I found my brain on overdrive as I was pondering the readings for this week. The Matthew text I knew was going to be complicated, we are reading through the Sermon on the Mount after all. But the Deuteronomy text threw me for a loop. To set scene, the Deuteronomy text comes from the very end of the Israelites’ time wandering in the wilderness. They were just about to enter the Promised Land, which means Moses was just about to hand the leadership of the Israelites over to his successor. What we read today was from Moses’ final speech to the Israelites as their leader. He started by reviewing all of the laws, everything from the Ten Commandments to worship practices and festivals to rules of warfare to what to do if you got a leprous skin disease. It’s super thorough, like, way more than you may have thought. Then, at the end of this whole recitation of law, Moses urged them, “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity…Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.” Choose life, as if it’s just that easy. The problem with this is, of course, it’s never that easy. Moses’ exhortation to just choose life makes it sound like every decision is a series of two clear-cut options, one clearly the right one and the other obviously the wrong one, and all we need to do is just pick the right one. And maybe it’s just my natural skepticism, but I have never found any decision to be that easy. On any topic from world peace to what I should have for lunch, I can give you a series of increasingly complicated opinions arguing both sides of the situation. You should have seen the pro-con list when I tried to buy a running watch earlier this year.
I like this passage from Deuteronomy, because it appeals to my desire for order and clear-cut answers. I wish life was so simple as “see I have set before you life and prosperity, death and adversity, choose life.” But I have just not experienced that to be the case. Honestly, when someone tells me that all the answers they need for life are in the Bible, I tend to wonder if they’ve actually read much of it.
Also honestly, the fact that the Bible is complicated and not clear-cut is what I love about it. Those complications and contradictions are what make scripture come alive for me, it is what makes this messy, convoluted story of God’s love for God’s people believable and real. I love that the Word of God invites me to engage with it, to wrestle with the complexities of life and humanity, to learn and to grow and to change. I love that God’s word is strong enough to handle my questions and my challenges, and I know that I am a better person, that I have grown, through of my study of it. The complexities of scripture have challenged me to grow in ways that a checklist of right living could not have accomplished. I’m grateful for a God who loves me enough to trust me with the freedom of complexity. What a gift and a leap of faith that feels like.
The beautiful and terrible complexity of scripture is what Jesus was addressing in the section of the Sermon on the Mount we read this morning. Remember the Sermon on the Mount is insider conversation; it is a master class on discipleship for those who are already part of the community of Jesus-followers. It is for those who have already experienced the unconditional grace and love of God that can never be earned or deserved and is totally and completely a gift God has given to us and now want to know how to live well in response to that gift. If I can quote Spiderman here, “with great power comes great responsibility.” This section is the “great responsibility” side of the equation. God has chosen life for you, how shall you live with this one precious life?
Last week, we heard Jesus tell the disciples “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law… I have not come to abolish but to fulfill.” Jesus then fleshed out what he meant by fulfilling the law by giving examples. We heard four of those examples today, anger, adultery, divorce, and oaths. We’ll hear the last two next week, retaliation and treatment of enemies. Any of the four could be a sermon series in and of itself. So instead of picking any one of them, I want to look at the form of all four of them, pick apart Jesus’ pedagogy a little bit, and see what Jesus’ overall purpose might have been.
All of these sections follow the same pattern. First, Jesus reaffirmed the law. “You have heard it said that: fill in the blank.” For example, anger. You have heard it said “You shall not murder.” One of the Ten Commandments. Pretty cut and dry, right. Don’t kill people. How complex can that be? Well, what about in self-defense? What if it was an accident? Or abuse that comes close but does not lead to death? What about war, what constitutes just war? It sounds easy until you hold it up to any actual situation, and then it is instantly more complicated. The Pharisees, and let’s face it, all religious and civil leaders throughout all of human history, past and present, tried to solve these questions by adding increasingly complicated levels of legislation around it. Which helps, but there are always gaps and cracks that screw up the question. We cannot, no matter how hard we try, legislate ourselves into right living. So check out what Jesus did next, he radicalized the law. And by radicalized, I don’t mean the way that the word radicalized gets used today, where “to be radicalized” means to move to the violent fringe of a system. This is the opposite of that. I mean radicalized like to move to the radix, to the root of the command. What was God’s will for God’s people behind the institution of this command. So in the anger example, “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 the radix, the root of the command about murder is much deeper than don’t kill people. It gets to God’s desire for us; God’s will for us is a community where there is not hostility between God’s people. An evaluation of how to live out the law “you shall not murder” should not ask the limiting question of “is this or is this not murder,” but rather should ask the ever expanding question of “does this action help to bring about God’s will of a community without hostility, and if it does not, what would?” The difference is subtle, but it is profound. One closes ever-tightening walls around who belongs and who does not, and the other seeks to open the expanse of God’s kingdom to ever-widening reaches.
