“Until All Is Accomplished”

An sermon based upon Matthew 5: 17-48  (Read only Matthew 5: 17-20) 

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin. 

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership,   

Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 2nd, 2020 

We had furnace problems at church.  Instead of meeting in the sanctuary we assembled in the basement and our sitting arrangements were different.  One fellow, who normally sat at the very back row, was sitting on the very front and listening very intently to my message on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.   

After the service ended, the man came up to me.  He first told me that he appreciated my sermon, but he was wondering how we could dare take Jesus literally.  ‘Surely’, he said, ‘Jesus couldn’t have meant for us to live like this in the ‘real world’.  These how we will live in heaven, right?   

That man was asking a good question.  Was Jesus being realistic when he said, “Your righteousness must exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees”?  He went on to explain this by saying: “You’ve heard it said… “Don’t murder, but I say don’t even get angry at your brother”.   “You’ve heard it said, don’t commit adultery, but I say “Don’t even lust in your heart”.  “You’ve heard it said, you may divorce your wife, but I say, don’t…”.  “Don’t make vows”, “Turn the other cheek.” “Go the second mile”,  and strangest of all, he said: “Love your enemy”?  What planet was Jesus on?  Didn’t Jesus realize he was talking to humans, and not angels?    

BE PERFECT… 

I hate to tell you this, but Jesus saved the hardest part for last.  Go to the end of today’s text and in most versions of the Bible you’ll his final summary.  Summing up all these, difficult, unrealistic, challenging, exceptional teachings, Jesus concludes:  ‘Be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect.’  Yea, right!  But God is in heaven, and we’re not.  Isn’t this where many people write the Bible off as ‘wishful thinking’?  Who can ‘be perfect’ like this, especially when it comes to loving an enemy?  

When I was concluding elementary school, Billy was who we would call a bully.  He sat in front of me, and constantly pestered me.  Once I thought he was going to choke me to death.  I had knelt down to pick up Diane’s pencil, like a gentleman should do, and Billy jumped on my back wrapping his arms around my neck.  My lights almost went out and he finally stopped.  He only stopped because Diane was pleading with him.  I was humiliated and felt like a fool.  I had not been taught to fight back. 

On the school bus that afternoon, I vowed (First exception to Jesus) to myself that this would ever happen again.  I couldn’t afford Karate lessons, so I bought simple self-instruction book on Judo; a fighting method based on teaching self-defense, like most law enforcement, and military personnel learn.  I got my best friend to help me and we went through and rehearsed the basics together.  One day, before the teacher arrived in math class, Billy jumped on my back again.  I was standing up this time and made a move just like I had rehearsed.  I threw Billy over my shoulder and he landed on his back on the concrete floor.  He looked shocked.  People around were laughing as I walked away to go to my seat.   

Billy never jumped on me again.  That was my second exception to Jesus, and I’ll have to admit, it felt very good.  It worked too.  It worked in a way that turning the other cheek never could.   

So, it’s here that we come back to the question the man asked me at church: ‘Jesus couldn’t have meant this for the real world, could he?’. I wish I could have given that fellow an easy answer, but there is no simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’.  Life is always more complicated than that, and righteousness and goodness, just like love, can get complicated too.   

But there is one simple answer I know that I you right up front.  If you try to live like this in the ‘real world’, you could get hurt.  Jesus did live like this and we all know what happened to him.  You certainly couldn’t ‘turn the other cheek to Hitler’.  You also couldn’t ‘love an enemy like communism that declares to you, like Soviet Communism once declared to our country, ‘We will bury you’!  One German Christian, who came to America because of Nazism, just like many others did because of communism, said that some evils in life call for ‘Christian Realism’ instead of ‘Christian Idealism’.  In other words, while we should do our best to follow Jesus in this world, since the kingdom of heaven hasn’t fully come, even peace-loving Christians sometimes have to ‘get real’ in this fallen world. 

That German-American Christian, Reinhold Niebuhr, was right.  We must live toward Christian ideals, but now, in this fallen world, we have to ‘be realistic’ too, right?  But wasn’t Jesus just as realistic as any human could ever be?  Are we simply to write Jesus off every time we face an evil, or moral challenge?  Is this what Jesus words are finally reduced too—-a nice way to dream, but far away from the realities of our everyday life?  And if this is what we settle for, why did Jesus call us to be Salt and Light?  How can we be salt if we stay in the salt shaker? How can we be light by hiding these values and behaviors under a basket every time the world gets dark?  Shouldn’t being a Christian mean more than simply doing what everyone else does?             

