6A
Epiphany 2019
Rev.
Adam T. Trambley
February
16, 2020, St. John’s Sharon
This morning’s Gospel continues with Jesus’ Sermon on the
Mount. Today we hear key foundations of Christian ethics. In these paragraphs,
Jesus resets religious instruction from something that is law-based and about
what we do, to something that is heart-based and about who we are. While we
don’t hear the word “love” in this reading, Jesus is grounding everything he is
saying on loving our brothers and sisters from the heart. Keeping law codes,
however enlightened, is not enough. Jesus wants our hearts, and he wants our
hearts overflowing with love for our brothers and sisters.
I want to break into the four areas Jesus discusses in
our Gospel, but I want to start with the sentences he speaks about divorce.
These lines, or similar ones, show up in a couple of places in the gospel, and they
have often been used to build up even more elaborate systems of religious law around
divorce than existed in Jesus day. Creating more legal regulations was not
Jesus’ intent, here. Jesus wanted to look beyond the law towards what was best
for all of us.
Let’s start by looking at some background to what Jesus
was saying. First of all, Jesus and the Bible as a whole see marriage as pretty
important. When people are married, the goal is to help them stay married.
Divorce is an incredibly painful process that causes suffering to those who
were married, as well as to children, extended families, and wider communities.
God would rather that no one have to go through that kind of ordeal.
Second, marriage and divorce worked a bit differently in
the ancient world. In general, woman could not own property, had very limited
employment options, and often could not make legal decisions for themselves or
their children. Married women had no rights versus their husband and when they
were divorced they got no alimony or child support, and could be thrown out on
the streets with nothing. Women could not divorce their husbands and had no
recourse if their husbands divorced them. The Jewish law that required a man to
go to the trouble of writing out on a piece of paper that he divorced his wife and
give it to her, so that she could go find someone else to marry, was considered
a huge step forward in ensuring a divorced woman could survive.
Did men abuse this near total power they had over their
wives? Seems like it. Deuteronomy chapter 24 actually has a prohibition of
against a man remarrying a woman whom he divorced and then was married to
another guy who then divorced her. In seminary we asked about what seemed like
a strange law. Our professor said it was in there to keep guys from divorcing
their wives, sending them off to someone else – since remember unmarried women
either went back to their parents or could be homeless--, marrying someone else
for the equivalent of a business trip to Vegas, and then divorcing their new
wife and having their friend divorce their first wife and remarrying her.
So we need to hear Jesus’ words about divorce causing
adultery in this context. When a man divorces his wife, and it was always men
divorcing their wives, never the other way around, the woman, and maybe the
children, are in serious financial straits. One of the only ways to get out of
this situation is marrying someone else. Think about it. A marriage has just
been ruptured, perhaps due to real issues, but perhaps on a whim and with only
one side having any say. Then the woman has to go find another husband almost
immediately. Maybe the legal marriage has ended, but there are almost certainly
still emotional and other ties that are not resolved. In this context, telling
a man that divorcing his wife causes her to commit adultery is just saying that
putting your wife in such a situation can be as much a violation of her
integrity and wholeness of self as an adulterous liaison. And that men who are
willing to take advantage of women in those situations, perhaps trading food
and shelter for marital duties, are just as bad. Jesus is saying very clearly
that just because you can legally do something does not make it right.
Sometimes it is very wrong. Since women do not have legal rights in marriage,
all the men involved have to act beyond reproach in this system so that no one
is taken advantage of or forced into situations where they have to make evil
choices.
Note how different these situations are from where we
often are today. Jesus’ words are not about punishing people who are divorced
or forbidding them from every being remarried. When a marriage dies, it is a
tragedy, but sometimes it does. People who go through a divorce need healing
and support, not more pain. Even if you want to take Jesus words about divorce equaling
adultery and literally apply them to our current context, we have to remember
what happened when Jesus met a woman caught in adultery. He said, “I don’t
judge you. Don’t commit this sin again.” Which sounds a whole lot to me like,
“Figure out what you did wrong and try not make the same mistakes in your next
marriage.” I know this isn’t the interpretation of a lot of churches. But the
Jesus I know is always about forgiveness and redemption and resurrection. If
something dies, including a marriage, God is going to pull new life out of it
if we let him.
