(Deuteronomy 15:1-11; Matthew 6:1-6)

I’m a Seattle sports fan, and I know what that means:  mostly, it means rooting for teams that are punchlines more than punchers.  The Mariners have been futile for most of their existence, the Seahawks are the only team in NFL history to win their division with a losing record, and we don’t even have an NBA team anymore.  Lately, though, the Seahawks seem to be bucking that trend, turning themselves into title contenders—and arguably the most-disliked team in the NFL.

Much of that comes from our defensive secondary, which is mostly composed of very large men who hit very hard.  Over the course of last season, we noticed that after opposing receivers had been hit once or twice by Kam Chancellor, our strong safety, or a cornerback like Brandon Browner, they began to develop what people call “alligator arms.”  They weren’t focused on catching the ball, they were hearing footsteps; they were afraid of getting hit, and so they wouldn’t extend their arms all the way, because they didn’t want to leave themselves vulnerable—and passes sailed right on by, incomplete.  For receivers to succeed against our defensive backs, they had to be able to put all that out of their minds and focus both eyes and all their attention on catching the football—and let whatever happened after that, happen.

Jesus isn’t a football coach, of course, but he has something of a similar concern here.  His question is simple:  why are you doing this?  Are you doing it for yourself, or for God?  Are you looking to God for your reward, or are you seeking a reward here on earth?  If you do good works—if you give to those in need, if you pray, if you do what’s right—out of the desire to please God, then if other people see what you’re doing, they will praise him because of you; and God who sees everything you do will reward you.  If you call attention to your good works, or make a point of being conspicuous about them, so that other people will see you, then whatever response you get from them will be the only reward you will receive.  God will not reward you for things you didn’t do for him.

Obviously, Jesus is criticizing the Pharisees here, calling them out for their religious grandstanding.  I suspect a lot of us know people like that, whose primary concern seems to be to convince you that they are much better Christians or much more spiritual than you are; Jesus says, essentially, that they’re spiritual frauds.  His point applies more broadly than that, however.  For one thing, whether we seek out an audience for our good works or not, we’ll often have one regardless; and of course, when we gather together as the church, we pray together, we work together, and so on, and we all see each other.  If our hearts are right and we’re focused on God, rather than on how we look to everyone around us, the Devil’s going to try to change that, to tempt us and distract us.  That’s the hard thing about praying in public—keeping it actual prayer, not performance.

More than that, even when there aren’t other people around, we still do everything before our own eyes, as it were; even when there’s no one else to impress, we can still do things to impress ourselves, to feed our egos and stoke our pride.  That’s why Jesus says, “Don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing”—it’s a way of saying, “Don’t even be watching yourself.”  If you give to others, but you’re focused on yourself rather than them—if you do good works because it makes you feel good about yourself, or it builds up your ego—then you already have your reward.  Jesus calls us to do his work in a divine self-forgetfulness, focused on him and on those whom we’re serving, leaving behind concern for ourselves and how we look to others.

Along with that, he calls us to leave behind concern for reward in this world, in this life.  We have the expectation, living in a culture in which Christianity has long been assumed and is still broadly accepted, that if we’re good Christians, other people ought to respect and appreciate us for that, and say good things about us.  I tell you, where I lived before coming here, it really didn’t work that way, but around here, it still does more often than not; and when we find our expectation is not met, we feel let down, we get upset, and we start muttering about taking back our country and things of that sort.  When we get caught up in that way of thinking, we take our eyes off Jesus, and we start practicing our righteousness to squeeze a reward out of other people rather than to please God.  Next thing we know, we find ourselves lined up right beside the Pharisees.

The earthly reward Jesus talks about in this passage is the one the Pharisees were focused on (reputation and the praise of other people), but the principle here applies to other rewards as well.  If you go to church and consider yourself a Christian because you want a more fulfilling life, or you like the support it gives to your political views, or you want God to bless you financially, or whatever it might be—and there are a great many churches out there peddling those sorts of messages—then you’re not seeking to glorify God, you’re seeking to bless yourself, and you have received your reward in full.  What­ever it may be, if you conceive of Christian faith as a way to get what you want on earth, you’ve missed the point, and you’ve missed God.  God will never be a means for us to achieve our own ends; he will not be used.

This applies to churches as well as individuals. You know we’ve left the Presbyterian Church (USA)—not that they’re willing to admit that yet—because of their ongoing pattern of setting aside the authority of Scripture to make room for them to change the denominational position on things like marriage and homosexual sex.  I firmly believe the folks who lead that denomination are doing that because they want the approval of the world, or at least the part of the world they care about:  the elite culture, the intelligentsia, the media, the rich and famous.  They want to be called “progressive” and “up to date” and “relevant”; and I think it’s safe to say, they have already received their reward.

To be honest, there are conservative denominations that are much the same at the core—they’re just aiming for applause from a different part of the culture, is all; and there are plenty of congregations that have this same basic attitude.  It can be an effective way to build an organization.  Just identify the kind of people you want to attract, figure out what they want, and then tailor everything you say and do to fit their desires and expectations.  Build it, and they will come (usually, if you build it well enough).  But if the guiding question behind your worship services and your programs is not “What will please God?” but “What will make the right kind of people come?” then you may win all sorts of praise on earth, but you will find none in heaven.

