oaths to bolster the strength of commitments.   Jesus said, “Let your yes be yes, and your no be no”.  Basically he’s saying  to be honest – and also to be reliable….certainly an important word in our culture.  We live in a time when people routinely flake out on commitments.   Or they may show up, but then ghost you 20 minutes later. We all have that one friend or coworker that, when you ask them to do something, will “yes” you to death – “yes, I’ll be there, I’ll do that, you can count on me” - and not follow through.   Don’t be that person.  Jesus wanted his disciples to be dependable.  Let your yes be yes and your no be no.   And saying “no” is perfectly acceptable sometimes.  And here I’m preaching to myself.  Personal boundaries are important…we need to remember where our lives and our responsibilities end and other people’s lives and responsibilities begin. Pastors in the United Church of Christ have to take courses every three years to remind ourselves of that reality.  Lots of people – me included – hate to say no, but sometimes we have to say no to some other commitment to say yes to God’s intent for us.

Bottom line:  Jesus wanted us to value our relationships, and to live in ways that strengthened them.  Jesus wanted our words, our actions, our relationships to reflect God’s love and to be guided by God’s love.  By letting anger, lust, and a lack of commitment intrude, we trivialize our relationships, treat them as disposable.  Jesus wanted us to treat one another as persons created in God’s image, to value one another as carrying some spark of the divine within us – in a word, to love one another as God loves us.

Again, none of us get this right all the time. All of us fall short.  All of us stand in need of God’s grace, stand in need of restoration to fellowship with God and neighbor.  But Jesus’ teaching also gives us a picture of the transformation God intends in response to God’s grace.  Grace is not license to keep sinning, not a license, once we’ve been cleansed, to return to wallow in the mud all over again, but an opportunity to be, in Paul’s words, “transformed by the renewing of our mind.”   We are transformed by God’s great love for us, so that we in turn can share God’s transforming love with others.  We all need that transformation. We all need that renewal.    May we give God space to act in our lives, to transform us into Christ’s likeness, so that we can truly be Christ’s hands and feet in the world. Amen.