(This is the third excerpt from chapter 17 of my manuscript on the Sermon on the Mount; the first two excerpts are here and here.)
It’s not easy to accept Jesus’ declaration that the pure in heart are blessed, but it’s possible to assent intellectually without letting it interfere with our daily lives. It’s far harder to heed John Owen’s dictum, “Be killing sin or it will be killing you,”[1] and declare war on our sin out of a desire to be pure in heart; but though that’s a major spiritual commitment, it’s still one we usually make with unconscious caveats. We assume there are limits to how far we can be expected to go in order to put sin to death in our lives. We assume God is reasonable—on our terms, by our definition—in his expectations.
Jesus shatters those assumptions, because his demands aren’t reasonable at all. In fact, they’re barbarically unreasonable. He commands us to do whatever we have to do to overcome sin in our lives, no matter how much we expect it to hurt or how much we have to give up. If we try to tell him he’s asking too much of us, he looks us right in the eyes and says, “No, I’m not.” There are no exceptions, no loopholes, no limits, and no statute of limitations to his command.
It’s easy to read this legalistically. It’s easy to see Jesus as a martinet issuing orders which are as arbitrary as they are impossible, just to give him an excuse to condemn us. This would be a mistake. Jesus doesn’t want to make it impossible for us to obey God, he wants us to understand the deadly seriousness and grave weight of our sin. We sin too lightly and too blithely; he wants to smash our complacency. Whether we realize it or not, the struggle against sin is a desperate battle which is desperately important. To call it a matter of life and death is to say too little. The stakes are infinitely high; defeat would be unfathomably catastrophic. No price is too high to pay and no sacrifice too great to make: if we lose the war against sin, we lose everything, and all we’ve ever done has been in vain.
Jesus’ language feels harsh, judgmental, and unloving to us because we don’t want to believe our sin is really that bad, and thus don’t see the consequences of shrinking our sin. Jesus takes our sin far more seriously than we do because he takes us far more seriously than we do. The logical conclusion of our desire to shrink our sin is succinctly expressed by the Canadian folk-rock band Great Big Sea: “I want to be consequence free; / I want to be where nothing needs to matter.”[2] The song presents this positively, but it’s a horrifying thought. To be consequence-free is to be inconsequential—to be insignificant, unimportant, and irrelevant.
In warning us that our sin matters far more than most of us want to believe, Jesus tells us that we matter far more than most of us are able to believe. When we try to live by law, we produce a law which is far too small because our understanding of God is far too small because our understanding of ourselves is far too small. This is why Jesus slams our sin in our face: “Not because God wants us to grovel or rub our noses in our brokenness, but that we learn and grow in our awareness of just how important our lives and connections to others really are. Again, we take the significance of our relationships far less seriously than God does.”[3]
Once again, God’s Law isn’t fundamentally about behavior. The Law is 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,” for there is no such thing. We exist not 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. When considering an action, it isn’t enough to ask ourselves if we can justify it. 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?”
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[1] Owen, Mortification, in Works, VI:9.
[2] Alan Doyle, Séan McCann, Bob Hallett, and Darrell Power, “Consequence Free,” Turn, 1999.
[3] Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 144.