We can’t follow Jesus faithfully if we have one eye out for what kind of reward we’re going to get on earth, any more than a wide receiver can catch the ball effectively if he has one eye out for whether he’s going to get hit.  He tells us to focus our attention on God and what he’s calling us to do, and leave the rest to him.  Don’t worry about whether we’re applauded or criticized, making money or going broke, popular or persecuted; don’t worry whether there’s nothing but grass between us and the end zone, or a safety about to lay the lumber on us.  Just keep our eyes on the ball, and catch it.  Let’s pray.

(Leviticus 19:17-18, Leviticus 24:17-20; Matthew 5:38-48)

“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”  “Turn the other cheek.”  “Go the extra mile.”  These are all reasonably familiar phrases in conversational English; we know what we mean by them, so we assume we know what Jesus means.  The problem is, we don’t, because in fact they don’t mean what we think they do.  Unfortunately, there aren’t even many teachers in the church who realize that.  I’m heavily indebted here to three people who do:  the New Testament scholar Dr. Kenneth Bailey, whom I’ve referenced before; the late Rabbi Dr. Edwin Friedman, one of the seminal figures in family systems theory; and the Rev. Dr. Carolyn Gordon, chair of the Department of Preaching and Communication at Fuller Seminary.

Let’s begin where Jesus does:  “You have heard it said.”  The Old Testament certainly does contain the words, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”—in more than one place, in fact; and no doubt you’ve heard that called barbaric.  Those words are taken as a justification for private vengeance, for getting your own back and doing unto others as they’ve done to you—but as with the law on divorce, that’s the exact opposite of the purpose for which this law was intended.  In our terms, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” was a sen­tencing guideline to ensure proportional punishment for those con­victed of assault and battery.  It was intended to bring an end to blood feuds and break the cycle of violence, not to justify it.

The legal authorities have the right to execute judgment; as individuals, we cannot claim that right for ourselves.  Instead, Jesus tells us not to resist an evildoer—and we as­sume he means:  play dead, be a doormat, roll over and let them do whatever they want.  Unfortunately, that gets used to justify some truly horrendous counsel, sending women and children back into abusive relationships, and the like.  It’s a misreading of Jesus and a misreading of the examples he gives.  He isn’t setting forth a program of passivity; rather, in Dr. Gordon’s words, he’s giving “God’s rules for righteous retaliation.”

Take verse 39—did you notice Jesus says, “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek”?  Pay attention to that.  In the first place, it’s assumed that whoever strikes you is doing so with the right hand, because in those days without modern sanitation, the left hand was unclean.  You didn’t use that to touch food, and you didn’t touch people with it, either.  So if someone strikes you on the right cheek with the right hand, how are they doing it?  It’s a backhanded blow.  In that culture, if you hit someone with the palm of your hand (or a fist, I imagine), that was understood as a blow given to an equal which was intended to cause them harm.  If you hit them with the back of the hand, though, that was intended to humiliate them—it was a serious insult.

So, someone strikes you on the right cheek, what are they trying to do?  They’re trying to provoke you to react:  to fight, to freeze, or to run.  If you run, or you freeze up in humiliation, you’ve accepted the insult.  If you fight back, maybe you win, and regain some measure of honor; but maybe you lose, and end up worse off than before.  Regardless, you’re letting their treatment of you define you and determine how you will act.

Jesus says, don’t just react—catch yourself, and break out of the script written for you by the aggressor.  Choose to respond differently, and hit them with a different kind of challenge.  If someone slaps you on the right cheek and you stand there and turn your left cheek to them, you are refusing to accept the insult, and you’re giving them a real problem.  To hit you with the back of the hand, they have to use the left hand—and at that point, they’re in trouble.  To use the right hand, they have to strike you with the palm—thus retracting the insult themselves.  Turning the other cheek isn’t passive at all, and it isn’t the least bit submissive.  It is the refusal to submit, to be stampeded, to let an enemy pull your strings; it is acting as a disciple of Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit to do something the world cannot see coming, much less understand.

Now, we don’t have time to dig into everything in detail, so let me just hit one other example, verse 41.  Roman law gave any Roman soldier the right to dragoon anyone who wasn’t a Roman citizen to serve as forced labor, but only within limits.  Thus a soldier could require a Jew to carry his equipment, but only for one mile.  As you can imagine, this caused considerable resentment; but Jesus says, don’t stop with the first mile, but carry the soldier’s burden another mile before you lay it down.

Note that.  Jesus doesn’t say, “Go the rest of the way with him,” he specifically says, “Go two miles.”  If you only do what you are compelled to do—if you just go the one mile and then quit—then you’re not free in that situation.  On the flip side, to carry the burden the whole rest of the way would be to completely surrender your dignity, and you would still not be free.  But if you carry the load a second mile, by your own choice, and then lay it down, on your own initiative, then you are acting beyond compulsion; in so doing, you are reclaiming your own dignity as one who is free to choose how you will act.  You are creating your own meaning out of the situation rather than allowing someone else to impose it on you.  You are refusing to let your identity be defined by how someone else treats you; instead, you are asserting your identity as a follower of Christ.

