Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
Deuteronomy 30.11-20; 1 Corinthians 3.5-7; Matthew 5.21-48
Church of Scotland, Costa del Sol, Fuengirola, February 2020
Half a century ago, Irish students looked across the sea with envy at their peers in the United Kingdom. We paid university fees; they didn’t. They received student grants; we relied on our parents to support us.
So when I went to study in University College Dublin, I sat for an entrance scholarship. I sat an examination in maths, my favourite subject – and one at which I thought I excelled.
The examination paper quickly dispelled that illusion. I found it hard to answer many of the questions. Sometimes it was hard even to understand them. I came out of the examination hall deflated and demoralized.
I scored a mere 20 points out of 100 – ordinarily, not just a fail but a bad fail. Despite this, I was awarded the scholarship. I’m hoping on the day of judgment for equally kind examiners.
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Listen to our Gospel reading this morning. Five times Jesus says to us: “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago … But I tell you that’s not enough. It’s not even the half of it.”
This is a little like sitting that scholarship exam. It’s hard to imagine ourselves doing everything Jesus asks of us. It’s sometimes hard even to understand why he wants us to.
A casual acquaintance with the Bible is enough to tell us that the Jews of old found it hard to keep the law commanded by God.
A casual acquaintance with ourselves is all we need to know that we too find it hard to do what God wants, to be the men and women God wants us to be.
Yet here is Jesus raising the ante. It’s not enough, he is telling his hearers repeatedly, to obey the law as traditionally understood. They, and we, must do more.
Turn the other cheek. Go the second mile. Gouge out your eye. Cut off your hand. Some of this, of course, is typical Jesus of Nazareth, exaggerating for effect. But even if we allow for that, we may find ourselves perplexed. What is he telling us, and why is he doing that?
To untangle that perplexity, we need first a word of background.
Jesus lived in a troubled world, just as we do. His society was divided between a small elite of the very rich and a large mass of the pretty poor. His land, and his people, were also under occupation by the Roman empire. Some in his society cheerfully collaborated with the occupiers, as some in all societies always do. But many thought the appropriate response was to take up arms against the occupier. Jesus thought this was a self-destructive strategy. He thought it made as much sense then as when Hamas in Gaza fires home-made rockets at Israeli targets today.
This reality is poorly captured in traditional pictures of Jesus with a lamb in his arms and a halo around his head, but it’s the real background against which he preaches to his people.
Don’t allow yourself to be eaten up by anger, because it will destroy you. If your brother or sister is angry with you, go and be reconciled to them. Settle your disagreements without going to court. Don’t steal another man’s wife. Don’t swear elaborate oaths: just tell the truth. Don’t resist evil by retaliating against the evildoer. That just creates a vicious spiral – in personal terms, a vendetta, in larger political terms a war that results in the destruction of your city and your temple.
If a rich man sues you for your shirt, give him your coat as well and stand before him naked, shaming him for his greed.
If a Roman soldier forces you to carry his equipment for a mile, carry it for two, shaming him for his casual abuse of his power.
Love your neighbour, as it says in Leviticus 19, yes, but don’t hate your enemies. Love them too.
This last point requires a little teasing out. In Luke’s Gospel, when Jesus is asked “Who is my neighbour?”, he responds by telling what the parable of a Samaritan who acts as a neighbour to a Jew bleeding by the roadside. The consequence is we think loving our neighbour means loving everyone, and we miss the provocation of telling a Jewish audience that there could be such a thing as a good Samaritan. For Jews in the days of Jesus, Samaritans were among their enemies and were by definition bad.
Love your neighbour in Leviticus 19 doesn’t mean loving everyone. It means love your Jewish neighbour. Loving those who aren’t your Jewish neighbour comes into the chapter only later, when Jews are enjoined to love the stranger in their midst – the immigrant, perhaps, or the refugee, or the person who was in the land before them.
Nowhere in their Bible were Jews told to hate their enemies, but it was as easy for them then as it is for us now to ringfence their affection. To say that love goes only so far: to friends and neighbours, certainly, to those who aren’t like us, maybe, but definitely not to those who occupy us and injure us.
The Romans weren’t theoretical enemies. They were all too real. And the rich in their society, who wanted the shirt off your back, they were real too.
When Jesus says to the Galilean crowd, “Love your enemies”, these are the enemies he was talking about, and they have all too many counterparts in our world today.
Jesus isn’t telling his hearers that injustice doesn’t matter. No. He is offering them and us different kind of justice, a “creative, healing, restorative justice”,[1] one that deals with enemies not by overcoming them, but by overcoming enmity, by turning enemies into friends.
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What would it require for us to take seriously the command to love our enemies?
Three things.
First, we would need to believe in a God who loves us unconditionally. Henri Nouwen says:
“When we know that God loves us deeply and will always go on loving us, whoever we are and whatever we do, it becomes possible to expect no more of our fellow men and women than they are able to give, to forgive them generously when they have offended us, and always to respond to their hostility with love. By doing so we make visible a new way of being human and a new way of responding to our world problems.”[2]
Second, we need God to impress this truth on our hearts. We need a truth that isn’t just held in our minds as a nice idea but that reaches into the depths of our personality and changes us from top to bottom. The prophets of Israel understood this well. It wasn’t enough for God to give his people a written law to guide their footsteps. This law needed to be written on their hearts, just as it needs to be written on ours. God needs to take away our indifference, and give us human hearts, hearts of flesh; and this, as the prophets said, is the work of the Spirit.
Lastly, we need to see God’s unconditional love in action; and this is where Jesus of Nazareth comes in. Jesus fulfils the law by radicalizing it, by showing us that it’s not just about what we do but about the kind of people that in our hearts we are. But Jesus fulfils the law, also and more importantly, by living it, by embodying it.
“The Sermon on the Mount isn’t just about us,” says Tom Wright. … “It’s about Jesus himself. This was the blueprint for his own life…
“When they mocked him, he didn’t respond. When they challenged him, he told quizzical, sometimes humorous, stories that forced them to think differently. When they struck him, he took the pain. When they put the worst bit of Roman equipment on his back – the heavy crosspiece on which he would be killed – he carried it out of the city to the place of his own execution.”[3]
When Jesus sits down on the mountainside to teach, he isn’t just giving us a new rulebook, a new highway code for life. He’s inviting us into a new way of being human, the new way of being human that he himself is.
And when we trust in God’s unconditional love, trust in Jesus as the embodiment of that unconditional love, and trust in the Holy Spirit who pours that unconditional love into our hearts, then we can begin, however imperfectly, to walk in this new way.
“Whenever,” says Henri Nouwen, “we forgive instead of getting angry at one another, … tend one another’s wounds instead of rubbing salt into them, … give hope instead of driving one another to despair, hug instead of harassing one another, … thank instead of criticizing one another … in short, whenever we opt for and not against one another, we make God’s unconditional love visible” and help to give birth to the new humanity of which God is the father.[4]
[1] Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone, part 1 (London: SPCK, 2004), 51.
[2] https://henrinouwen.org/meditations/a-new-way-to-be-human/
[3] Matthew for Everyone, part 1, 53
[4] https://henrinouwen.org/meditations/make-gods-unconditional-love-visible/