Sixth Sunday After Epiph…

Sixth Sunday After Epiphany | Sermon on Matthew 5:21-37, by Luke Bouman |

Matthew 5:21 „You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‚You shall not murder‘; and ‚whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.‘ 22 But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‚You fool,‘ you will be liable to the hell of fire. 23 So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, 24 leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. 25 Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. 26 Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny. 27 „You have heard that it was said, ‚You shall not commit adultery.‘ 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell. 31 „It was also said, ‚Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.‘ 32 But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. 33 „Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‚You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.‘ 34 But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, 35 or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. 36 And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. 37 Let your word be ‚Yes, Yes‘ or ‚No, No‘; anything more than this comes from the evil one.

Impossible Obedience

I’ve been hearing a lot about the “Ten Commandments” lately.  No, not the movie with Charlton Heston.  The ancient words, honored first by the Hebrew people and now attached to the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Within the past month I’ve seen:  A Facebook post suggesting that everything would be right with the world if people would just obey the “Ten Commandments,”  A blog post suggesting that it is time for us to post the “Ten Commandments” in every school classroom so that children will somehow read the posted commandments, understand them, and live by them, or at least know why they are being punished if they don’t,  A couple of my relatives arguing about politicians and their public behavior, each of them invoking one or another commandment to bolster their argument.  I asked the posters of the Facebook post and the blog if they could, without looking them up, list the Ten Commandments for me.  Neither one could.  But they still insisted that they were important and everyone should know them and follow them.

Jesus, as an observant Jew of the First Century, clearly knows these commandments.  He quotes a number of them in our text for today.  But he doesn’t just leave them for us to ponder.  Each time he follows a patter in which he takes the commandment to an extreme that has dropped jaws from his own time to today.  “You have heard it said… But I say to you…”  By doing so Jesus is challenging those who would use these commandments as a kind of “Virtue List,” including the posters that I encountered in the last month.  In a sense, Jesus is saying that if we want to be virtuous and use commandments as our guide, the standard is high, perhaps so impossibly high, that we cannot possibly win.  It reminds me of Ben Franklin’s quest for Virtue, in which he realized that he could never fully achieve all of the virtues on his list, and declares his moral experiment a failure.

Why would Jesus do such a thing?  Is it wrong for us to want to be “good” to one another, however that good is defined.  Clearly not.  Jesus commands us to love one another on numerous occasions.  It is wrong to seek virtue for its own sake?  No and Yes.  Jesus seems to be saying that as a pathway to relationship with God and one another, following the Ten Commandments will fail us, as it has failed so many people over the years, as it fails me almost daily.  My nature is such that I cannot win God’s affection and favor through my virtue.  The best I can do is hide my failings from others for a time, in order to appear virtuous, all the while knowing that it is a lie.  So, no, obedience is not a pathway to God.  But, yes, virtues can serve us and our relationship with God in a different way, as they were intended to do from the start.

What most people who tout the morality of the commandments do is they take them out of the context in which they were originally given.  That context is the covenant YHWH/God made with the people of Israel.  This covenant is much bigger than these commandments.  It begins with God identifying Godself.  “I am the Lord your God…”  It continues with God recounting the mighty acts that have saved the Children of Israel from bondage.  “…who brought you out of the land of Egypt and out of slavery.”  It then continues with the commandments, followed by the good things that happen to those who remember and keep the covenant, the bad things that befall those who fail to do so, and finally provision for the covenant to be recited and remembered in the future.  This ancient covenantal form is the context into which Moses received the commandments.

The commandments are not given to earn YHWH/God’s love and favor, but rather as a way for the people to respond to it.  God’s love comes first, and it comes free of charge.  We call this grace: the gift of God’s love without strings attached.  So, the commandments are ways in which people are invited to hear God’s love and respond to it.  The blessings and curses are not reward for obeying and punishment for disobeying.  They are the natural consequences that eventually come to those who obey and disobey.  And, importantly, the covenant, the whole covenant, God’s part and our part, is to be remembered and renewed.  If we see this section of Matthew’s Gospel as part of a greater whole, something we call “The Sermon on the Mount,” we begin to understand that more portions of the covenant are discussed in detail.  The “Beatitudes” that begin Chapter 5 are part of the “blessings” section of the covenant.  (And if you note the retelling of these in Luke’s Gospel, we find that Luke also includes the “curses!”)  So of course, we also must look outside of this passage for things that identify God (and the Messiah) and what God is doing.  Later in the Gospel we see that the covenant is renewed every time we gather in Jesus name, especially as we gather for the covenantal meal of Communion.

Paramount to this understanding is that Jesus points out the absurdity to the use of commandments as a way to God’s love and favor.  We already have God’s favor.  He chose to dwell among us in the flesh, to endure life and death as we do, to be a presence of healing and life for all.  In Jesus, God is choosing to make a lasting and living covenant with us.  We are loved, healed, and forgiven prior to the giving of any “commandments.”  We cannot try to earn what we already have.  I am convinced that’s why Jesus does what he does in this passage.  It cures me of any notion that I can do the virtue thing on my own.  It drives me back into the arms of a loving and merciful God.  And having been given love and mercy, I am sent back into the world as a loving and merciful child of God, giving what I have already been given.  Perhaps we cannot see that message in just this passage alone, but in the context of the whole Gospel of Matthew, it is clear and present, written in the life and death of Jesus himself.

So, in my own life, and I would hope in the lives of others so redeemed by God, the Ten Commandments are not meaningless.  They are one, among many, ways in which God has expressed a desire for us to respond to God’s love with our love for one another.  It is in the context of a covenant that is rich and always being renewed that God calls us into a mission for the sake of all people.  Does posting commandments in classrooms and courthouses help us to further that mission?  I don’t know, but my instinct tells me that it does not.  It just produces a large cadre of people trying to fake righteousness when all this time God has given it to use as a gift (where righteousness doesn’t mean we always do the right thing, but that God has given us the gift of a right relationship of love and forgiveness).  But God, in Christ Jesus, has written love onto our very hearts, implanted it into our very being, and thus freed us to live for one another.  My failure to be virtuous always sends me back to God.  God’s love always sends me, healed and renewed out into the world only to return again.  It is a dance that will continue until I die.  But it is a dance in which God ever, always, and only takes the first step:  Love.