Deuteronomy 30:15-20, Psalm 119:1-8, 1 Corinthians 3:1-9, Matthew 5:21-37
Dear Lord Jesus, you’re making it hard. We want to hear you, we want to follow you, but when you say things like this you make it hard. We like so much else that you say in the Sermon on the Mount, and then you say things like this. It’s good we got this lesson on the Sunday of school break.
Lord Jesus, I thought I understood you last week, in the Gospel lesson, with the verses right before this morning’s lesson, when you said that unless our righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees we’ll never enter the Kingdom of Heaven, I figured you meant a different kind of righteousness, a kind not measured by rules and regulations, but today you make it even stricter and more rigorous than the scribes and Pharisees. At least their regulations made some allowances.
Lord Jesus, I don’t want to go back to those days of the church making divorced and remarried people feel guilty and excluded. I know this was the practice of the church for most of history, and it still is for Roman Catholics, but I don’t want to go back there as a pastor. Yes, I want to be faithful as a preacher, but you make it hard when you say things like this.
I could appeal to the context and say that marriage was different back then. It wasn’t about vows between two lovers, but an exchange of property, of whom the bride belonged to and the goods and the kids. It was a contract between two men, the father and the groom, in which the woman had no say. And I could point out that when a woman with no say ends up committing adultery you make it totally the man’s fault, not the woman’s. But that also negates the woman’s agency, which is not so good, and then in other places in the gospels you do implicate the woman as well.
You make it hard when you say that if I call someone a fool, I’m in for hell. I could say that you didn’t actually say “hell,” and the translation is wrong, and what you really said was “gehenna,” which does not mean eternal punishment. It’s the garbage dump of Jerusalem, in which a dead body would get consumed by the constant fire, so this is your metaphor for a very shameful death. I’m sure that when you say to cut off my right hand or cut out my right eye and throw it in the dump, it is an exaggerated metaphor. But still, just being angry with my brother is morally tantamount to murder?
You make it hard with what you say about committing adultery in my heart. I remember how much trouble President Jimmy Carter got in from that interview in Playboy Magazine when he confessed to having committed adultery in his heart. Should I feel guilty about my feelings of sexual attraction? I could say that comparing Presidents reveals the value in what you say here, Lord Jesus, that once we give free rein to these feelings we end up with a self-admitted, boasting sexual predator in the White House.
And I could point out that once again the Lord Jesus blames the male, and not the woman. It’s not about how the woman dresses but how the man eyes her, which in terms of women’s rights is very advanced, but still, even when we keep our sexual feelings tight inside, should we feel guilty when we have them? Are we then all adulterers? Lord Jesus, you make it very hard. Can I believe you when you call this Good News, and that you don’t intend to impose on us some new legalism?
I get what the scribes and Pharisees were doing with their legalistic righteousness. They were trying to keep the people pure, and maintain a moral fence between them and the dominant Roman culture of casual exploitation and big money and violence, in which the powerful could manipulate the laws for their own interests and their friends, and take whatever sex they wanted, and Caesar could practice adultery and corruption with impunity. We have this today, so I can understand the scribes and Pharisees.
But their system of righteousness could achieve no more than social control, and only deal with external actions, and it therefor consisted of regulations and exemptions. It was righteousness as social management, to keep holding on, until the Kingdom of Heaven might someday return.
But you told them, Lord Jesus, that the Kingdom of Heaven is already among us when you are with us. So you must mean that your difficult message is for our salvation, for our comfort and our liberation. Obedience, yes, holiness, yes, devotion and challenge, yes, a higher standard of ethics and bearing our crosses and self-examination, yes, yes, yes, but also for comfort. You mean this to save us, to help us. And in the middle of your Kingdom you offer us yourself.
So, then, Lord Jesus, I imagine myself standing before you, and as you look at me, slowly I look back at myself. I lower my head, I close my eyes, I touch my chest, I breathe. Yes, Yes, and No, No. Yes, and No. Why isn’t that always enough? Why do I feel the need to make an oath? What is my general nervousness or my fear inside that requires me to say more than just a simple Yes or No? Why do I have to amplify my words to make myself believable, and why do I need to electrify my speech to make me impressive? Is this just a matter of rhetoric, or style, or class, or even maturity, or is it more ethical than that, a matter of holiness, that I don’t have to amplify my speech?
Why am I sexually restless? What does my eye keep looking for? What from myself am I projecting? What do I crave that I imagine someone else will satisfy? What is empty in me and continually unsatisfied? Is it also from an inner emptiness that I insult other people? What do I get out of putting other people down, of making them feel bad, of making sure other people know they’re wrong?
I do like social control. I do like laws and regulations. I don’t like people parking in the bike lane or making u-turns in the street, which is when I call them jerks. I like not to split infinitives. I like to be right and I like my people to get things right. But I know that getting things right is not what you mean by righteousness, Lord Jesus.
One of the hardest things you say here is that when I’m offering my gift at the altar, and I might remember that someone I’m close to has something against me, you want me to put my gift down, and go be reconciled to that person, and then come back and offer my gift. That’s hard. It’s always on me? Shouldn’t they be responsible to come to me? This is an invitation to all kinds of projection. My therapist would not agree with you. I’m going to be running around the country trying to make up to people and never get back to church. What are you asking of me, O Lord?
One of our elders pointed to this verse at our meeting on Tuesday night and saw Good News in it. I forget exactly how he said it, but my take on it is that it’s about the same projecting energy, but channeled in love to your neighbor instead of anger or insult or lust or adultery. You desire that person, but your desire is not to put that person beneath you socially or physically but above you. So maybe this is another way of illustrating how you love your neighbor as yourself.
Lord Jesus, is that what you mean by all this, that you are giving illustrations of what it looks like and extreme examples of what it feels like for me to love my neighbor as myself? Is the law of love such a challenging law that I need to hear you lay it out like this? Is this loving kind of righteousness so contradictory to my flesh that it feels like chemotherapy? Like plucking out my eye? Is this the kind of love I have to end my sermon on this week? How hard is love? Why is love so hard?
Lord Jesus, if your Kingdom has come then you are my judge. I get that. You judge me by waiting on me to judge myself. You examine me by my use of your words by which I examine myself. You call me to truth in my heart and you wait for me to explore that truth. When I protest with my allowances and plead my exemptions, you wait for me to be done with them.
Lord Jesus, I can feel this as your strange strategy for my freedom, mostly from myself. I can sense this as your method for my choosing life, life for myself and life for the world. I can feel this as your alarming way of converting me in how I love myself, that I can say No to myself and also Yes to myself, and love myself in such a way that I can also say Yes to my neighbor and love my neighbor as you love me. Lord Jesus, I want to believe that this is all about your love.
Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
1 comment:
wow!!!
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