The key here, as Dr. Bailey put it, is that Jesus says, “Love your enemies”—he doesn’t say, “Join them.”  He doesn’t say, “Enable them.”  He says, “Don’t resist the evil­doer,” but he never says, “Don’t resist evil.”  We have trouble with this because we’ve bought our culture’s definition of love, which is insipid.  We think loving people means doing what makes them happy, and thus that loving our enemies would mean giving them aid and comfort in oppressing us.  Not so at all.  Yes, loving our enemies means wanting what’s best for them, which is salvation in Christ—which entails, among other things, conviction of sin and guilt, confession, and repentance.  To love our enemies is to desire that they repent of their evil and seek to make it right, and thus stop being enemies.

We talked about this when we were going through Romans 12, and we saw Jesus lay the foundation for it in the Beatitudes, where he declares that the merciful and the peacemaker are blessed.  To love our enemies, to turn the other cheek, to go the second mile, is in a sense not to resist them—but it is to trust God to resist them through us, and to oppose the evil they do with a power greater than theirs.  If we react to our enemies our own way, in our own strength, that’s all the strength we have; if we use their weapons, we will tend to become like them.  If we respond God’s way, he can do far more and far better than anything we could ever accomplish.

And in this, God is revealed in us.  This world gets the concept, “love those who love you and hate those who don’t”; it understands “do to others before they get the chance to do to you.”  If we respond to our enemies by trying to take them down, we look just like the rest of the world, because there’s nothing of the power or character of God in that; if we claim to be Christians in one breath and then undermine or attack our enemies in the next, we should be ashamed.  Jesus directs us to pursue the perfection of God.  He doesn’t actually say, “Be perfect now,” though you wouldn’t know that from the English; literally, this is a future tense, “You shall be perfect.”  It’s a promise and a goal, and a command to pursue that goal:  the objective of our lives is to be perfect according to the character and will of God, and God is at work in us to perfect us.

(Leviticus 19:11-12; Matthew 5:33-37, Matthew 23:16-22)

Let me begin by clarifying a couple things.  First, the statements in the Law to which Jesus refers—we read one of them this morning, there are others—deal with two different but related subjects, oaths and vows, but Jesus goes on to talk only about oaths.  Vows are solemn promises which are made ultimately to God, though often to other people as well; marriage vows, for instance.  Oaths are invocations of God or of some object which is sacred, or at least very important to us, for the purpose of assuring others that we’re telling the truth or that we’re going to keep a promise; I swear by my Aunt Priscilla’s grave, that’s how it happened.  (Since I don’t have an Aunt Priscilla, this should not reassure you.)  In court oaths and oaths of office, we see these combined, as vows are taken with one hand on the Bible, thus invoking the Bible to affirm the vows.

Second, Jesus is not declaring a new law in Matthew 5.  The Mennonites have historically interpreted his words as forbidding Christians to take oaths under any circum­stances, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses agree; for that reason, they refuse even to swear an oath in court.  This is not what Jesus is saying here.  The Old Testament law required oaths in certain circumstances; if he had intended to set that aside, he would have had to do so explicitly:  “Even when the Law commands you to take an oath, you may not do so.”  That’s not his concern, because that’s a matter of legal requirement—it’s not about what we as his disciples choose to do or not to do.

If the law says we have to swear an oath, that’s to serve the law’s own purposes.  If I choose to swear an oath, that’s to serve my purpose—it’s because I want to convince someone to believe what I’m telling them.  It’s a response to mistrust.  That mistrust may be justified, or it may not, but either way, it puts a wall between us; an oath is like piling stones and furniture at the bottom of the wall, hoping we can build the pile high enough to enable us to climb over.  If we can’t prove we’re telling the truth, maybe we can convince the other person that we wouldn’t dare lie, and they’ll believe us for that reason.  That’s what oaths are for.

The thing is, though, that if we use oaths to convince others that we’re telling the truth, it’s easy for us to tell ourselves that when we don’t swear an oath, it’s okay if we lie; after all, since we didn’t swear to it, we weren’t really committed to tell the truth.  Oaths, then, don’t make us more honest, but less—and they distract us from what really matters.  They tell us that we only have to tell the truth when we swear that we are; and in calling God to witness for this one thing, they imply that God isn’t paying attention to anything else we say.  This is disastrously untrue.  As the German pastor and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Disciples of Jesus should not swear, because there is no such thing as speech not spoken before God.  All of their words should be nothing but truth, so that nothing requires verification by oath.”

There is no such thing as speech not spoken before God.  When­ever we speak, God is standing right behind us listening to every word.  Oaths are unneces­sary, because they’re redundant:  God is already witness to everything we say, and he already holds us to account for all of it.  Part of Jesus’ criticism of the Pharisees is that they take the truth, and oaths, and the things by which they swear, far too lightly.  Indeed, they take God far too lightly.  For all their commitment to holiness and righteousness (as they understand it), we see no awe in their religion; the Scriptures told them that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” but they do not appear to have taken that to heart.  They had no real conception that they served a God who would dare upset all their expectations and careful schemes, much less that they should expect him to.

