Sermons - 6th Sunday After Epiphany (2/16/2020)
Dt. 30:15-20; Ps. 119:1-8; 1 Cor. 3:1-9; Mt. 5:21-37
These are difficult words. If you say to someone, “You fool!” – that’s just as bad as murder? Speaking only for myself, if I drive for more than ten minutes around here, the odds are that I will be calling someone that. Well, to be completely honest, I usually use a slightly different phrase, but we’re in church, so “You fool” is close enough. So am I in trouble? Never mind some of the other things Jesus says in this passage. In fact, since I’m being honest, I really wonder if some of these demands are too extreme. When someone is being abused or harmed, isn’t righteous anger exactly what is needed to stop the wrong? Despite the best of intentions, marriages sometimes end – isn’t acknowledging that and moving on often the best solution for everyone? Can Jesus really mean what he says here?
It’s no wonder that for many people the Sermon on the Mount is written off as too impractical – Jesus couldn’t have possibly meant us to take it literally. Lutherans in particular will thank God we are justified by faith, even though we are sinners, and so it’s OK that we don’t fully live up to every word of the Sermon on the Mount. And that’s not wrong – God loves us even if we don’t live the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount; this is not a test that is so impossibly difficult that we’re bound to fail and suffer the consequences of failure. But then what are we supposed to do with these teachings of Jesus?
One clue comes to us from the first reading today. It’s from the book of Deuteronomy, which is a very long speech given by Moses to the people summarizing the Law, before Moses dies and the people enter the Promised Land. Our reading today is from the conclusion of that speech: Moses says to the whole people, look, you’re about to start your common life together in the land God has given you. I have shown you today the way that leads to life and the way that leads to death. If you, all of you, do what I have told you, then in this land you will build a society that is lifegiving, that is joyful and prosperous and peaceful. If you don’t do these things, if you don’t honor God or respect your neighbors, then you will build a society that leads to death, to unhappiness and grief. But, Moses, says, the choice is yours. I urge you to choose life, it will be much better for everyone that way, it’s what will fulfill God’s purpose in setting you free and bringing you to this land. But God is giving you the choice. It’s up to you which one you choose.
This way of thinking about the Law tells us a couple things. One is that God’s law, whether given by Moses on Mount Sinai or by Jesus on another mountain with his disciples, is intended to be a lifegiving way for us to live together in community with our neighbors. Doing what God asks of us is not supposed to be boring, or to cramp our style, or to keep us from having fun – on the contrary, it is intended to be lifegiving, especially for our common life together with others. So if we are interpreting God’s law in a way that’s not lifegiving, that’s probably a good indication that we’ve done something wrong. Maybe, like Jacob who wrestled with an angel and wouldn’t let go until he received a blessing, we need to wrestle with the law a little longer until it gives us a blessing too.
Another conclusion from the way Moses frames this choice is this. If we don’t follow the law and bad things happen, they happen because we chose them. It’s not so much that God punishes those who don’t keep the law, but that not keeping the law is its own punishment. A community of people that loves something other than the living God with all their hearts, minds, and strength; a community of people who love themselves more than their neighbors – this is a community that will be riven with jealousy and quarrels, where the powerful will take advantage of the weak and where no one can be safe or secure. If a community chooses to make a hell for itself to live in, Moses says, God will allow you that choice. Moses doesn’t say that God will punish us by sending us to hell when we die; Moses says that God will let us live in the hell of our own making in this world, if that’s what we choose.
Of course, Jesus and his disciples lived in a world where human beings have long since chosen the way of death. Some people in Israel, called the Pharisees, tried very hard to get back onto the path that leads to life by making great efforts to study and apply the Law of Moses. But, as Jesus said at the end of last week’s gospel, it’s actually going to take more than that. Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees, Jesus said, you won’t make it to the kingdom of heaven. No, Jesus says, at this point human beings have made our choice – but now God has found another way to bring us life. So, in this week’s passage, I think Jesus is trying to do what Moses did in today’s first reading. He’s trying to flesh out for us just how lifegiving it would be to live in the kingdom of heaven.