This understanding of Jesus’ words about divorce make
even more sense in the context of the previous paragraph about lust and
adultery. Here Jesus is saying that sexual ethics does not consist merely of
not sleeping with people when you or they are married to other people. Jesus sets
the bar much higher. Again, he is talking to men here, although the principles
do apply more broadly. He is talking to men who have a whole lot of physical,
economic, and social power over the women around them. Then he says don’t even
look lustfully at someone, or it is just like adultery.
Jesus is not advocating some sort of puritanism where
every sexual thought or impulse is seen as horribly bad. What he is saying is
don’t sexually harass people. But he is saying it much more strongly than the
most strident #metoo advocates. He is saying that it is better to cut out your
eye than to creepily stare at people and make them scared and uncomfortable. He
is saying that it is better to cut off your hand than to grope people. And he
says nothing about what people are wearing or what the other circumstances are.
Jesus’ words are truly revolutionary for a first century culture where women
had no rights, even over their own bodies. Jesus says that not recognizing the
inherent worth and dignity of women by sexually harassing them is an offense
worthy of hell and that we should do anything we can, including cutting off
body parts to avoid it. Jesus demands that we love everyone else, including
those whom the culture at the time often said were there to be taken advantage
of.
Jesus’ words about insults have a similar message in
another area. Jesus takes the commandment against murdering people and applies
it to insulting them. This is quite a move, but it makes sense. Jesus demands
that we love our neighbor as ourselves, and we can’t love them if we are busy
putting them into some category in our heads that makes us superior to them.
The issue here is not the insults themselves, but the ways that we relegate
people in our hearts and minds to a lesser status than ourselves. When Jesus
says that calling someone “You fool” will make you liable to the hell of fire,
he is not setting up a new regulation that lets us call people jerks as long as
we don’t say “fool”. He is saying that any language that is racist, sexist, or
otherwise cuts people down to try to build ourselves up is a type of murder. When
we use those names for people, out loud or in our own head, we are trying to
take away a piece of their humanity. Yet everyone we call a name is a child of
God and is someone that Jesus was willing to die for. We cannot expect to
belittle someone that Jesus loved so much that he hung for three hours on a
cross and think it doesn’t matter to God. It matters. And we need to stop.
Of course, Jesus also knows that we don’t always achieve
this level of love and respect. So he also says that we need to reconcile with
each other. He says that when we are bringing gifts to the altar, and our
relationship with a brother or sister is broken, we should stop and go and fix
it. For Jesus, how we treat one another goes hand in hand with our relationship
with God. When we have hurt other people, that strains our relationship with
God, as well. We can’t expect to carry on with God like nothing is wrong when
we are ignoring what we need to do to reconcile with our neighbor.
These verses are why we exchange the peace before the
offertory in our liturgy. The peace is not a condensed coffee hour, but meant
to be an opportunity for reconciliation if needed. If there is something that
you need to get right with someone else in the church, find them and maybe
invite them outside to talk to them, or go to the lounge during that time and
make a cell call to someone else that you need to apologize to. Jesus wants us
to take seriously our relationships with each other and truly love neighbor as well
as loving God.
Finally, in the last paragraph of this morning’s gospel,
Jesus says to tell the truth. People in his time had decided that if you swear
by certain things you had to do it and various oaths required the truth and
others didn’t. We all know there is the truth, and there are lies, and there
are white lies, and there is not telling the whole truth, and there is not
being honest about how you feel because of being scared or intimidated or not
wanting to rock the boat or just getting along to get along. Jesus wants us to
be truthful all the time. People should know that if we say yes, we mean yes.
If we say no, we mean no. If we say we’ll do something, we will follow through
and can be counted on. Christians shouldn’t have to pinkie swear in order for
people to trust us. Jesus is not laying down some law against taking oaths in
court. He is the Truth, and he wants us to speak truthfully. We cannot become a
community if we don’t trust each other, and we can’t trust each other if we
aren’t honest and truthful.
The Sermon on the Mount covers a lot of ground. Jesus
expects a lot from us. He wants us to love our neighbors as he loves them. He
wants us to respect all of God’s children, especially those we may have power
over. He wants us to show love and care and compassion, even when it is
difficult. He wants us to be honest and to speak the truth in love. And he
loves us enough to give us the grace and the wisdom and the courage to live
into his great law of love.
