For Sunday, February 16, 2014 – Matthew 5:21-37
Devoted followers of religion tend to think quite a bit about The Rules. What does God require? Is God pleased or angry with me? Will I gain God’s favor if I am good enough and keep my sins disguised well enough? Religious folks who were devoted to calculating the law and their performance would not have been pleased to hear Jesus speak of it in a different way. Maybe he would be easing up on these revered regulations handed down from Moses. Maybe he was going to terminate a standard they had known for centuries and preach who-knows-what-kind of loose, no rules, free love. Was he just another fresh faced kid attracting a following by tossing aside tradition? Would he promote no more hard stuff, no rigorous discipline? How about just fellowship and fun, just eating in each other’s homes and laughing and telling stories? Look at some of the people Jesus was attracting—not exactly the cream of the temple crop! Very few Sabbath School gold stars for decorum and scholarship had been handed out to this bunch.
Jesus already had upset the temple crowd when he said he was fulfilling Isaiah’s vision of good news for the poor and the imprisoned and the oppressed. Maybe he had a following simply because he had lowered the standards. Does anything but trouble come from messing with the law? And indeed, Jesus does intend to “mess with” the law—not dismiss it, but look at the old ways in new ways. He cuts through the religious smog so that the light of truth can shine. He intends a much more radical action than erasing the law; he intends to flesh it out, putting it in the context of real life, our struggles to be honest in our relationships, our fierce resistance to love. Jesus says, don’t keep religious things in one box and your life in another. Don’t put a relationship with the law above your relationships with one another.
Jesus knows we have used God’s law primarily to comfort or to criticize ourselves, to feel self-righteous or self-loathing, morally superior or ashamed. Keeping the letter of any law, he knows, will never be a path to abundant life. Restraining ourselves from acts of murder, adultery, divorce, swearing falsely will never be enough. God wants more. God wants it all. Not our actions alone, but our thoughts, our intentions, our words, our being. Jesus knows, not how difficult keeping the law is, but how impossible. Do you hear me? It is impossible to perform our way into relationship with God. It is impossible to act in ways that will earn God’s favor. Only when we get this, that we are not able consistently to keep the law, do our spirits begin to align with the One who can.
