Matthew 5:21-37
“Say What?”
February 12, 2023
How’s that for intensity?
On this beautiful morning when we’ve just welcomed 5 new members to join us in being church, we just heard one of Jesus’ toughest speeches.
I can distinctly remember taking a break from church for a bit in my 20s after a priest took it upon himself to get pretty accusatory or at least it felt like he was looking at me when sharing this particular passage.
On the surface, these are pretty dramatic and hard core issues in life and Jesus doesn’t seem to be leaving any wiggle room.
He’s talking about anger and adultery and divorce and keeping your word.
But instead of seeing it as one dire warning after another and start imagining the loopholes that there must be to get around them, maybe Jesus has something else altogether in mind.
What if instead of feeling this is a personal admonishment toward any of those folks in that crowd and any one of us or me, Kathy Clark, personally, let’s hear it within the context of what Jesus is doing here.
He is lifting up the vision and God’s deepest desire for a new community.
A community that lives in the knowledge that they are loved and blessed.
Jesus is setting a path for how we are to love one another.
The idea of sin and having Jesus preach about it with all sorts of judgment attached is enough to make any of us shut down or turn away from religion.
Barbara Brown Taylor offers a powerful insight into why we do need to think about sin but in a different way than how we legalistically think about sin and its relative crime.
What she does with sin is depicting it as our only hope, “because the recognition that something is wrong is the first step toward setting it right again.” (Speaking of Sin, p. 59)
Here Jesus is showing us just how much God cares about us and yearns for us to set it right.
God intends for us to treat each other well.
God wants us to thrive and have dignity and be filled with the mercy and grace and generosity that is God’s own self.
The way we treat each other matters.
A while back, a clergy colleague shared an experience he had when visiting Mexico just before COVID.
While he was in a Mexico City cab, he got into a conversation with the driver about the infamous terrible traffic that the city is known for.
He expected the driver to commiserate with him but instead the man described the weaving, bobbing, and seeming chaos as a carefully choreographed dance.
Drivers in Mexico know when to let others go ahead of them, sharing the road graciously and with no ill will and that seems to help everyone.
He then pointed out to my friend how obsessed we Americans seemed to be with rules and that in the U.S. we drive by the letter of the law while in Mexico they drive by the spirit of the law.
What Jesus is offering here in the Sermon on the Mount is an elaboration on the letter of the law as Moses presented it from God with some heart and interpretation and contextualization – what rabbis did then and still do through what’s known as Midrash.
Jesus here is not changing or expanding or dramatizing the law.
What Jesus is doing is trying to get across the spirit of the law.
It’s not just the outward actions in how we treat each other but the disposition of our hearts behind the actions.
The murder that Jesus speaks of includes the homicidal type but also the lesser murders when we kill the spirit of others with cruelty or inhumane treatment or making fun of or belittling them.
Jesus is calling for what some would call repentance and he depicts as reconciliation.
Is there some person or group of people who we have deprived of our love or their dignity and worth?
Following Jesus’ lead, we know we won’t get it perfect.
We will have to try again tomorrow as well as the next day.
But relationships are worth it because we belong to a God who values relationships.
And what Jesus does here is remind us that God doesn’t give up on us.
God is not content with us staying as we are but rather sees that life is for constantly growing more loving and kind, considerate and merciful.
On this new member welcoming Sunday, we are reminded that church gives us the chance to build relationships that consider others feelings, hopes, beliefs and struggles.
This is the place where we get to practice and fine tune our humanity.
Jesus gives a bunch of examples here of how imperfect humans are but he’s not doing it to show us how terrible we are but rather, like the title of the book by Duke Divinity professor Kate Bowler, “There is no cure for being human.”
We are imperfect – that is a shared characteristic across humanity.
Jesus wants us to find a path toward reconciliation and the first step is to admit that we’ve done something that has hurt our relationship with others.
Once we have admitted it and are honest about it, reconciliation can begin.
The law is not something to be afraid of or avoid.
Following the law is our life’s work and it will definitely be a two steps forward/one step back journey.
Acknowledging this in ourselves hopefully allows us to recognize the work others are doing in also trying to follow the law.
And not just its letter, but its spirit, also.
Let us pray then these words from Presbyterian minister Randy Harris:
Loving God, renew our humanity as we seek to follow in Christ’s way. Stir up within us a desire to tend to our relationships that we may live and share and serve in such a way that we give honor to the bonds of love and fellowship in which our lives are held. May our living be a means of grace and blessing and a witness to the new life you offer us in Christ. Amen.