Jesus says, “Just speak the truth, as simply and plainly as you can; anything you clutter it up with only makes it easier for you to lie.”  We resist that, because we sense that the truth is dangerous; and we’re right.  The truth is dangerous.  Honesty is dangerous.  God is dangerous.  As Annie Dillard writes in Teaching a Stone to Talk,

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions.  Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?  Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?  The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.  For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

God is dangerous because God is alive, and the source of all life; only death is safe, because the worst has already happened.  If we want his life, we have to accept the danger of the truth, plainly spoken, with no crossed fingers and no loopholes.  As Bonhoeffer put it, “There is no following Jesus without living in the truth unveiled before God and other people.”  God is true, so if we are his people, we must also strive to be true, in our relationship with him and our relationships with others.  We must be committed to speak the truth to him, to each other, and to ourselves, and to live according to the truth we speak.

(Exodus 20:14; Matthew 5:27-32, Matthew 19:3-9)

I said two weeks ago that Jesus doesn’t set God’s Law aside, he intensifies it and fulfills it.  Last week, we saw that in the case of the law against murder, as Jesus goes beyond mere outward obedience to the letter of the law to point us to the purpose for which God gave the law; and I pointed out that in so doing, Jesus is taking the scribes and Pharisees head-on, because they taught and followed the law only at the literal level—they refused to ask if their interpretations of God’s Law were consistent with God’s purpose in giving it.  This morning, we’re going to take our passage from Matthew 5 back to front, because it shows us the full force of Jesus’ critique.

You see, when we look at the law given through Moses regarding divorce, in Deuteronomy 24, we need to understand two things.  One, divorce was rampant and uncontrolled in the ancient world, something that was done for even the most frivolous of reasons; and two, divorce was something men did to women, not the other way around.  You’ll notice the Pharisees don’t ask, “Is it lawful for a couple to get a divorce?”—they ask, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”  That’s not an accident.

The divorce law was given to protect women.  One, it established that a man couldn’t divorce his wife unless he could prove some major moral failure on her part; no superficial reasons were allowed.  Two, any man who divorced his wife had to give her a written statement—which, the way the Law worked, he had to give her in the presence of two witnesses—thus preventing him or anyone else from accusing her of being a runaway or a prostitute or whatever other ugly idea someone might come up with.  And three, the decree that any man who divorces his wife is forbidden to remarry her might seem harsh, but it also served this purpose:  it drove the point home, for any man who might be tempted, that divorce was nothing that could be done lightly and later undone.

As well, this law was given to protect God’s institution of marriage, in the exception that Deuteronomy makes and Jesus affirms.  When there is a catastrophic moral failure within a marriage, such that the relationship is defiled, then divorce is permitted, because it’s a recognition of the death of the relationship which has already occurred.  Note, neither Moses nor Jesus commands divorce; Jesus came to make dead people live, and he can raise marriages from the dead, too.  But we can only control what we do, we can’t control what anyone else does, and so there are situations for which God allows divorce, as the best of a bad set of options.

Now, at this point, people tend to want to focus on what’s allowed and what isn’t, and start laying out all the lines and the rules, and I don’t want to go that way.  Let me just say that the term Jesus uses here is not the word for adultery, it’s a broader word for sexual immorality; I believe his point encompasses what one of my mentors called the four As:  adultery, abuse, addiction, and abandonment.  I’m not going to take the time to lay that out, but what’s in view here is anything that breaks faith in a fundamental way with the person to whom one is married, that ruptures the relationship at its core.

What I want to point you to is the difference between this and the Pharisees’ attitude.  They come to Jesus and say, “Moses commanded divorce, so why are you contra­dicting the Law?”  From their point of view, what’s important about the law is that if you want to divorce your wife, you have to give her a certificate of divorce, and so they’re very particular about that; everything else, they’ve twisted into a pretzel.  There were some rabbis, followers of the great teacher Shammai, who were trying to hold the line; but then there was Shammai’s great rival Hillel, and all his school, who held that “indecency” meant that “he may divorce her even if she spoiled a dish for him.”  Later, the prominent Rabbi Akiva would add, “even if he found another fairer than she.”  This is exactly the sort of thing the Law was given to prevent, and they’re using the Law to justify it—and in fact, insisting on it.

This is the problem with living only by law:  if we measure our lives by the law, we tend (consciously or subconsciously) to shrink the law down to where we find it a comfortable measure.  We look for ways to justify the things we want to do, and then we “interpret” the law to include our self-justifications.  If you’re a Supreme Court justice, you use words like “penumbras” and “emanations” to do this; if you’re an ordinary schmo like us, you tell the cop, “Yes, I know I was technically speeding, but the conditions are good and I could see for miles, so it was perfectly safe”; but whatever ways we find, that’s what we try to do.  And we don’t see, or we refuse to see, the damage we do in the process as we carry on doing as we please.