YOU’VE HEARD IT SAID… 

Being Christian and following Jesus doesn’t have an ‘easy button’.  Having a savior who died on a cross who bids his disciples to take up their cross can’t be easy, and Jesus most certainly didn’t say ‘blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake’ for nothing.  When you follow Jesus there is a cost to pay, just like there is a cross to bear, but Jesus isn’t trying to get us killed.  So, what did Jesus mean?  

The key to understand Jesus’ radical commands must focus on what Jesus was teaching about God’s law.  In the ancient Jewish world, and still in many Jewish and Christian groups today, following and obeying God’s law is the way to live a good, moral, and upright life. This is why Jesus declares right up front, before he makes any moral challenge: “Don’t think that I’ve come to abolish the law.  I’ve come to fulfill it.” (5:17).   

As one commentator says, when it comes to the Law of Moses, we should think of Jesus as a great searchlight and a laser-beam. Whereas a searchlight magnifies the light through a great lens and displays light powerfully across the sky and a laser intensifies and concentrates the light, the event and person of Jesus Christ helps the ancient light of God’s Law to be even more focused and enlarged.  At every place and in every piece of the law, Jesus asks ‘What is the will of God that stands behind each commandment he wants us to ask ourselves how may we be obedient to God’s will being expressed in the law.’ (Tom Long). 

We see exactly what this means in the opening of the gospel when Jesus reinterpreted Sabbath laws (Matt. 12: 1ff.).  After Jesus and his disciples got in trouble with religious leaders for plucking grain and healing a lame man on the Sabbath Day, Jesus pointed beyond the ‘letter of the law’ to the law’s original intent, which was to offer justice and mercy in ways that would nourish, sustain and restore God’s people. In other words, God’s intention was to give a day of rest for humanity.  Sabbath Law should never be used against people. This would violate God’s loving intent.   

In a similar way, each of the radical commands we read in Matthew 5, Jesus is going behind and beyond the ‘letter of the law’ straight to the heart of the matter.  In each case Jesus implies that being righteous is not about cold, calculated, and sometimes even cruel legalistic ways of following rules, but the law is about a coming into a living relationship with the God of the law and becoming the kind of loving, caring, concerned person God has created us to be.    

Jesus’ radical call is to trust, obey, and to love God and others in such radical, surprising and personal ways, to meant to challenge the human situation so that people can be given an chance to be transformed and changed by God’s mercy and grace.  This is why told his disciples that their ‘righteousness must exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees’.   The world can’t be challenged and changed if people only do what is right.   Hearts are only changed when we are the right kind of people.  The law is limited to show us what the good it, but it does not change the heart.   This is why the world must be challenged from the inside out, not only from laws and rules.  The religious leaders of Jesus’ day knew the law and followed it meticulously, but what they were failing to do was to feel God’s heart and love like God loved.  They failed to live and teach in a way that promoted healing that would shine the light of God’s love, even into the darkest places. 

BUT I SAY TO YOU… 

The main message here is that only through acts and deeds of love will God’s law be fulfilled and will all be fully accomplished.   Living a good and faithful moral life does not boil down to mastering all the rules and religiously following them to the letter.   Who can do that?   

Normally, when society encounters a new wrong, what do legislators do but make and write a new law forbidding it.   Last year, when we had two mass shootings back to back, one in El Paso, Texas, and the other in Dayton, Ohio, there was an immediate new outcry for new gun laws.   Make new laws, and the violence will stop.   In another situation, as American’s face the rising costs of medicines, which seem to point to dishonest drug prices, there were more cries for increased regulations.  Then, when we hear about someone using the internet to break into people’s bank or credit card accounts, we also hear an outcry again for more and more laws.   

No one argues that we don’t need constantly need new laws and new legislation, but happens when you finally end up with more and more laws and less and less freedom.  You know how it goes.  Someone does something wrong, then you have a new law.  Then comes another way to do wrong, the comes another law, then another wrong, then and another law, and it goes on and on.   You understand where I’m going with this, don’t you?  This scenario recalls something I heard quoted in High School Debate Club: “You simply can’t legislate morality!”  And that’s so true, you can’t.  While we need laws, God’s and human, laws certainly aren’t the way to perfection, maturity, or salvation.  Having to write and live by ever-stricter rules of law means the opposite--that we are still living ‘infantile’ lives, and aren’t able to grow into the maturity of love.    

