Epiphany 6
During the season of Epiphany, our readings from the
gospel draw our attention to two things.
First, we confront the claims of who Jesus was. The visit of the Magi, The baptism of Jesus,
Jesus’ presentation in the Temple, the beginning of Jesus’ preaching. All of these point to Jesus as the light of
the world, the hope and messiah of Israel, and the messenger of the Reign of
God.
Second, as a result of the way our lectionary assigns
readings, we are confronted with Jesus’ proclamation of the coming reign
through the Sermon on the Mount. We've
been hearing portions from the Sermon on the Mount over the past few
weeks. The sermon starts out pleasantly
enough: Blessed are the poor, the meek,
the peacemakers, the mourning. You are salt and light! Be salty!
Shine out for the entire world to see!
Have hope in a future! This is
good news for a world in which evil conspires to destroy the creatures of
God! Your comfort is in the promise of
God!
But then the Sermon on the Mount gets difficult! Jesus gets all unreasonable! It’s easy to listen to the Gospel today and
have a sense of panic, anxiety, and perhaps shame. Jesus takes moral stances on actions that by
their frequent commission prove that they have historically been difficult to
uphold. Murder is not done away with,
adultery still occurs, divorce breaks relationships, swearing oaths is
considered necessary so that what we say carries some credibility. Removed from the context of the rest of
Matthew’s Gospel, today’s passage simply reads as throwing more rules and responsibility
on an already burdened humanity in a high-stakes game of life or death, both
temporal and eternal. Refraining from
killing someone is not enough; we have to forego any expression of anger. Avoiding adultery is not enough; we have to
avoid lustful thoughts.
We are left with no room for compromise. We feel undercut. Condemned. If this is what God requires of us, who can
stand as righteous before God? No
one. Certainly not me.
Wait. Stop.
Before the proclamation of the God News of God in Christ
is swallowed in self-pity and shame, or before we dig in our heels to prove our
own righteousness, let’s take a step back and look at the whole Gospel of
Matthew.
If you were to search for a phrase that defines the
essence of the Gospel of Matthew, the phrase “righteous perfection” would do
the trick. In Matthew 5:48, Jesus says
“Be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” In fact, you will hear this in the Gospel
reading next week. Jesus in the Gospel
of Matthew is announcing the impending reign of God and he almost always takes
the ethical demands of the Kingdom of God to their most strict reading.[1]
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus as the messiah is
the one who is tasked with revealing the perfect will of God by interpretation
of the Torah—the teaching of the Will of God.
This is what Jesus meant when we heard him say in the Gospel last week "Do
not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not
to abolish but to fulfill.” Jesus as the
messiah discerns what God had in mind all along in the law and the
prophets. But more than teacher, Jesus
is the fulfillment of the Torah as Emmanuel, God with us, the word of God made
flesh. The life and teaching of Jesus is
the definitive ruling on what the reign of God looks like.
And even more than that, at the conclusion of the Gospel
of Matthew, at Jesus’ ascension, we are assured by Jesus that all authority in
heaven and on earth has been given to him. “The making of disciples, baptizing, and teaching which the
risen Jesus authorizes still involve the practice or observance of all we have been commanded to do, but this is
not simply a new code of behavior to be followed in the absence of the Messiah.
For Jesus tells us that He is with us, even to the end of the age."[2]
The conclusion of the Gospel of Matthew is the announcement of the continuing presence
of the Messiah and Lord.
Back to the Sermon on the Mount. The starting point for
Christian interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount is the good news of who
this Jesus is who speaks to us. Separating the proclamation from the Proclaimer
or abstracting a code of moral maxims from the whole vision of divine blessing
and ultimate dominion will pervert the Sermon into being one more moral agenda.[3]
If we forget that we are forever
accompanied and empowered by the one who proclaimed this vision, we would
indeed have reason to despair. But we
are not alone.
What the Sermon on the Mount presents to us is a vision
of a Kingdom whose realization in the here and now is begun and yet
incomplete. What Jesus speaks so
forcefully about in the Sermon on the Mount is the vision of the future. The vision is a promise; it is not merely a
prescription to follow, as though it could be achieved if all of us only tried
harder.