Understanding the law from the point of view of God’s intention behind it makes living within the law impossible. This anger one is especially interesting because taken to its furthest extreme, even Jesus seemed to fall short of it. In Matthew chapter twenty-three, Jesus will call the Pharisees “blind fools.” And if Jesus is sinless and the fulfillment of the law and yet Jesus cannot live up to the law, then clearly we are misinterpreting something here, as both of those things seemingly cannot be true. The misinterpretation, I think, is that same mistake of thinking there could be a clear-cut, right-wrong answer. Living perfectly within the intention is impossible, because the world is impossibly complicated. So after getting to the radix, to the root of the law, Jesus then went on to give his disciples a situational application for how to live from this root understanding. “So,” Jesus said, “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.” Basically, Jesus was like, look, it is God’s will that there be no hostility in the world. But obviously, it is impossible to never be angry; the world is full of people, not mindless automatons. You’re going to get your feelings hurt; you’re going to hurt other people. It happens. So, when it happens, be about reconciliation. Be about finding ways to move past the hurt and the anger to rebuild relationships with one another. The law is fulfilled not by one clear-cut statement, don’t be angry, but by a thousand tiny outreaches of grace, a thousand small movements toward each other.
And the super cool thing about this reaffirmation, radicalization, application process Jesus taught the disciples, is it totally works for all of the law. To prove my point. I mentioned that Deuteronomy has a law about what to do about leprous diseases. There’s actually two whole chapters about it, Leviticus thirteen and fourteen, if you’re really bored sometime, you could check it out. But the basic premise is, if you have a leprous disease, show yourself to the priest and do what they tell you. Friends, this is obvious but, if you have a leprous disease, unless you know a priest who also happens to be a medical professional, do not show it to a priest, because we will not know what to do for you. I mean, by all means, show it to me if you want. I spend a lot of time in hospitals, I’m comfortable with whatever. And I will certainly pray with you and sympathize with you and provide pastoral care. But in terms of medical advice, I will not be helpful. So what do we do with this law? Do we ignore it? But Jesus said he came not to abolish, but to fulfill. So what’s the radix, the root intention of the whole priest/leprosy thing? Well, priests were the most well-educated members of a community. You showed yourself to a priest for the same reason you would go to a doctor today, because the priest was the person in your community who had the most training and knowledge, they were the person most qualified to help you. Leviticus says that if the leprosy looks deep, the priest should confine the person and then check it in seven days. Remember there aren’t like antibiotics or creams or anything, the only option is really wait and see. Confining a person was the only way to keep a potential illness from spreading to the rest of the community. So might the radix of this be that it is God’s will that people live in healthy and vibrant communities? That people have access to the care they need, and that the sick and vulnerable are protected? If that is the radix for the laws about leprosy, that God’s will for us is health, how then do we put that into practice? How do we create communities of health and well-being? How do we care for ourselves and for others to truly bring about God’s vision of a healthy community? These are much harder questions than simply do this, but they are also much richer and more life-giving ones.
This process of reaffirmation, radicalization, application is hard. Yes it would be much easier if Jesus had just been like, do this, not that. And yes, we’re totally going to screw it up all the time. And we’re going to royally disagree on how we do this and what conclusions we reach. But when I read this section of the Sermon on the Mount, I can’t help but feel honored that Jesus loved his disciples, loves us enough, and believes in us enough to teach us how to ask these questions and to help us grow into a fuller vision of who God has created us to be. And that belief and that love and that trust Jesus shows makes me want to try to live up to this expectation. Jesus said you are salt, you are light, and the fact that Jesus seems to feel that it is true makes me want to live up to that expectation, and gives me the confidence to try again even when I fall short. And I hope that the complexity, the challenge, and the objective reality that you are loved by God fills you with the confidence and the courage as well. Thanks be to God, who loves us and believes in us more than we could ever believe in ourselves. Amen.
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