Once again, the Law isn’t fundamentally about behavior, because we can almost always find a way to rationalize doing what we want to do, even when we’ve been told not to do it; it’s about being in right relationship with God, with our families, and with all those to whom we owe faithfulness—and for that, everything matters.  There are few con­cepts in our society more pernicious than that of the “victimless crime.”  There is no such thing.  As I said last week, we do not exist as isolated individuals, but in networks of rela­tionships, and everything that happens to us—and everything we do, even to ourselves—affects everyone connected to us, and everyone connected to them, and so on.  The question is never just, “Is this something I could get caught doing?”  Rather, we need to ask, “Will thinking about this or doing this make my heart pure toward God?  Will it strengthen my relationship with him, or my wife, or my kids, or my boss?  Or—not?”

Both the Old and New Testaments use marriage as an image of God’s love for his people.  The commitment to marry is supposed to be the deepest and most all-encom­passing that we ever make to another human being—a pledge of exclusive devotion to one another with every aspect of our lives, to put one another ahead of ourselves and everyone else on the face of this planet for as long as life shall last.  Yes, sometimes people make that commitment and strive to keep it, only to find it shattered by the person to whom they committed themselves, and so divorce happens.  Yes, there are those in the church who have shattered marriages in the past through their own deliberate sin, who are now trying to follow Christ faithfully; like all the rest of us, they are sinners saved by grace.  All any of us can do is try to make amends as we have the opportunity, accept the grace of God, and go forward from here.  But how we go forward is the point.

And how we go forward is—not trying to justify our sin, but ruthlessly cutting out of our lives anything that tends to draw our hearts away from God, and anything that poisons our relationships with those we love and those who love us.  For those of us who are married, obviously we owe this most after God to our wife or our husband.  This doesn’t mean that any time we feel any temptation, we’re guilty of sin; as Luther said, we can’t stop the birds of temptation from flying over our heads.  The point is, as he continued, we can keep them from building a nest in our hair—and this we are responsible to do.

(Genesis 9:5-6, Exodus 20:13; Matthew 5:21-26)

In seminary, I was trained in an approach to counseling called family systems theory.  It’s a deep and complex field of study, but it rests on a few profoundly simple insights.  Most basic of all:  people don’t exist as isolated individuals, but within networks of relationships—family, work, school, friends, church, and so on—that function as systems.  As a result, everything that happens to each person ripples across all those webs, affecting all the relational systems to which that person belongs.  It’s like when you touch a mobile:  the whole thing moves, not just the piece you touched.

When something is wrong in a family, or a workplace, the stresses get transmitted all over the place, the whole system gets messed up, and the person who ends up showing the problem—the one who cracks first under all those stresses—is often not the person who actually has the problem.  Think of angina:  the first warning many people have of an oncoming heart attack isn’t heart pain, but arm pain.  So it often is in families, or churches, or other organizations:  one person or a group of people shows the symptoms and takes the blame for all the problems, when the real problem is somewhere and something else entirely.  What you see is not what you get.

The danger, then, is that if you focus on the surface issues—if you just try to treat what physicians call the “presenting problem”—you can miss what’s really going on; you can pour all your time and energy into trying to fix one person and get nowhere, because the real sickness isn’t there at all, but outside them.  They’re just the one who’s broken first (or most obviously) under the stress of their dysfunctional family; as long as that doesn’t change, neither will they.

You have to look below the surface if you want to understand the truth; you have to look below the surface if you want to see what matters.  Even when the problem you see on the surface is the primary problem, there’s always more you need to know.  This is true in counseling, it’s true in leadership, and it’s true in teaching the word of God; and Jesus comes down like a rockslide on the scribes and Pharisees because they wouldn’t do it.  They would not look into the commands of the Law, past mere obedience to the letter, to understand their deeper meaning and purpose.  I’ve said before that the Law can’t change the human heart, and that’s true; but the way the Pharisees taught it, they didn’t even challenge the human heart.

The law against murder, for instance, is uncontroversial on its face.  There aren’t any truly universal laws in human history, but that probably comes as close as any.  I ex­pect we’ll all be able to go to bed tonight and say, “Well, I didn’t murder anyone today.”  But does that mean we’ve kept the sixth commandment?  Not necessarily.  Why didn’t you murder anyone today?  If you knew you’d get away with it, would you have been tempted?  Was it just that no one happened to irritate you?  Or was it honestly because of the love and grace of God in your life?

Obedience is not enough.  Results are not all that matters.  The reasons why you do what you do, and the process you use to get your results, are also profoundly impor­tant, because they’re what endures; you can’t keep getting the right result the wrong way very long.  I learned that from math class, but even more, I learned it from baseball.  If a young hitter goes up to the plate every time and just swings at everything that moves, he may hit .300 for a while, he may hit 30 home runs his first year, but he won’t keep it up.  His results may look good, but he’s not really playing as well as they would make you think.  Give the pitchers time, they’ll figure out they don’t have to throw him strikes, and pretty soon he’ll be back in the minors.