And in this vision of the future, no compromise is
possible because it is not so much a program for behavior as a manifestation—an
epiphany—of the reality that we catch glimpses of as we seek the reign of God
in its fullness.
So we return to our particular gospel lesson for
today. Our distance from the Kingdom is
here highlighted by the light of Christ thrown over the failures of human
relationship. It is abundantly clear
that our relationships to one another matter to God. To say otherwise would be to miss the point of God's entire project with the world. And what we are meant to understand is that
the motive of the heart laid bare is just as important as an act that comes
from our bodies.
In Jesus’ interpretation of the Torah, gone is the recourse
to self-righteousness—to judge and condemn others who do in one situation that
which we have wished we could have gotten away with in another. Gone is the supposed sanctuary of the hidden
parts of our hearts in which we would harbor hate and the desire to use others
for our own purposes. Gone is lie that life is ultimately a fight of self-interested conquest.
“These persistent words [of the Sermon on the Mount]
confront us with a dire diagnosis of our human condition so that we may no
longer live out our days in the anxiety of trying to work out some arrangement
and in the denial of the truth which we know in our hearts [and in so doing, we
end up living a lie]. Only the [Christ] whose righteousness suffices for us and
whose announcement of the kingdom has filled our lives with light and hope
would dare to expose the deadly lie of our lives so baldly.”[4]
We instead have to challenge our impulses to live free of
our neighbors, and confront the desire to pursue our own projects as though God
and the rest of humanity make no claim on us.
We must say ‘no’ to the lie that denies or cheapens our
interconnectedness. We are asked recognize
that our wills and our desires have consequences for our relationship to
others, even if no action takes place.
We must remember that human dignity is a nonnegotiable trait of all the
children of God.
In short we are asked to obey, but the uncomfortable
truth is that doing so requires a vulnerability and accessibility to God so
intimate that we shy away from it. And
it is no wonder we shy away, given how often we hear these passages as mere
moral condemnation, and not as a hopeful promise of a future God moves us
toward.
But what if, beloved of God, what if we took these words
as more than a moral measure—as more than a way to measure our
shortcoming. What if we considered them
signs of the Reign of God? What if they
became not the marks against us on the tally sheet we imagine God carries
forever, but the lens through which we pray that God would enact the Kingdom
through our lives?
And what if, beloved of God, we were willing to bring our
shame and discomfort and pain to God in prayer, and possibly private
confession through the rite of reconciliation? The grace of God is
free. The forgiveness of God is
unreserved. The love of God passes all
understanding. What if we could risk
that level of intimacy with God, and receive peace and strength?
Beloved of God, the Kingdom to come that we seek is a
gift, not an achievement. Remember as you hear
the Sermon on the Mount that you may feel conflicted, you may feel convicted,
you almost certainly will be challenged, but you are not condemned. You are invited to
join in the proclamation of the truth concerning Jesus and a “vision of the
Christian life which only God can bring to perfection.”“Filled with a hope that is not born
of human ambition or effort, the Sermon on the Mount is an epiphany of the will
of God, fulfilled and embodied in Jesus who proclaims and grants it to his
followers out of the largess of the kingdom to come.”[5] We are invited to participate in ever greater
measures. Will we take some steps
further into the Kingdom?
[1]
One notable exception is divorce. Mark,
writing earlier than Matthew, does not permit divorce at all. Matthew allows divorce on the grounds of
unchastity. In this case, Matthew
records Jesus loosening an ethical precept where it is elsewise stricter. But it is not clear if he means on grounds of
adultery or according to relationships among family members that were forbidden
in Leviticus but probably common in Greek converts’ lives.
[2]
(Matt 28:20).
[3] I am here indebted to the work of DAVID
L. TIEDE (“Let Your Light Shine: The Sermon on the Mount in Epiphany”) Luther
Northwestern Theological Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota, Word & World 4/1
(1984)
“TEXTS IN CONTEXT”. Copyright © 1984 by Word & World, Luther
Seminary, St. Paul, MN. Retrieved from http://wordandworld.luthersem.edu/content/pdfs/4-1_1984/4-1_Tiede.pdf.
[4]
Tiede, ibid.
[5]
Portions of this paragraph appear in Tiede (Ibid). This sermon is in large part dependent on his
work cited above. And I am particularly
grateful for his words.
