February 12, 2023.
Texts: Sirach 15:15-20; 1 Corinthians 3:1-9; Matthew 5:21-37.
It’s been a week since devastating earthquakes struck southern Turkey and northern Syria. The images that have been coming to us are heartbreaking. Sadly, the world’s news agencies are already moving on to the next exciting story.
But countering this are the many nations, agencies, and individual people who are responding with open hearts and resources to do what they can to help. The ELCA is part of that response, through Lutheran World Relief which is a good thing. We can, if we wish, contribute more to this effort, or choose from a variety of other agencies or organized efforts to make a personal response. Our prayers today, and going forward, are precious offerings too.
Yet how easy it is to move on, or to not respond at all. Turkey and Syria are a world away. There’s a tendency to make assumptions about how different we are rather than to think of these people as having names and faces, people who work and love and play and hope and grieve.
With this immediate tragedy, as with others that have previously unfolded, or inevitably will in the future, it takes real effort to continue caring and being responsive to people outside our own pod. Being curious about them, believing, trusting that they are more like us than not, makes us more compassionate mutual citizens of the earth and goes a long way toward embracing the world that Jesus came to bring.
The idea that they’re not so different from us is an important sub-text to our appointed scriptures today. Yeshua ben Eleazar ben Sirach was a teacher of wisdom probably in Jerusalem. He taught students in his school about two centuries before Jesus was born.
Sirach believed that God’s commandments are not too hard for us to keep. It is a matter of choice to be faithful to them. Or not. We are free to choose.
The wisdom teacher said that choosing to follow the commandments amounts to appropriately fearing God (in the sense of respect and humility). Our decision to be obedient to God yields life. Departing from God’s commandments leads to wickedness and sin, the fruit of which is death in any number of ways, from spirit to matter.
Sirach’s teaching is accessible. On many levels it makes sense to us. We know that we exercise freedom of choice in our daily lives. We know that unwanted consequences often (though not always) follow poor choices. And good choices usually (though not always) lead to positive outcomes.
Despite living in different times and different cultures, those students who sat at Sirach’s feet were not so different from us. We know that despite our best intentions, we get it wrong too.
A lot more often than we care to admit. And so we too are in need of instruction in wisdom no matter how old we are, or how much life experience we have.
As were the early Christians. So like us as Paul reveals. Jealousy, quarrelling, rivalry? Um, yes.
It’s when we come to the gospel that this notion seems to fall apart. Surely the disciples were not at all like us if they could follow the commandments in the way Jesus taught in his memorable sermon preached that day on the mount. Jesus had said that the disciples’ righteousness must exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees, remember?
But what is all this? Divine judgment for being angry? Standing before the heavenly council for insulting someone? Being consigned to the hell of fire for calling someone a fool?
This brings to mind a pastor who taught a Sunday School class. One day a student responded to another with, “You’re not supposed to call somebody a ‘fool’ you idiot!” Which shows us how easy it is to get even a very small test of exceeding righteousness wrong.
And so what hope is there that we could keep our eyes from gazing inappropriately, or our hands off something for which we might yearn. Or divorce? Are we going to back away from relieving people of broken or abusive relationships? That would not be right.
The things that Jesus taught that day are preposterous. There’s no getting around it. They all have to do with taking the commandments and intensifying them to the point that what Jesus asked becomes essentially inhuman.
There are two enduring responses to these verses in Matthew 5. One is to take them literally, which leads to unbearable guilt and shame or horrifying self-inflicted injuries. Thankfully even bible literalists don’t go there. Another response is to dismiss these verses as pertaining only to that culture and time. Which was obviously wildly different from our own. And while this is often the way we go, it can feel somehow that we haven’t properly understood what Jesus was conveying and are failing to take his teaching to heart.
Thankfully, there is a third option. It is to take these verses seriously. Because Jesus said them to the disciples, who in fact, are not so different from us.
If they had been different from us in following Jesus’s teaching, then certainly we would have early Christian stories about the disciples being severely and eternally judged for failing to exceed in righteousness Remember how angry they were with James and John for asking to sit at Jesus’s right and left in his kingdom? Remember how often they said far more than ‘yes, yes’ or ‘no, no’ to Jesus and his reign? But to the end Jesus promised they would be with him, whole and intact in his heavenly reign. So what happened?
This teaching of Jesus on the commandments turns out to bear another kind of wisdom altogether for the disciples and for us. Jesus bids us to take seriously the essential purpose of the commandments. To resist dishonoring other people and instead to honor them. Which brings honor to us in the sight of both God and neighbor.
Taking what Jesus said to its logical conclusion, the commandments are about relationship rather than a performance of religious duty. Jesus bids us to go beyond the letter or duty of the law into the grace of God’s law. The grace of God is profoundly present whenever we say of others, they’re not so different from us. And the reign of God seems somehow closer too.