Sin is like that.  It isn’t just about doing or not doing certain things, and living a life pleasing to God isn’t just about controlling specific behaviors.  Sin is a weed, and as anyone who’s ever tried to deal with weeds knows, you can mow them down and tear them up all you want, but as long as the root is still in the ground, they’ll keep coming back.  You have to kill the root or dig it out if you want to get rid of the weed.  We have yucca plants along the south side of our house—you might not consider them weeds, but Sara does; and we have yucca despite the fact that the last couple years, she has declared total war on them.  I’m not sure how many pounds of yucca root she’s dug up, except for this:  it hasn’t been quite enough.  Just a little bit of yucca root still alive in the ground, and back come the yucca.  Sin is like that.  You can’t deal with it just by changing your behavior—that’s just the branches; you have to go after the root.

And understand this:  sin always roots itself in something good in us, or something that ought to be good.  Sin is parasitic, because the devil can’t create—he can only twist what God has created.  Anger isn’t evil in and of itself; it’s a necessary and ap­pro­priate response to sin and injustice.  Some things absolutely should make us angry.  But—our hearts aren’t pure, and so our anger is never truly pure; our fears and our pride and our selfish desires have a way of hitching a ride on our anger, multiplying and tainting it.  Even when our anger is justified, it can very easily become a root for sin in our lives, and the enemy is doing everything he can to make sure that it does.

If we hold on to anger against others (especially against other believers), that will tend to fester and breed bitterness—or worse, contempt, which is the coldest and most poisonous of the passions, and along with despair the dead­liest of sins; more, it feeds an attitude of self-righteousness, convincing us that we have the right to punish those who have angered us.  We may not choose to express that by physically killing them, but we will in other ways.  We may insult them to their face, or we may insult them behind their back; we may complain about them, undermine them, turn people against them, or try to stir up conflict.  Jesus doesn’t say that’s as bad as murder, but he does make clear that anyone who lives this way toward others still deserves eternal judgment.

Of course, we all deserve eternal judgment, and it’s only by the grace of God in Christ Jesus that we don’t all get it; but that’s part of the point.  We don’t have the right to hold anger in our hearts, because our anger is impure, and we aren’t pure.  Only God can say otherwise, and so only he has the right to stay angry forever—and here’s the kicker:  God, who alone would be fully justified in turning his anger loose, instead consistently chooses to hold it back to give us time to repent.

God’s chief concern isn’t to satisfy his anger, it’s to reconcile us to himself, which in part means reconciling us to each other.  The true purpose of his law, then, isn’t just to stop us from killing each other—which is to say, to hold back the power of death—but to point us to the way of life.  The question for us as we consider his law, and as we consider our hearts, is whether there’s anything driving a wedge between us and God, or between us and a fellow Christian, or a member of our family, or someone with whom we work, or whomever it may be.

(Psalm 119:9-16; Matthew 5:17-20, Matthew 11:11-15)

As we come back to the Sermon on the Mount this morning, we’re beginning the main body of the sermon.  Jesus opens by telling us about the way of the disciple—sketching out a picture of the life of one who dedicates his life to following Jesus.  In the Beatitudes, he describes the character of a true disciple, as a person who is living the life of the kingdom of heaven in the midst of the kingdoms of this world, and finding blessing in very different ways and places than the world seeks it.  Then in verses 11-16, Jesus portrays the activity of a true disciple, one who has answered his call to move into the world to give of ourselves for the sake of our neighbors.

So far, so good, but of course it’s not enough to draw the big picture—you have to start filling in the details, which is what Jesus will do over the next couple chapters.  The difficulty is that when you do that, the natural tendency is to collapse back into legalism; it’s natural for your hearers to understand it that way, and quite frankly, it’s natural to preach it in that way.  The language of law is the language we have to describe what we should and should not do, and with the language of law comes the mindset of legalism—of salvation through obedience to law.  So what do you do?

Jesus takes the question head on.  In this section, he sets out his thesis for the main body of the sermon—but what I’ve called an explanatory thesis.  It’s not a thesis which he’s going to try to prove; instead, it’s there to explain the approach he’s going to take as he turns to apply the Old Testament law to the question of what it means to live as a disciple of Christ.  And note this, he doesn’t say—as so many Protestants say—that the law has served its purpose and now it’s done and everything is grace.  He doesn’t set the Old Testament law against the New Testament gospel.  Instead, he makes very clear that they’re all of a piece; far from setting aside the law, he actually intensifies it.

The key is Jesus’ statement that he has come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets—which is to say, the whole of the Old Testament.  He hasn’t come to abolish them, but he hasn’t come merely to teach them, either; he’s not just a different kind of Pharisee.  The Law was not the end of God’s plan for his people, or for the world; simply obeying it would never be enough, because law can’t change our hearts.  The Law pointed forward, preparing the way for God’s final answer to the problem of our sin.  That’s why Jesus says, “All the prophets and the Law prophesied until John.”  We understand that the pro­phets looked forward to a time when God would write his law on the hearts of his people and put his Spirit within them; we need to understand that the same is true of the Law.  By itself, it’s incomplete, unfinished; it finds the fulfillment of its purpose in Jesus.

