(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.