"You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not murder'; and 'whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.' 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. So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny."Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.' But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let your word be 'Yes, Yes' or 'No, No'; anything more than this comes from the evil one."
"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.
"It was also said, 'Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.' But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
Okay, now that I’m preaching every other week, you’d think the lectionary texts would align themselves so I don’t have to deal with the tough passages, wouldn’t you. But here we are, on this 6th Sunday after Epiphany dealing with all sorts of unpleasantness in the gospel reading.
People disagreeing…divorce…murder…adultery. You name it, it’s probably in those 16 verses that Lisa and I read to you just moments ago. It sounds more like the headlines from the magazines at the grocery store checkout line than words from scripture. So here I am, all ready to bring the good news and I’m stymied by the Bible of all things. Go figure.
These verses that we heard are part of Jesus’ sermon on the mount. We’re in the midst of a lectionary run on the sermon on the mount that begins with the beatitudes. And here we are facing some of the most difficult of Jesus’ sayings this morning.
I’d be willing to bet that the warnings about not murdering apply to none of us in this room this morning. But how about anger? Or insulting someone else? Jesus pushes the edges here and throughout the reading. He goes to extremes and forces us to reexamine who we are and how we behave.
When you look at these verses from a distance, without starting to beat up on yourself for being less than perfect, you’ll see that they are all about relationship; right relationship. Through these five to seven admonitions that Jesus tags onto previous laws we see him go deeper into how we are supposed to behave with each other.
Forget about murder and adultery and divorce; remember how you’re supposed to act with each other on a day-to-day basis. That’s the crux of living the live that Jesus calls us to. And that’s what Jesus is doing in this sermon on the mount: he’s calling us to live a life that follows his example. We would call it a Christian life, though of course, Jesus would never use that terminology: the term “Christian” is still years to come when he stood up and preached his sermon.
So we struggle and wrestle with this scripture, trying to coax out the good news. Murder, to look at the first instance Jesus uses, is serious business. Jesus isn’t denying that at all. But he is saying that anger is serious too. Both murder and anger are important enough to garner God’s attention in our lives. Murder and anger may be two sides of the same coin.
From these pronouncements that Jesus made that day on the hilltop, we can get an idea of what might have been going on in the first-century Near East. In that crowded, bustling area, brutally controlled by Rome and trying to keep religious laws that originated centuries earlier that were for an agrarian, nomadic people, Jesus was trying to point out that you have to go beyond the law and create law that governs how you interact with those who are right around you.
Of course, for any society to survive, there have to be rules and laws. Laws about murder, rules about divorce, and so on. But Jesus was saying that we have to go deeper than the humanly-created rules and laws and think about reconciliation. Yes, that’s right, reconciliation. Because if God is going to go to the trouble of reconciling us to God, we have to make the effort to reconcile ourselves with each other. And that means paying attention to things like anger.
Now, in this day and age of the 21st century in North America, I’m not about to stand up here and say that anger, in and of itself, is a bad thing. Of course, we get angry and sometimes that’s actually a good thing. If I don’t encounter injustice and get angry, there’s something wrong. But what we do with our anger is what’s important. If we allow it to fester and boil over and ruin a relationship that we have with someone, that’s when we’re no longer reconciled to our brother or sister. If anger is all we feel in our relationship with someone though, we are missing something; something important.
We’re not that different from those who were struggling to survive some 2,000 years ago you know. Yes, Rome isn’t such a big deal anymore; it’s no longer the seat of an empire. And we no longer follow the religious laws that regulated life for the 1st century Jew. We are bound however by laws that go beyond what our current empire demands of us. Yes, we pay taxes and we don’t murder but nothing out of Washington is going to tell us how to be in right relationship with each other. It isn’t illegal to be angry or to feel lust, thank heavens. But it’s our Christian calling that keeps us in right relationship and tells us how to deal with the anger or lust or any other number of feelings that we might be having.
Because that’s the thing. Jesus only scratches the surface here if you think about it. There is a passel of ways that we can damage our relationships with each other. And if we allow such things to get in the way, we need to reread that sermon on the mount and pay special attention to the passage we heard this morning. We, being the inventive humans that we are, have found all sorts of ways to alienate ourselves from each other. We seem almost limitless in our abilities to cause a rift in the fabric that binds us to each other.
So when these rifts occur, we are called to mend them as best we can. Whatever it is that comes between us and another needs to be addressed. Through our ministrations to our relationships we can bring about true reconciliation with each other and therefore with our God.
Jesus’ words this morning may have been hard to hear but if we look behind them we find that there is an attempt to cause right relationship. If we are indeed to answer our call to live the Christian life, we must begin with our relationships with each other and seek true reconciliation. For through those relationships we find the glimmer of truth that is our relationship with God.
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