Righteousness.

Isaiah 58:1-12; Matthew 5:13-20

February 9 MMXX

I.

The key word in today’s readings is “righteousness.”  Jesus has just finished his descriptions of what it means to be “blessed.”  It becomes clear now that blessing is something that resolves or bears fruit in righteousness.  Blessing is received according to our openness and our stance in the world, particularly as people who experience, know, and even in some sense welcome loss, people who are in the process of self-emptying, losing both their own grasping, craving egocentricity, and allowing God’s love and light to flow through them.

This sharing, shining, giving, and doing is righteousness.  Today’s passage culminates in the Lord’s statement to us that “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”  It’s not enough just to be a recipient of God’s blessing; we must then shine forth and flavor the world with God’s righteousness exhibited in and through us.

Jesus clearly says here that the shape of righteousness is found in the Scriptures.  He includes here, of course, the Law, the Torah, which is the centerpiece and core of Jewish existence.  And he also adds the Prophets.  The writings of the Prophets were and are part of the Scriptures for Jews, of course, but for them they are somewhat secondary, I think it is fair to say.  Jesus implicitly sees them as being equal to the Torah.  Indeed, as we will see a bit later, he appears to take the writings of the Prophets as an interpretive lens through which we may see the deeper meaning of the Torah.  

In this he is militating against the trend advocated by the scribes and Pharisees, which was to double-down on literal observance of the 613 specific regulations of the Torah.  Instead, he wants us to listen to the Prophets at the key to understanding what God really intends in giving the Torah to the people in the first place.  In other words, Jesus will use and embody the teachings of the Prophets to counter the strict literalist biblicism that he saw happening in the teachings of the scribes and Pharisees.

For the prophets are not afraid to criticize the people when their observance of the Torah gets in the way of true righteousness, and neither is Jesus.  

This is what is going on in this reading from Isaiah 58.  It is the Day of Atonement, sometime after the exiles have returned from Babylon to Palestine.  The ceremonial trumpet has sounded; the people are dutifully fasting.  And the prophet is nevertheless disgusted with them.  

Because for all their apparent religiousness, they are not participating in the one thing that this is all supposed to be about, which is righteousness.  They are congratulating themselves for being religious enough to observe the Day of Atonement; but they are cynically avoiding the whole point of the Day of Atonement, which is the realization of God’s rule in their lives embodied in the social justice which the prophet says constitutes righteousness.

II.

Last week, we heard the prophet Micah rail against the idea that God desired burnt offerings and sacrifices, two things the Torah talks about a great deal.  Instead, Micah ends with that beautiful passage about how God really desires justice, kindness, and humility.  The prophet Amos positively mocks the religious observances of the people, demanding instead that they treat the poor well.  

There are lots of passages like this where the prophets relate, in effect the kind of thing that Jesus is about to say in his sermon, “You have heard that the Bible says this, but I tell you this instead.”  The Torah talks about sacrifices and rituals, but the prophets and Jesus talk about justice and righteousness.  The prophets deliberately contradict the letter of the law in order to draw people into the inner, deeper spirit of the law.

The Bible is meant to point us to God’s way of peace, justice, and righteousness, but by focusing solely on a literal adherence to these various rules as ends in themselves, or as factors used to prop up and unify a particular national and religious identity, the prophets point out that the Bible is made into an idol that actually separates us from God’s actual intentions.

This happens when the Bible is taken by powerful people and pressed into service to defend their interests and status.  Instead of reflecting, expressing, and anticipating the Kingdom of God, the Bible gets neutralized and twisted into a dead weight of ballast undergirding and stabilizing the empires of this world and their controlling, oppressive ideologies, moralities, pecking orders, economies, prejudices, and bigotries.  

If the prophets are complaining about it, this is nothing new.  And it continues to happen.  There is like this fault line driven through the Judeo-Christian tradition.  On one side is an established religious institution, sucking up to government and the State, motivated by paranoia, nostalgia, nationalism, and the need to impose social order and enforce morality, who therefore focus on literally keeping the rules they have selected out of the text for their own purposes.  Thus somehow the Bible is made to support their wars, their injustices, their bigotry, and their favorite politicians no matter how venal, truthless, and corrupt they may be.  This where you get Christians participating in lynchings.  This is where you get Christians imagining that by hating immigrants, Muslims, Socialists, and gays they are somehow living out their faith.

But on the other side of this division is, well, Jesus Christ and the prophets of the Hebrew tradition, and the actual Bible, which is about God’s liberating, transforming, redeeming power and love.  This is where we find the Sermon on the Mount and its humility, gentleness, compassion, forgiveness, generosity, and confidence.  This is where we find the cross, which witnesses to  both the destructiveness of human hatred and violence, and the awesome ocean of God’s grace and deliverance.

III.

Righteousness means aligning ourselves with Jesus Christ and the prophets, not against the Torah, but as the proper way to receive and enact God’s law.  Isaiah is ridiculously clear about what really constitutes righteousness.  It is: “to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke.”  It is “to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house.” 

Righteousness therefore means compassion.  It means establishing equity.  It means justice in the sense of giving people what they need to live.  It does not mean cutting food aid to hungry people or criminalizing homelessness, two things now happening in our country.

The Lord says his followers are “the salt of the earth.”  Like salt, we are to infiltrate, influence, insinuate, and infuse the values of God into human life.  We are to bring out the flavor of the Creator in everything, bringing things into balance, facilitating open and honest communication, melting icy hostilities, reducing egocentric fear and anger, permeating the whole with blessing and grace, forgiveness and peace.  If we refuse to function in this way we are worthless, he says.

The Lord says his followers are “the light of the world,” shedding God’s light on everyone.  Our example of living in the beloved community is to be visible and inviting to all.  When people see our good works they will give glory to the One from whom all such blessings flow, our gracious Father in heaven.  “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love,” is how one hymn puts it.

Here is the most effective evangelism: just living the life Jesus Christ gives us to live.  Just doing together what he is about to command us in this amazing and powerful sermon that summarizes his teaching.  Just getting ourselves — our thinking, our desires, our memories — our fear and anger — out of the way, and letting the goodness of God flow in and through us, radiating out into the world.  

That is righteousness, Jesus says.  That’s justice.  And it is inherently and necessarily relational, communal, and social.  If we are refusing to spread our influence or withholding our light to others, if we are tight-lipped and secretive, if we are not telling people the good news of God’s love, we are not doing the job.  If we are not advocating for inclusion, diversity, unity, welcome, forgiveness, and peace, we, by default, remain agents of darkness, ignorance, and fear.  Then we would not be his people.  

 

IV.

That’s what Jesus says.  Yes, he will tell us it starts with the transformed, changed, renewed, and converted hearts of individuals.  He will tell us it is about being in relationship with him; but because of who he is it cannot just end there with “me and my Jesus.”  Because of who he is, the truly Human One who is one with the Creator of all, being in relationship with him means being in relationship through him with all: every person, every life, all creation.  When we meet Jesus Christ we are changed, and changed people change the world.

He will say it in his sermon here, and he will do it, acting it out in his ministry of healing, liberating, feeding, gathering, and teaching people.  And it gets expressed in communities, and applied in societies when they experience the influence of God’s people as salt and light in his Name.

And finally this righteousness and justice, this shalom of the Creator at work shining through us, Jesus’ disciples, becomes the relief, renewal, redemption, and release of the whole creation.

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