Beyond the Limits of the Law, Mt. 5:21-37, Epiphany 6-A, 2/12/17
It may sound flippant, but I am completely serious when I say that if you want to understand this morning’s gospel lesson you should imagine yourself riding with your little brother or sister in the backseat of the car on a long trip. If you had one or more siblings, you recognize the situation: You’ve gotten a little frisky and finally a stern word comes from the front seat, “Leave your brother (or sister) alone!” The law has been proclaimed, there is no denying the letter of what is intended---but there is room for interpretation. Does humming in a low voice while he is trying to read count? Can you stick out your tongue and look cross-eyed at him without transgressing? How about letting your pillow get on his side of the car, if you are not touching him? You don’t want to get in trouble, but you certainly want to inflict maximum aggravation. So you look for the sweet spot that keeps you on the good side of the front seat, but doesn’t cramp your style.
There is something in us that likes to define the limits of the law, something that wants to get a clear demarcation between what is acceptable and what is not—so that we can feel justified in pushing our advantage. Most of us don’t indulge in tax evasion; that can land you in jail, but we have no problem with tax avoidance, even if both have the consequence of undercutting good schools, roads and the common good. We honor the letter of the law but feel pretty free to ignore its spirit.
It’s this distinction between the letter and the spirit of the law which lies at the heart of today’s gospel lesson. We continue in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount with what some scholars call a series of antitheses. They are so named because of their literary structure: “You have heard it said…but I say to you…” I have always thought this is a poor naming because they are not really antitheses. An antithesis is the opposite of something. The antithesis of “The Hokies are the best football team in the world” is asserting that they are the worst. Jesus is not offering antitheses; he does not say the former teachings are wrong. Quite the contrary, he says they do not go far enough. He wants to go deeper, to move beyond observing the letter of law to dealing with the root causes of violence, bitterness, infidelity, and lying.
Last week we heard Jesus say, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Some hear that as a snarky comment about the religious leaders, but in fact, at their best the religious leaders modeled what keeping the commandments looks like. Today Jesus begins to lay out what it looks like when you go beyond merely keeping the law to understanding God’s intention in giving the Law. Jesus shows us what it means to go above and beyond the righteousness of the best rule keepers he can cite.
A quick look at this list and we can see why we are attracted to rule keeping. Rules may impose limits, but they are pretty straight forward and often pretty easy to obey. But in his teaching Jesus ramps up the expectations of God beyond outward behavior. It is not enough that we do not kill;we should rein in our anger and actively seek reconciliation with those who offend us. It is not enough to abstain from adultery and fornication; he expects us to curb our desires and silent lusts. That is a high standard to meet, but as Flannery O’Connor observed, “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
And the truth is that these things which we recognize as wrong—murder, adultery, broken relationships, and lying do not come out of nowhere—they are rooted in attitudes of the heart.
We often think that the way to deal with problems in society is to make and enforce more rules. And if the truth be told, rules do improve our life together. It is indeed good that we have laws against murder and theft. But in the long run, making and enforcing rules is like cutting the tops off the dandelions in your lawn. It looks better for a while, but the roots are still there and they ultimately cause a new outbreak. Until you deal with the roots, the flowers keep coming.
We do not have time to look at each of these teachings in detail. But they are unified by their concern with the things which destroy healthy relationships and disrupt community life—anger, lust, covetousness, and dishonesty. In each case, Jesus goes beyond behaviors to asking, “What is God’s intention?” So let’s take one of these sayings as an example of what Jesus is doing.
“You have heard it said …you shall not murder…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.”
In my early days of Sunday School,I remember reading the 10 Commandments to see how many I was breaking. I did not always honor father and mother and I told a lie or two, but I thought that ones against killing and adultery were gimmes for a 12 year old. I I did not appreciate that there is more than one way to kill, that murder begins with a bitter heart. Martin Luther knew better, he writes,
“You may find as many ways to kill as you have organs. You may use your hand, your tongue, your heart; you may use signs and gestures; you may use your eyes to look at someone sourly or to begrudge him his life; you may even use your ears if you do not like to hear him mentioned.—All this is included in ‘killing.’”
A felonious act is only the last in a long chain of events which begins when we devalue another person, when we allow ourselves to think of them as of less worth than ourselves. You probably remember the Rwanda genocide of 1994. News accounts at the time documented that the killing began when Hutu controlled media broadcasts ordered people to kill the Tutsi “cockroaches.” The killing began when people became bugs in the minds of others.
That is Jesus’ point in saying we are liable to judgment for insulting a brother or calling someone a fool. He is not instituting a new legalism which merely prohibits certain words; he is reminding us that we can not hate and hurt until we demean and deny another’s humanity. If we refuse to demean we are closer to reconciliation.
We might protest that there is a big difference between attitudes and actions, but given enough time, attitudes inevitably become actions. The writer of Proverbs puts it this way, “Can a man carry fire in his bosom and his clothes not be burned? [6:27] If we are serious about dealing with violence and creating a more civil society, we begin by consciously putting out the flame in our own bosom; we stop fanning the fires wherever we can.
In a different time a famous preacher asked, “What proportion of the letters delivered any morning would be found to be written in displeasure, in petulance, in wrath? The postbag shrieks insults and bursts with suppressed malice.” This was before social media. Reading his words and thinking about my daily Facebook feed, I thought, “Man, you ain’t seen nothing yet!” Now we have the ability to instantaneously and even anonymously spread vitriol far and wide. Certainly we must speak up when we see cruelty and injustice, but we do well to be aware that such cruelty lurks in our hearts also.
I began this sermon by asking you to imagine riding in the backseat with an aggravating sibling, looking for limits of the law. My brother and I were no saints, we bugged each other mercilessly. But I remember one of those long trips when it was different. We had to cover 800 miles across the Deep South, in the middle of July, with no air conditioning—and I had the ear ache from hell. I was lying down hoping to get some relief when I felt my brother’s hand on my head. I was just about to snarl at him when I realized that he was not poking me. He was gently stroking my hair, trying to help me relax. For many miles, as we drove through the still night across north Alabama, Brian cradled my head, a gentle witness that though we might fight, I was still his brother.
The ultimate solution to violence is not more laws and it is certainly not probing for the limits of what God demands of us. It is bridging the divide with acts of understanding. It is remembering that we are all brothers and sisters, called and privileged to care for one another in the spirit of Jesus, the one who showed us what it means to put reconciliation over being right, compassion over conquest and forgiveness over fear.