There’s a quip by comedian Steve Martin, “never criticize a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you’ll be a mile away and you’ll have his shoes.” It’s a funny line; that of course, totally misses the point of the “walk a mile in their shoes” line.
That’s the interesting, and challenging thing about language, it’s nuanced. Even a phrase as clichéd as “walk a mile in their shoes” can be interpreted in various ways, as the Steve Martin quip demonstrates. I mean, if you’re going to criticize someone, it’s not bad advice to first steal their shoes and get a mile away, but it maybe isn’t the best way to build empathy and understanding. The question then, is what is the intention behind the action.
Which has been the question we’ve been asking throughout all of the Sermon on the Mount, the lesson I think Jesus has been teaching his disciples to ponder. When the Law says something, what is the intention behind the statement, and how should that intention affect your action. Last week we talked about how Jesus used the pattern of reaffirmation, radicalization, situational application to show his disciples how to understand the law, and we’re going to do that again. But before we get into that, I want to talk about perfection.
The last verse of our reading is also the last verse of this section of the Sermon on the Mount. With that verse, Jesus finished talking about the Law and moved on to worship and religious practice. So verse forty-eight isn’t just the end of the section about loving your enemies, it is also the summation of the whole section about how the Law is fulfilled. “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The problem, of course, is that perfection is an impossibly high standard. Which, certainly Jesus wasn’t above setting impossibly high standards for his disciples, but this one seems a bit much even for Jesus. Obviously, if the goal is Godly perfection, we are going to fall short, so, one might ask, why even try?
The problem, I think, is a translation issue. And not an English translation issue. Actually, I think the writer of Matthew might have gotten it wrong. The Gospel of Matthew was written in Greek, we know that. And Greek culture had this very dualistic view of the world. There was the world we inhabit, which is broken and messy and flawed. And then there was a second world, a clean, pure, unadulterated inner level that could never be reached, but could only be glimpsed at. I’m doing a terrible job at explaining this, I took a lot of philosophy in college, thank you Jesuit education, but I never managed to grasp the Aristotelian idea of the inner chairness of a chair. But here’s the problem with the word perfection. Jesus wasn’t speaking in Greek; Matthew’s Gospel is itself a translation of Jesus teachings. Jesus spoke Hebrew and Aramaic, neither of which has the same dualistic notion of perfection that was found in Greek culture. The closest Hebrew word to perfection is tamim, which means complete, or whole, or mature. Jesus could not be urging his disciples to perfection, for the simple reason of Jesus was teaching them in a language where the concept of perfection didn’t exist.
So what was Jesus saying, when he taught his disciples to be like their heavenly Father? What might it mean, how might one live, if they were striving to be complete, to be whole, to be mature, like our heavenly Father is complete, whole, mature? The Hebrew culture, the culture in which Jesus was teaching, was a culture rich with the openness to complexity. Unlike the Greek culture, which was all about two distinct worlds; in the Hebrew tradition, the world is messy and fallen and broken, and yet is still the footstool of God, as Jesus said in the scripture from last week. Think about this, in the creation story, God made the world and all that was in it, and God called it good. And then God made humanity, and God called it, called us very good. Now, if we believe that God is all-knowing, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that God knew that we would screw this up and bring sin into the world? We talk about the fall of humanity as if it was some great surprise, but God had to have known it was going to happen. And yet, at our creation, even knowing the future that was to come for us, all of the wars and violence and hatred and greed that we would inflict on our world and each other, God also knew our tremendous capacity for grace and forgiveness and love and compassion, and God called us very good. We are complex creatures in a complicated world, and yet God looked at this strange little thing God had created, this little hairless being with nearly unlimited potential to do both harm and good, and God said, this thing here, this human thing is created in my image and is very good. To be complete, whole, mature, like God is to engage in the messiness of the world, to work toward wholeness, because God called creation good at its inception, and the power of the voice of God brings truth into being. The translation in the Message Bible seems much closer to the intent in the Hebrew. That translation reads: ““In a word, what I’m saying is, GROW UP. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.”
The two examples we heard this morning have to do with retribution and love for ones enemies. The retribution law “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” sounds a bit draconian, of course if someone knocked out your eye, that does not then give you permission to gouge out theirs. But in the cultural context in which it was written, it would have set the Israelites apart from their neighbors because it set a limit on recourse. To be an Israelite, to be a follower of the one God, was to abide by a standard that treated even your assailant as a human being, deserving of a punishment that fit only the crime and no more. Jesus then radicalized it, saying it is not enough that retribution should be proportional. In the kingdom of God, there is no retribution at all, for it is God’s will for humanity that grace and mercy prevail.
Like Steve Martin’s shoe quip, there are a lot of ways to read this, and certainly there is temptation and possibility to see such grace and mercy as weakness. How could it be justice to let one’s abuser walk all over them, to turn to someone who has struck us and offer up the other cheek as well, to give to everyone who begs until we ourselves have nothing left.
It seems like weakness, but in fact, the unconditional love Jesus was teaching is the strongest force in the world. First off, because loving ones enemies, or even one’s neighbors, does not mean saying yes to everything they do. Think about this, does loving your kid mean giving them a cookie every single time they ask? No, right. Loving your kid means telling them no sometimes. Another reason this isn’t weakness is that it is super hard. Think about the kid example. Sometimes, when your kid asks for a cookie, even though you should say no, you might give them a cookie, because you’re in the middle of something and you know it will get them to go away. Or you might not give them the cookie, but you might snap at them, can they not see that you’re in the middle of making dinner, which they could have a whole lot faster if you weren’t continually having to engage the cookie conversation. Obviously, neither of these responses make you a bad parent, they make you human. But if it’s that hard with our kids, who we love, it is that much harder with people we don’t love. But, as is often true with hard things, the results can be that much greater.
One of the best modern examples of this is the Civil Rights movement. There’s a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. that I stumbled across recently, that I think captures it perfectly. King said: “We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system, because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.” King’s point here is that an unjust law must be opposed, because we have a moral obligation to work for justice. Loving your enemies does not me co-signing on their injustice. But King went on, the way to oppose such laws was not through violence, but through mercy. So then King said, “so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you… But be assured that we’ll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”
And our victory will be a double victory. That is the power of love. Friends, this is hard. This is super hard. It is hard, and it is incredibly dangerous. Jesus came to challenge the authority of the Roman government with this revolutionary love. And first off, he totally confused his disciples who fully expected the Messiah to be a conquering hero who would ride into town and vanquish the enemy. Then, eventually the Romans killed him for his troubles. But so powerful was this message of love that in dying Jesus destroyed death, and then even death could not hold him and he rose from the dead. Jesus act of unmitigated love so changed the world that two-thousand years later we’re still talking about it, two-thousand years later, we’re still being changed by it.
And with that, our master class on discipleship comes to a close for the season. Next week, we’ll move on to Transfiguration and then we’ll begin the long journey to Lent, where we will see Jesus live out these teachings, all the way to death and beyond. Love, it’s scary and it’s dangerous and it’s totally counter-intuitive. But it is, in the end, the only way to change the world. Thanks be to God, who loved us enough to send his Son, to change the world through his love, and to teach us how to do the same. Amen.
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