Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Matthew 5:21-37
Before It Gets to That Point
First Presbyterian Church, Birmingham
J. Shannon Webster
February 12, 2017
Ordinary 6
You have heard it said…, Jesus told them, but I say to you. Where had they heard any of this
said? In the Torah, and in Deuteronomy’s call to obedience to the Torah, the Law of Moses. The
Ten Commandments. At first it sounds like Jesus is either dismissing them or changing them,
with his formula: You have heard it said…, but I say to you, but that it not what is happening
here. This is a part of the Sermon on the Mount – 3 chapters in Matthew that gather Jesus’
teaching, his agenda for us, in one place. (Cat Goodrich and I have decided to preach the whole
Sermon on the Mount over the next several weeks.)
The formula in our Old Testament text is “Life and death are set before you; choose life.” King
Josiah had this version of the Exodus written when he was trying to reform Israel and save the
Kingdom from itself. It is the ancient covenant formula of blessings or curses, and Deuteronomy
goes back to the Covenant at Sinai, what Moses brought down from the mountain, to pose the
choice – Life and prosperity or death and adversity. We’re not used to having only two choices.
WalMart gives us a wider selection! The Covenant defined the difference between Israel and the
surrounding Canaanite culture in a time in which (as Brueggemann describes it) “everything and
everyone was reduced to a tradable commodity.”1 That should probably sound familiar to us, in
our time when money is power and control, our whole society is driven by the quest for consumer
goods, and wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. Back then, the covenant of
Moses called people into relationship, into community, for their own sake and for God’s. Not for
the sake of acquiring things. But they had to make a choice. (“Choose life” is often invoked these
days in the debate over abortion, but that’s out of context. This is about the option of the whole
people of Israel to choose blessing.)
Jesus summarized the whole Torah this way – You have heard it said…, but I say to you. You
have heard the Ten Commandments, but I say to you the whole Law is summed up in this: Love
the Lord your God with everything you’ve got, and your neighbor as yourself. Jesus didn’t
overturn the Torah, he deepened it – made it harder, if anything – in order to do this: make it
loving and just. That’s good, because we are surrounded still, in our own time, by a culture that
(Brueggemann) “wants to talk us out of our baptism.”2
Jesus began to use examples – familiar sayings or scripture they would know – and the first 3 he
took from the Commandments, the 6th, 7th and 9th. You have heard it said ‘You shall not murder,’
(more precise translation than ‘kill’), but I say to you if you are angry with a brother or sister you
re liable to judgment, and also if you insult them … and he adds more, but already we are
thinking (and I’m sure they were), “Well I’m angry a lot of the time…” and perhaps that is the
point. Anger erodes our life together, our relationships. It may even build until it is our of
control, and someone pulls a gun out of the glove box in a fit of road rage, or has had enough
insult that they take that gun to school, or we say something we can never take back or unsay and
damage a relationship, or someone, somehow gets hurt, even dies. We cultivate anger in extreme
language on internet sites or television, language that demonizes others and even makes them
targets for the off-balanced maniac who (for whatever tortured reason) needs someone to hate.
We cultivate anger in barely controlled outlets. I could talk about SEC football and the shooting
that happened after the 2013 Iron Bowl, but you might get angry with me. So let’s take a
Canadian example – our gentle neighbors to the north have given us hockey – a game filled with
rage, fighting, high-sticking and even players who are designated “enforcers.” Hockey legalizes
1
anger. When is the last time you saw a fight break out at a curling match? Was anyone shot after
the last Bassmasters Fishing Tournament?