The Apostle Paul wrote to the Galatians: “… if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. “ (Gal. 5:18 NRS).  That’s not simply wishful thinking.  It’s the sign of having a transformed mind and heart.   And this is exactly Jesus’ point in elevating the moral law to actual deeds of love that go above and beyond the law.  This is why Jesus says that if we want to be perfect or mature; we must learn to control our anger, we must learn to deal with our lust, we must learn to save our marriages, we must learn to tell the truth,  we must learn not to retaliate or seek vengeance, and most of all, we must even learn to love our enemy.   The late James McClendon understood exactly where was headed with all this.  He explained how Jesus did not say ‘Have no enemies.’  We all have enemies, but if we try to go against our enemies, and we only fight against our enemies, we’ll find they have friends, and we’ll make even more enemies.   No, McClendon said, Jesus was right.  The best way to get rid of an enemy is try to make them friend.   

In this passage, every time Jesus says “You’ve Heard it said, but I say unto you…”, Jesus was not abolishing the law, but he is taking us back to what God when he gave Moses the law in the first place: “…You shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD. (Lev. 19:18 NRS).  Learning to love like God loves is what God’s law has always been about, but it’s still not easy, especially in world like ours.  That's why the man came to me after church with his question.  It’s always good to ask questions, for we would go out on the streets of New York City one morning, or most any American city for that matter, loving with our heart, without also using our head, we could be in the hospital before lunch.    

We must be ‘wise as serpents, and as innocent as doves’ when we follow Jesus, especially when we follow Jesus in this radical way loving each other in ways that go ‘beyond’ the law.   So, to I conclude with three simple, clear, very important words, each beginning with “C”, which give us wisdom for living God’s love in the ‘real’ world.  

The first word is: Christ.  When we read such radical demands of love we must realize that this comes by Jesus’ own authority.  A way of following the law had been revealed to Moses, but now an even greater, more personal and fulfilling way life based on the law of love is being revealed.   Notice that Jesus does not quote any Scripture when he reinterprets the law, but Jesus acts as if he is the law giver himself, and that everything in Scripture has been pointing to Him all along.  By his example, Jesus calls for his disciples learn how to obey love, not just obey laws.   Obeying love is not easy, but it is the only way God’s light and love comes into the world. 

The second word is ‘Community’.  Recall those warnings on TV before someone shows you a dangerous trick: “Don’t try this at home!”  Well, in this text, speaking to his disciples and followers, Jesus is saying the opposite: “Do try this at home!”  When Jesus says we should love like God loves, Jesus is calling us to first ‘try’ to practice these life-altering words in a community of people, who are praying and living out Jesus’ prayer: ‘thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven!’   When we live like this, we are ‘living’ toward in a community that prays and lives that the kingdom is coming, because God’s rule has come near in Jesus Christ. 

  

This brings me to the final word: ‘Challenge’.  When we follow Jesus and live like Jesus, we challenge the darkness of the world.  This is how we begin to be ‘salt’ and ‘light’, not by going out and forgiving everybody of everything, loving them as if nothing has happened.   No, what Jesus is calling us to do is learn to love as if something wonderfully strange has happened to us.  This kind of radical love starts right here at church, as we live in a community that confesses, lives and loves because of our faith in Jesus Christ.   We first live God's redeeming love among ourselves, because we know who we are,  but then, as we grow and learn the depth of God love, it should spill over in our witness to the world.  This is what Jesus meant, when later in Matthew, he tells Simon Peter: “And I'll build my church on this rock and the gates of the underworld won't be able to stand against it.  I'll give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven... (Matt. 16:18-19 CEB). 

Another great Jewish rabbi, Abraham Joshua Herschel spelled out God’s original intention to teach love, not just to give laws.  Rabbi Herschel wrote: 

“To meet a human being is a major challenge to mind and heart. 

I must recall what I normally forget.  A person is not just a specimen of the species called homo sapiens.  Each person is all of humanity wrapped up into one, and whenever one person is hurt we all are injured....  To meet another human being is an opportunity to sense the image of God, and to enter the very the presence of God.  According to rabbinical interpretation, the Lord said to Moses:  “Wherever you see the trace of man there I stand before you....”  

This is why Jesus goes beyond the law.  It’s only by loving that we truly encounter another person.   This is why the church that not only lives like Jesus, but also loves like Jesus becomes the church that ‘holds the keys’ to the kind of redeeming love the world still hungers for, even today.  We certainly aren’t perfect in living out Christ’s love, but if we truly love like Jesus loves, we will be perfected by it.   To be love and to love, is forever what it means to say that we have accomplished what this life is all about.  Amen.