"But I say to you...."

Matthew 5:21-37

February 12, 2017

I.

Last week, we heard Jesus say to his disciples that “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”  He is responding to his critics who charge that he is undermining the Jewish Law and encouraging people not to keep it.

This is a charge that gets leveled at some Christians a lot, especially today, when people say we are “going against the Bible.”  The same accusation was made against Jesus.  Frustration with the Law, or at least the way the establishment of his day interpreted the Law, is at the heart of Jesus’ work, and that of the apostle Paul as well.  

Traditional Jews were apoplectic about how it seemed to them that Jesus and his disciples ignored, broke, or changed the very words of Scripture.  They saw it as a self-serving, watering-down of biblical rules to make faith more palatable.  They saw it as Jesus caving in to contemporary culture or societal pressure.  They saw it as unpatriotic and a dangerous threat to Jewish national identity.

    

But Jesus insists that he affirms and upholds the Law, which he says he comes to fulfill, not to abolish.  And here, after encouraging his disciples to be more, not less, righteous than the religious authorities, he proceeds to make several comments about the Jewish Law.  In every case he uses the same formula.  He says, “You have heard it said,” and then he quotes or paraphrases a law from the Torah.  Then he adds, “But I say to you,” and says something apparently much more demanding, to the point of sometimes being impossible, about that topic.

This kind of talk drove his critics crazy.  First, because they thought he was presuming to overrule the Bible, and claiming to be a higher authority than God’s Word.  If I tried that I would be out of a job, and rightly so.  The Lord is setting the highest possible bar for himself and the rest of the gospel proves that he is himself God’s Word and the highest authority.

Secondly, the authorities feared that Jesus was really undermining the Law by spiritualizing it.  They felt that Jesus was making the Law so subjective and psychological that keeping it was just about our feelings, our attitude, or our thoughts.  Authorities don’t want to hear about this.  They need to be able to see and measure when someone is breaking the Law.  To them what Jesus suggests is like telling a State Trooper to let you off because in your heart you were keeping to the Speed Limit, even though in your car you were doing 90. 

• The Law says don’t kill; Jesus says don’t even get angry, don’t insult anyone, don’t be selfishly adversarial, don’t make anyone your enemy.  
• The Law says don’t commit adultery; Jesus says don’t even think about it, because even that turns someone else into an object.  Any part of you that is making you do that is expendable.  
• The Law says divorce is permissible with due process; Jesus says don’t get divorced at all.  
• The Law provides for how properly to swear legal oaths; Jesus says forget about making oaths altogether and just tell the truth.

In the musical Godspel, it is when Jesus says some of these things that one of the characters turns to the audience and says, in a Groucho Marx accent, “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard.”  It is no wonder that we have spent 2000 years trying to figure out how to ignore the Sermon on the Mount altogether.  It can’t be done.

II.

And that is precisely Jesus’ point.  His teachings can’t be done like the commandments of the Hebrew Scriptures.  Those commandments are like when a musician learns their scales.  At first it is a challenge; but after a while you can do them without thinking.  And it is not really music, just to play scales.  Just as the rules of grammar are not communication and calisthenics are not sport.

It is not enough just to keep the letter of the Law.  It is not enough to keep to a literal reading of the Bible.  That only gets you so far, and then it becomes a hindrance.  Yes, the scales, and the grammar, and the calisthenics are important, to a point.  But as Paul says, when he became an adult he gave up childish things.  Eventually you have to take off the training wheels. 

In fact, if you don’t take off the training wheels, and you have a religious establishment carefully watching to make sure you don’t take them off, and punish you when you do take them off, things deteriorate.  Over time, people, especially the leaders, had learned how to use keeping the letter of the Law to actually give themselves permission to continue to break the deeper spirit of the Law.  In one of his tirades the Lord shakes his head at the religious authorities who, he says, are very good at cleaning the outside of a cup, while leaving the inside full of gunk.  He means that merely keeping to the letter of the Law can actually prevent you from doing what the Law is really trying to inspire within you, which is a change of heart.