Thus his statement in verse 18:  “Not a yodh, not a stroke, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.”  The yodh is the smallest of the Hebrew letters—it is, roughly, akin to the English i and y; the same is true of the Greek letter iota, from which we take our word “iota.”  The stroke is a small mark you find on some Hebrew letters to distinguish them from other letters to which they are otherwise identical.  In other words, not the smallest thing will disappear from the Law, and not the smallest change will be made, until the world ends and everything God intended to do through his Law has been done.

Is Jesus saying, then, that we have to keep all the Law—that all of it is as binding on us as it was on Moses and Joshua and David?  No.  If he’d wanted to say that, he could have; instead, he says that the Law (and the whole Old Testament) has a purpose—one which goes beyond ritual obedience—and that he’s going to fulfill that purpose.  This he did by living a life of perfect obedience to the will of God, culminating in his judicial murder at the instigation of the religious leaders of his own people, and then rising again from the dead to deny sin and death their victory.  After that, the Old Testament continues to be the word of God, and we are to continue to learn from it and obey it fully—but what it means to obey it has changed.

Now, let me make this clear:  this doesn’t mean that we obey a different list of commands in the same way.  That’s the way the legalistic mind hears this—usually with the idea that the list of commands is a lot shorter and doesn’t include the ones I don’t like.  Whoever teaches that even the smallest of God’s commandments may now be ignored because we follow Jesus may still end up in the kingdom of heaven, but they will not be honored there.  Sure, some of the details of regulation and application no longer apply to us; we have indoor plumbing, so we don’t need to take a trowel and go outside the camp when nature calls.  But even those parts still stand as the word of God, because they still show us something of his character.  Living by grace doesn’t mean we keep God’s Law less:  it means we keep it differently.

The key to understanding that is in verse 20.  The scribes were the religious schol­ars, which of course also meant legal scholars; we might also think of them as the regulators, since they were the ones who determined what qualified as keeping God’s Law and what didn’t.  The Pharisees were a reform movement within Judaism dedicated to restoring the moral and religious health and strength of their nation; they were the social con­servatives—we might call them the Moral Majority of their day.  They held themselves to an extremely high standard when it came to keeping the Law, believing they needed to model the holiest way of life possible for the people around them.  These are two distinct groups, but closely linked, and a lot of the same people in both; and they were respected by the people for their holiness and their knowledge of God’s word.

What could it possibly mean to have a righteousness which far exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees?  If you understood righteousness as they did, in terms of literal obedience to rules and regulations, such a thing would be utterly impossible—this must have absolutely floored Jesus’ hearers.  The only way Jesus’ words make any sense at all is if he’s challenging their whole understanding of righteousness.

If you only go as far as literal observance of rules—however good those rules may be—then you fall short of the kingdom of heaven; indeed, at that point, you haven’t even started on the way.  As the New Testament scholar R. T. France puts it, “Those who are to belong to God’s new realm must move beyond [this] to a new consciousness of what it means to please God, one which penetrates beneath the surface level of rules to be obeyed to a more radical openness to knowing and doing the underlying will of ‘your Father in Heaven.’”

You see, the thing about mere obedience to laws and rules is that, however lax or harsh your rules may be, they all have a limit—and they usually have loopholes and grey areas and contradictions, whether apparent or real.  There always comes a point when you can say, “I’ve done enough to keep the law—I don’t have to do any more”; and if you’re sharp, you can often find ways to do a lot less and get off on a tech­nicality.  You can be hanging off the fence from your knees, but as long as most of you is still on this side, you’re just as good with the law as the guy standing in the middle of the field.

This sort of “what’s the minimum I have to do”/“how much can I get away with” approach to the word of God comes out of the idea of law as a bunch of things you have to do and not do in order to avoid punishment and earn reward.  Jesus leads us to a deeper understanding of God’s law, and his word more generally, as a way to know him and to know how to please him.  This is where we get the delight in the law that we see in Psalm 119, a delight which makes no sense if the law is just a rulebook and a checklist; but it isn’t—it’s an opening into the character and goodness of God.

(Isaiah 42:1-9; Matthew 5:11-16, 1 Peter 4:12-19)

Blessed are you if you’re slandered and persecuted and abused because you’re trying to follow Jesus.  The church keeps telling people, “Come to Jesus and all your problems will be solved”—but if being a Christian has bought you a whole pile of trouble instead, count yourself blessed.

This is essentially an expansion of the previous verse, the eighth beatitude, with one significant shift:  no longer does Jesus say, “Blessed are those,” he says, “Blessed are you.”  He moves from describing a group of people—much as I might describe, let’s say, the kind of people who live in small mountain resort towns—to personal address; and in so doing, he abruptly connects the Beatitudes to the lives of the people before him.  He has presented the vision, he has given them the goal:  now he begins the challenge.

You see, in the Beatitudes, Jesus has laid out the qualities which characterize someone who is truly his faithful disciple, who is being filled with the life of the kingdom of God—but with the last one, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,” there’s a shift.  It still tells us what the life of the kingdom of heaven looks like in this world, but the angle is different; it’s not describing what a faithful disciple of Jesus looks like, but rather what their life will look like.  It belongs among the Beatitudes, be­cause it’s another contradiction to this world’s ideas of what it means to have a blessed life, but at the same time, it doesn’t exactly fit with the rest of them.  It shifts from a description of character to a description of action.