So, Jesus says, the kingdom of heaven is not just a place where the commandment “Thou shalt not commit murder” is enforced. In the kingdom of heaven everyone loves and respects their neighbor. In the kingdom of heaven, when someone does something you think is foolish – even if it really is foolish – you don’t point the finger and say “You fool!” You think of them as someone much like you who’s just trying to make it through the day and who sometimes doesn’t have it all together and needs some grace. In the kingdom of heaven, when I disagree with someone, I don’t try to win the argument and prove I’m right and they’re wrong. Instead, we are genuinely curious about each other, about why we have a different view, and we actually listen to each other and try to come to a shared consensus we can both accept.
Jesus goes on to contrast the hell of the world he and his listeners lived in with the life-giving world of the kingdom of heaven. Suppose, Jesus said, we didn’t have to live in a world like first-century Palestine, where the social status of women depended completely on the men in their lives, especially their husbands, and those men were allowed by law to discard them at any time and for any reason? For any woman, even a woman in a happy marriage, just knowing that eventuality was possible and legal and something she had no right to prevent – what a hell of insecurity and dread that must have been! What if, Jesus said, instead of tolerating such a situation, what if we dismantled every social system that puts some people at the mercy of others? Wouldn’t that really be the way of life for everybody?
What if, instead of sympathizing with the powerful and putting all the blame on victims (you know, she shouldn’t have worn that short dress!) – what if we put the burden of responsibility on men to do whatever it takes not to treat other human beings as something to be grabbed, if they’ll let you get away with it? What if everyone treated others as persons with dignity and agency of their own? Especially those who have a position in this world where they could get away with not respecting others, and even benefit from it – what if it was their responsibility to discipline themselves and do whatever it takes to ensure everyone is always treated with respect? Wouldn’t that be lifegiving? Isn’t that the world that we want to live in? Isn’t that the world that God wants for us?
While the Sermon on the Mount is certainly radical, I don’t see it as Jesus giving us an impossibly difficult burden to carry. I see Jesus as speaking to people of his own time and place and the very particular hells that they were very aware of living in, and inviting them not to double down on enforcing the old Law of Moses, but simply to imagine how different the lifegiving kingdom of heaven would be from the world of their everyday experience. Now, the hells of our twenty-first century are not always the same, and we might not imagine the kingdom exactly as Jesus did. What Jesus says about marriage and divorce, especially, seems to me to be very much tied to the specific ways women in his day were deprived of control over their lives – it makes so much sense in that context, but in our time I think Jesus would put things differently. But the world hasn’t changed that much. Overall, Jesus gives us a good starting place for dreaming big and bold – what does the lifegiving kingdom of heaven really look like? What do you think it’s like? What would be at the top of your list of what a truly lifegiving world looks like?
And this is not just an exercise in thinking about impossible utopias. Yes, putting the Sermon on the Mount literally into practice is impossible for just about everybody. But, as Jesus once said, some things are impossible for human beings but not for God; for God all things are possible. And what we dream about when we dream of the kingdom of God tells us something, first of all, about God. Because God is a God of life, not of death – the way of death has no place in the life of God. So the Sermon on the Mount tells us, not just how we wish we could all behave, but how God behaves. No matter what you mess up, God will never point the finger and say: You fool! Never! No, God will do whatever it takes to be reconciled to you. The same with the other parts of today’s gospel reading. God never fails to treat any person with respect. God never throws anyone away. God’s word can always be trusted.
It’s amazing to me how many people think of God the way that a first-century woman must have thought about the first-century patriarchal men in their lives: I’d better do whatever he asks, no matter how unreasonable, because if I don’t he’ll be displeased with me and he’ll throw me away, he’ll throw me into hell. Of course Jesus tells first-century patriarchal men that’s no way to treat women – because acting in that way is so contrary to what God is like! It seems to me that the first thing we really ought to take away from the Sermon on the Mount is that it reveals how God in fact already does treat us. God is truly for us, for our life, for our happiness and our joy and that of our neighbors.
And if we could only trust and believe that God really does treat us the way Jesus describes in the Sermon on the Mount – then, maybe, we whose lives are shaped by that faith can put some of that into practice – however imperfectly, with inevitable limitations and failures – maybe, just maybe, we can experience together just a little bit of the life and peace of the kingdom of heaven. We can’t do it on our own. But we believe in a God who treats us in a way that truly gives life. And who invites us to bear witness to that faith by the way that we treat one another.