blessing and abundance in a stuck-together world
Epiphany 6A | Matthew 5:21-37

Sometimes I walk up here eager to tell you a story. Often it’s reminding you of the grand arc of the Gospel. Sometimes its poetry. Usually, though, I look for a hook. Something to pull you into the story so we can explore a problem and God’s grace.

And sometimes we get a really different story. We get a gospel that jumps from one fire to another and then another and then another. In those moments it seems that direct is best.

So here we are the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5. We’ve heard the blessing of the beatitudes and the universality of God’s grace. Then suddenly we’re tackling commandments.

Do you think God’s not into murder? God’s not into thinking about murder.
Adultery? Same deal.
Divorce? Guess what?
Swearing oaths? You’re not going to like this one!

It is easy to be confused by this hostility. In a sense it comes out of nowhere. And to many well-meaning Christians, this passage is truly outrageous.

So let’s dig deeper.

1) Murder and Anger

Jesus starts out with this pattern that should become familiar to you: “You have heard…but I say to you….” This is a teaching which intentionally juxtaposes two ideas. But it’s not exactly pairing them in the way we think.

Juxtapositions are often used as being an either/or to us. One thing is good so the other must be bad. In a lot of ways we can thank Plato and the Greeks for this bias in our logic. This is not at all how Jesus uses it. He uses it to clarify and intensify.

“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment…”

In other words: The old judgment went to murder. The new judgment is stricter: it goes to anger.

Of course, hearing this, we’re jumping to a different conclusion. Jesus, are you telling me that I can’t even think? How can I control that? Here’s where we hold our horses.

Remember when this law against murder was given to Moses: in Exodus on stone tablets. It was given to limit retaliation and restrain the evil they took for justice. So in a sense, Jesus is saying, Your ancestors needed to be told that it is wrong to kill people. And you’ve got that message down. What you need to hear is stop wanting to hurt people. Because that actually impedes justice.

Jesus isn’t speaking only to our thinking when we’re impulsive. He’s saying that we need to rethink how we think.

2) Offense

Then Jesus starts talking about offense: if you have a beef with someone, drop what you’re doing and reconcile. This one makes a little more sense to us, but it has a couple of wrinkles.

The first is that if you’ve got a beef with someone and you’re on your way to the Temple to get yourself right with God, what you first need to do is get right with your neighbor. In a sense, don’t be coming to church and thinking your relationship with God is totally independent from these people sitting next to you. This is a group deal here.

Remember, the Great Commandment is a twofer–love God and neighbor, both.

The other wrinkle is that this is about you dealing with the part that you can deal with. This lesson is not if someone has a beef with you wait patiently for them to show up because you’re super nice and they are the bad guy. (I’m not the one with the problem.)

You

This is probably also a good time to mention that something really important gets lost in translation. When Jesus says “you” he’s using the plural form. English is terribly individualistic and in a sense, hyper-precise. It doesn’t actually want us to hear Jesus right!

Jesus’s you isn’t just for you. Nor is it for each one of us to think he is speaking to just each one of us. Because what happens when we think like that? Each of us starts to look at each of our neighbors to see if each one is pulling his or her weight. That is not the point.

At least southerners have y’all. They can start to get the difference.

What we assume is Jesus’s message is fundamentally individualistic. And what we miss is the communal character of it. And that is also foundational to these commandments Jesus is deconstructing. These aren’t requirements that help you individually achieve grace. They are boundaries which help us live the kin-dom life together.

David Lose writes:

“As my friend Rolf Jacobson has said, the best-selling Your Best Life Now would be a lot closer to the biblical vision of life if it had been titled instead, Your Neighbor’s Best Life Now.”

3) Divorce

I’m going to skip over adultery because it’s essentially the same deal as anger, right? It isn’t just a matter of whether you as an individual have refrained from doing evil. Or like this–it isn’t enough that we have made war absent, we must make peace present.

So God’s purpose for us isn’t just to refrain from murdering and adultering. For it is their underlying temptations of exploitation, abuse, oppression, bias, racism, that prevent the good from being present.

Jesus makes a slightly different move with divorce.

Remember that the rules around divorce in Jesus’s time were patriarchal and oppressive to women. Husbands can divorce wives, but not vice versa. And worse, men can get out of a divorce and be fine and women are not so lucky.

So instead of dealing with the legality of divorce, Jesus rolls it into that other matter of adultery. So what the people know of divorce is it acts like a kind of a get out of jail free card used by men while pretending it’s all OK. It’s just a little thing. The law says we can, so it must be fine. Besides, God ordained it! Excuses.

But Jesus nails shut this exemption: You don’t get to be excepted from this. We’re in this together, Bucko!

Your life is not just you! What you do affects all of us!

So Jesus doesn’t even talk about divorce in a legal sense. He addresses relationships. That’s the root of it.

4) Swearing

The last part is fascinating because we all know the commandment to not “take the Lord’s name in vain” and the prohibitions on swearing. And we take all of this like it’s about cussing. So we say shucks and darn instead. Even though we all know what we mean.

But this piece is about swearing an oath and putting a holy stamp on it. Like putting your hand on a Bible and saying “I swear to God I am good.” Sometimes we evoke our parents “on my mother’s life…” And what we’re doing is we’re using God or our parents or our children like an adverb.

We take a statement like

That hurricane devastated New Orleans.

And make it

That hurricane really devastated New Orleans.

Which is ridiculous. If we actually mean what we say. Devastated is a pretty solid verb on its own. It doesn’t need that help. Like total annihilation. Thanks for the help, total. I think I’ve got everything destroyed on my own.

When we swear an oath like it is an adverb, what we’re saying is My word is trash on its own. But if I say “believe me,” then I must mean it. I triple-dipple pinky swear.

Don’t use God like an adverb. Just be honest.

The underlying theme of all of this is integrity.

And this is something we struggle with. Not that we lack integrity. But we struggle to honor the integrity of the whole community and our relationship as individuals.

And that makes it hard for us to hear Jesus speak to God’s commandments; clarifying them and expanding them; as anything other than individualistic and legalistic judgment.

But remember that God’s commandments are given as a gift. Like a parent’s instructive and protective boundaries to her children. We are blessed with boundaries, direction, encouragement, and nurture.

The Law is a gift given to make us better. To strengthen our community, and not just keep lawyers in business.

And perhaps most importantly, it draws our attention away from only thinking of ourselves and instead demands we care for our neighbors, too. To treat them as well as we treat ourselves.

Jesus calls us to see the us that is present; the us that could be present tomorrow. The us inside and the us that is among us. An us that is eager and joyful and thoughtful, peeking and seeking, generous and contagious, full of hope and courage.

Like children playing in the yard, dreaming up worlds, roles to play, and even monsters to vanquish. Jedi knights or Paw Patrol, heroic saviors for a community in chaos, or explorers bringing the universe together. We are simply children of God inheriting the kin-dom and all of this is our backyard.