Thus we have the challenge.  It would be possible to be the kind of person described in the first seven beatitudes and have almost no one know it—to stay within a very small circle of friends and family and have very little effect on the world outside.  The eighth beatitude removes that possibility:  those who belong to the kingdom of heaven won’t live that way.  They won’t keep themselves safe from the world—they’ll be out where the world has the opportunity to go after them.  No gated communities allowed.

This is critical, and so Jesus underscores it and aims it directly at the people before him:  “If you follow me, you’ll be slandered and persecuted and abused—and when that happens, rejoice and recognize that you’re blessed.  You’re standing right there with the prophets, and God will reward you for it.”  We often think of good Christians as people who stay out of trouble, but Jesus’ statement is emphatic:  my disciples get into trouble.  Not for doing wrong, sure, but we all know trouble often comes for doing what’s right; that’s why they say, “No good deed goes unpunished.”  If we follow Jesus, we won’t avoid those opportunities—he leads us right into them.  Indeed, he leads us to seek them out.  There are a terrible lot of trouble spots in this world; that’s where the good news of Jesus Christ most needs to be heard, and so that’s where we need to be.

He communicates this by telling us we are salt and light.  These images show us three key things about what we’re supposed to do as his disciples.  First, we are to move into the world.  Salt only does anything when you pour it out of the saltshaker, and light only benefits anyone when you uncover the lamp.  Turn on the light and put a bucket over it, the room is still dark; and while salt is the first great preservative the world ever discovered, it can’t preserve the meat if you leave it on the shelf.  In the same way, we do very little good if we just hang out here in our saltshaker, and our light never gets beyond the front door.  We need to be where the need is.

Partly, that’s a matter of place:  where might we find people who need to be in­troduced to Jesus Christ, and how might we find a way to speak with them?  There’s also the matter of culture.  Let’s say some of us decided we were called to go preach the gospel in Rex’s Rendezvous, or in Zimmer’s corporate head­quarters; in either case, we would find ourselves not just in a different building but in a different cultural environment, full of people who aren’t just like us.  They have different values, goals, assumptions, plans, desires; they might be smarter than us, better educated and more knowledgeable, or they might be rather less so.  How would we earn the right to be heard, and what would we do to be sure we were clearly understood?  We can’t say, “Well, they need to become like us, and then they’ll understand”; but sadly, many churches do.

That sort of attitude develops when we think outreach is primarily about us and our own growth.  In truth, Jesus calls us into the world not to strengthen ourselves but to give of ourselves.  Salt and light work by expending themselves.  Light pours out to be absorbed here and reflected there; salt dissolves in liquids and works its way into the meat; that’s how they fulfill their purpose.

It’s also how God works.  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist in eternal, self-giving love for one another; he created us to share their love with us, to extend the circle of love.  When we rebelled against him, they raised up Abraham, and through him the people of Israel, to extend his love into the world; then Jesus came to live for us, and die for us—and to make us his people, his body on earth, that we might continue his work, to go out and do the same.  He’s creating us as a community of the self-giving love of God, a people of the cross, who understand that our mission is to give ourselves to others, for others, just as he did.  This is profoundly countercultural; our consumerist society is all about taking, not giving.  If the world doesn’t see it in us, they won’t get there on their own.

Our part is to show the world the love of God, so that when they look at us they don’t just hear us talking about Jesus giving his life for us—they see his sacrifice reflected in the way we live our own lives.  We’re called to go into the world, not for our own benefit, but for the flourishing of our neighbors.  Salt is used, not for the sake of the salt, but for the sake of the food and those who eat it.  Light shines, not so we ooh and aah over the light, but so that we can see where we’re going.  And our work is not for the purpose of our own “success” as an organization, however we might define that, but to resist the decay of the world and to light up its darkness.

Jesus calls us to move into the world to give of ourselves for the sake of our neighbors.  He has given us a mission not to avoid the troubles of this world, but to put ourselves right in the middle of them, to get into trouble for his sake and the sake of the gospel.  He calls us to be salt—to be a spiritual preservative, to fight the sin that corrupts our lives and the lives of our neighbors.  We must do so with care and grace, seeking to draw people away from their sin rather than condemn them for their sin,understanding that we need to earn the right to speak by showing them we love them and that we can be trusted, both in one-on-one relationships and through ministries like the Beaman Home.

That said, we can’t shy away from speaking, even though it’s difficult, because Jesus has made us to be light—to let love and truth shine from him through us into the lives of our neighbors, so that the darkness in their hearts and their actions will be revealed for what it is.  Some will thank us for that, responding with humble repentance, and then with the joy of the forgiven, and they’ll come along and follow Jesus with us.  Others will resent us, preferring the darkness, and they’ll fight back, seeking to turn out the light.  But blessed are you when that happens, says Jesus, because that’s how they treated the prophets—and that’s how they treated me.  Blessed are you, says the Lord, because that means you are where I am.