6 Epiphany A
February 16, 2020
Sirach 15:15-20
Psalm 119:1-8
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Matt.5:21-24,27-30,33-37
How is it that we have decided that we don't have to live
totally impaired lives before a holy God? Because we have come to believe
in God's mercy and forgiveness. We have come to believe in God's
tolerance of us as we live imperfect lives on a path of perfectability.
The beatitudes are artistic wisdom performance discourse
from the mouth of Jesus. Jesus performed this wisdom on behalf of lowly
people who did not have significant community religious standing or inclusion
because they couldn't keep up with all the religious rules. It was also
delivered as a rather severe polemic against religious figures such a scribes
and Pharisees who had come to practice the exclusion of lots of people from
God's love and grace. How were they practicing exclusion? They used the law as
punishment and not as method of teaching the great principles of the law of
loving God and one's neighbor. For them the law was more about incarceration
rather than rehabilitation. Jesus came to say that the fulfillment was
the law was to be the rehabilitation and instruction of our lives, not for our
punishment.
When you perform all the ritual rules, the referees can be
around to observe and check you off on their attendance and performance
charts. You can attain great public status by performing all of the
required ritual and people can think that you are jolly good fellows and
lasses. You can be publicly praised for all your "righteous"
behavior. But from all of these strokes for good public religious
behavior you can take it upon yourself to become the judge for those who are
not doing as well as you are in keeping the public ritual practices.
Keeping the legalistic religious ritual can become equated with rightness
before God; not keeping the ritual means that others can be regarded as not being
right with God. So one can begin to feel justified before God by keeping
all of the religious rituals.
This is the mindset which drew from Jesus his rather
hyperbolic and exaggerated discourse. "Guys if you really want to
play hard ball with the law and righteousness, you have to deal with
righteousness on your insides. On the outside, you may be following the
religious rules because you can, but what's going on inside? Are you
hating your brother and sister? Are you calling your brother a fool and an
idiot? Are you having greedy thoughts, lustful thoughts, prideful
thoughts, are you trivializing the rules of divorce to even divorce your wife
because you don't like her soup? God who sees your insides demands
internal holiness, so God could practice the law of the claw, "eye for an
eye, tooth for a tooth," with you." Do we see how in the
exaggerated speech of Jesus, he uses reductio ad absurdum; he showed the legalists the logical conclusion of their practices and how silly and contradictory such
practices are. We can use religious rules to look good in public, even
while our insides can be rotten, especially rotten with negative judgments of
other people who we want to compare ourselves with as being unfavorable because
they are not keeping "our rules."
Jesus was teaching people that the laws, no matter how good
and expansive you apply them cannot do the inside job. And they can't
make you perfect before God. All people might do well with 9 of the 10
commandments but that 10th is the kicker. Thou shalt not covet.
Thou shalt not let your desire focus wrongly on anything. The inside
desire is the real problem. Jeremiah wrote "the heart is exceedingly
deceitful and who can know it?" Sigmund Freud wrote that the unconscious
mind is polymorphously perverse. The Psalmist begged, "Create in me
a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me."
People can become legalistic as way to whistle in the dark
as they try to avoid being honest about all of the contrary ways that inner
desire can throw up in one's life.
Did Jesus have a problem with the law? No, he
didn't. But he said don't use the law for the public performance of vows,
to announce, "Look at me I'm really good at keeping the law."
Just let the law be good behavioral probability theory, a yes or a no, in
recommended behaviors for avoiding some major problems in life. Let the
law teach you how to approximate justice. You know, if you don't lie, don't
kill, and don't steal, honor your family, your life will go better.
That's good behavioral probability theory.
Jesus was announcing that the performance of any law does
not make one righteous; why? Because we still have to deal with our
insides. It means that we are always in need of God's mercy and grace to
make up what we lack. It means we cannot compare ourselves with others to
judge them harshly or to accept their harsh judgments. God's grace is
always relative to each person's life experience, which means we can't judge
each other. For me to be better today than yesterday, means something
different for you and everyone else. Personal repentance and God's grace is uniquely
applied to each person; therefore we can't judge each other harshly.
But we do. We can be so perversely competitive that
we can ruin even good things. St. Paul noticed that the Corinthian Church
was ruining ministry, which is a good thing. They did this by creating competition between
Christian leaders. The appearance of success in ministry is very
relative. Watering and planting is just as good as harvesting, though we
may think that the ones who have the success of harvest are better than the
people who plowed and planted without seeing any results.
What is the law of ministry? Just do it, where you
are. We present ourselves to God to do what we're supposed to do where we
are and damn the consequences or the results.
In ministry and in life, Jesus reminds us through the
Sermon on the Mount, that it is in God's grace and forgiveness that we live and no matter what rule of life that we find ourselves committed to. We
cannot judge others as being bereft of God's grace because we know that our
interior life is not always pure. God can create in us the heart of the Holy
Spirit who co-exists with our polymorphously perverse interior lives and thus
present us as worthy to God, even as we tolerate ourselves in our unfinished
condition. And we humbly tolerate other people with forgiving and
non-judgmental living.
Let us appreciate the stark language of Jesus in the Sermon
on the Mount as an invitation not to take our petty systems of legalism as a
valid reason to judge others. Let us understand that the high standards
of the Sermon on the Mount bring us to one conclusion: accepting God's grace
and forgiveness on our life journey. And if we can accept it for
ourselves, then we will also offer it to everyone else too. And this is
the Gospel. Amen.
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