What Jesus says about divorce is a classic example.  The Jewish Law requires due process for divorce.  This is an improvement over the previous practice which was kicking your wife out of the house if you didn’t like her.  Now at least you had to get the approval of the elders and have a good reason to divorce her.  But of course the elders all play golf together every Wednesday and they figured out quickly how to support each other in granting divorces.  So keeping the letter of the Law didn’t actually realize the purpose of the Law, which was to protect powerless women and children.  Hence Jesus says don’t get divorced at all.  But guess what, unscrupulous men figured out a way to abuse that too, so that by our time the church has had to allow divorce as a way to accomplish Jesus’ goal of protecting women.  All demonstrating that a legalistic and literalistic approach never works, even with Jesus own words.

Jesus says those outer motions of keeping the letter of the Law are meaningless and even counterproductive, if they do not reflect and express a changed inner attitude.  God looks at the heart.  We can fiddle with the rules and regulations all we want, we can make this or that illegal and impose harsh punishments for transgressors, but that doesn’t work.  What works is a change of heart and mind.  What works is repentance.  What works is dying to your old self and being born as your new, true, original self.

III.  

Asked by a student how much ego it is appropriate to have, the great Zen teacher, Shunryu Suzuki, answers: just enough so you don’t step in front of a bus.  So it is with Jesus here.  In every case, the life that Jesus depicts in obedience to the Spirit of the Law, his righteousness that exceeds that of the literalistic scribes and Pharisees, means having your selfishness and ego-centricity drained away, and replaced by the kind of humility he blesses in the beginning of this sermon.  Jesus gives us a righteousness based on self-emptying love, which is the love of God.

He illustrates this here when he talks about anger as tantamount to murder.  Anger, like all sins, is based on fear rooted in ego-centric selfishness which places us over-against others.  Jesus says anger is its own judgment.  When it erupts in verbal abuse it condemns itself.  It expresses an enmity and adversariality, not to mention a superiority towards others, that Jesus knows is not only unjustified, but not true.

Anger kills that other person in your heart, reducing them to a cipher of bad behavior, an object you can dispose of in self-righteous rage.  Anger is idolatry because it places yourself in God’s place as somebody’s Judge.  That’s why it is inappropriate to come before God with an offering, when you are nursing some anger towards someone.  Be reconciled first, he says, then bring your gift to God.  

Then Jesus presents an example about a lawsuit.  He urges us to “come to terms quickly” with our accusers.  Do not let yourself get sucked into a system based on winners and losers, making enemies and adversaries of people.  That admits the system’s authority over you, for one thing.  Jesus always teaches us not to react to violence with violence. 

I have been studying something called “Nonviolent Communication,” which is about learning to respond to people with empathy and address the real feelings and needs that underlie what we say.  Instead of treating someone as an enemy, NVC establishes a baseline of mutual identification which defuses anger, resentment, rage, and fear.  But in order for NVC to work you have to let go of your own selfishness and rightness, your own superiority and self-righteous vindictiveness.  You have to discover what you have in common with your accuser.  

It reminds me of where Paul pleads with the Corinthians about how it is better to suffer an injustice than to demand your rights against each other in a Roman court.  Instead of submitting to the inherent adversariality of what passes for “justice,” which is designed to divide and conquer, making us all enemies of each other, and keep the judges and lawyers in charge.

IV.

The righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees is not ever more meticulous adherence to the letter of the Law.  It is getting to the bottom of the Law as love, emptying ourselves of all self-righteousness and superiority, cutting off everything that gets in the way of God’s love, placing ourselves and our agenda last, and finding common ground with others.  It means relinquishing all claims to power and identifying with the victims and the powerless the hungry and the sick.  It means not “looking out for number one” or “getting a little something for yourself,” but becoming a clear channel through which God’s goodness may flow into the world.

The last thing Jesus says here is about truth-telling.  “Let your word be “Yes, Yes” or “No, No;” anything more than this comes from the evil one.”  Jesus calls for simple, direct honesty in all things.  No to the false way of ego and self-interest, distorted by anger or fear.  No to sharp arguments and schemes for victory.  Letting all of that go, we are open to hear and echo the beauty of God’s Word, which in Jesus Christ is always “yes!”

+++++++