Jesus used an example: You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery, but I say to you
that whoever looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. He
relates this to divorce, saying whoever divorces his wife except on grounds of unchastity causes
her to commit adultery, and who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. A preacher is on
dangerous ground here, in a time when half of marriages end in divorce. But here is the problem
Jesus addressed. Old Testament law permitted divorce, but only the man could divorce a woman,
not the other way around, and he didn’t even have to have a reason. (Greek, Roman and Egyptian
law were more fair.) Women were considered property, and divorce and adultery both had to do
with male rights and honor, in a property crime. Bible Scholar Crossan says that Jesus redefined
both divorce and adultery in a way that made it no longer androcentric (only about the man), so
that “honor belongs to the woman as much as the man.”3 William Countryman sees Jesus’
teaching as a radical change, for that time: “Prohibition of divorce and redefinition of adultery
took the wife out of the realm of disposable property and made her equal to the husband.”4
What did Jesus say in practice, in other Gospels? The father-son preacher team John and James
Carroll said that we should remember what Jesus did when the Pharisees were going to stone to
death the woman caught in adultery, or what he said to the Samaritan woman who’d had five
husbands. They write of divorce that “whoever goes through this wrenching experience would
receive from Jesus forgiveness rather than condemnation.”5 Sexual desire is often at work in us
somehow – we don’t need to even quote Jimmy Carter’s Playboy interview; we know this without
a lot of introspection.
Jesus here asks for a thoughtful review of our basic attitudes, what we allot to take root in our
hearts, and how that motivates the choices we make. It is less about having anger than about what
we do with it, less about biological instincts than what we do with them, and that our actions rise
from our better intentions. Jesus did not rescind the prohibition against murder, but put it into a
continuum of outcomes where anger or greed lie just to one side of it. Just as adultery is not just
that in itself, but making someone else an object instead of a person. My chaplain supervisor
back in seminary, Phil Anderson, used to say that the sin of lust was not wanting too much from
someone, but wanting too little.
James Taylor points out that lust is a staple in advertising, make us desire the product, often by
making us think the product will make us desirable, but its never the truth. “Commercials never
show a bunch of bored, balding, pot-bellied men slowly drinking themselves into a stupor. They
never show a group of kids puking their guts out in a corner of the parking lot... the reality isn’t
appealing or sexy, but reality doesn’t sell beer. Wishful thinking does.”6 Which could bring us to
the third of Jesus’ examples: You have hear it said, ‘You shall not swear falsely,’ but I tell you do
not swear at all. Let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no’. This is not about profanity. It is
about what do we wish to speak when we speak in the name of God. “Hard-hearted people do not
speak the truth,” said Edwin Van Driel. “Jesus asks us to speak as ones who inherit the kingdom,
where everything is true.”7
Elsewhere Jesus sums up the Law as Love the Lord your God with everything you’ve got, and
your neighbor as yourself. “God is not a cosmic cop,” wrote Lutheran Bishop Brian Maas. “God
loved us with a whole heart.”8 Love goes beyond “not murdering” and “not committing adultery”,
beyond not doing stuff to doing it the right way and for the right reason. Act differently before it
ever gets to that point. What he gave the crowd, in these examples, were ways to not damage one
2
another. Don’t hurt each other. Respect for the life of the other is at the heart of the Law. Don’t
wait until it is too late, to make things right.
The lesson is to know and examine our heart, and to act with love, in the interests of the other – as
God did with us in Christ Jesus. If Jesus had an agenda that differed from the petty legalisms of
the Pharisees, it was the protection and well-being – Shalom – of the human children of God.
Love, restraint, care for the other, don’t objectify a person, tell the truth. Ask yourself. Are those
virtues we see modeled in our world today? Are those the people we honor and celebrate? What
do we see on all the screens that occupy our attention these days? What do we hear from those
who entertain us, those who lead us, those who influence us? What effect are they having on us?
And what to we need to pray about, do, and change in our own lives, before it gets to a point
where we didn’t mean to be.
1
Brueggemann, Walter. Collected Sermons Vol. 2, Westminster/John Knox, Louisville, 2015, p. 58
ibid, p. 59.
3
Crossan, John Dominic. The Historical Jesus, HarperSanFrancisco, 1992, p. 301.
4
Countryman, William. Dirt, Greed and Sex, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1988, 0. 181.
5
Carroll, John T. and James R. Preaching the Hard Sayings of Jesus, Hendrickson Pub., 1996
6
Taylor, James. Sin: A New Understanding of Vitue and Vice, Northstone Press, 1997, p. 85.
7
Van Driel, Edwin. Feasting on the Word, Westminster/John Knox Press, p. 361.
8
Maas, Brian. “Living the Word,” Christian Century, Chicago, Jan. 18, 2017, p. 21.
2
3