"Making the Choice"

2-16-14 (Ordinary Time 6A)

Sermon Texts: Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Matthew 5:21-37

Making the Choice

“You’ve heard it said… but I say…”

This is the way Jesus forms the next several teachings that he gives in this “Sermon on the Mount.”  And as he lays out this groundwork for the expectations of what it means to be “more righteous than the scribes and the pharisees,” as he instructed at the end of the passage we heard last week, we can almost see him drawing a line in the sand.  He knows the so-called “righteousness” that the scribes and the pharisees practice - the very “letter of the law” to which they subscribe and the kind of living that they deemed as being “inside” the law.  He knows these things and he challenges them - it’s time for the people of God to put up or shut up, to make a choice about how they will live their lives and how they see the law of God which Jesus has just told them that he has come to fulfill.

There’s no real way to get around it here - Jesus’ words here are scary.  They make me uncomfortable and even though I’ve sat down, wrestled with them, and written a sermon on them - I have to confess: I don’t like this passage.  I look at it and I can’t help but wonder: is Jesus serious about this, that we should remove body parts rather than risk them causing us to sin?  Where are the words about grace and forgiveness in these verses, the unconditional love of God that we usually hear proclaimed from the pulpit?  How do we deal with passages like this?

While it doesn’t make what Jesus says any less difficult to hear, it does help us a little bit, at least, to understand some of where Jesus seems to be coming from - especially as it comes to the scribes and pharisees.  This other familiar passage from Deuteronomy that we heard this morning comes from a larger passage in which Moses has just led the people of Israel in renewing their covenant with God.  Moses has just reminded the people of the journey through which God has led them, the promises which still await them, and the law which God had laid out for them in this covenant.  Moses sets a choice before the people of Israel - “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil.”  He tells them that if they obey God's law, they will “live and multiply,” that they will be “blessed” by God.  But if they disobey God’s law, if they serve and worship other gods, they will “surely perish.”  They will be abandoned by God, stripped of their blessed status, and not live long in the land which they had been promised.  Moses lays the choice before them and then urges them - choose life.  Choose to obey God, to love God and “hold fast” to God.

And so God’s people made that choice - time and again, they chose, either to love God, to listen to God, and to follow God’s commandments, or to disregard God’s laws, to worship other gods, and to follow their own ways.  The books of Kings and Chronicles detail many of those choices, and ultimately, the consequences of those decisions - the eventual conquest of Israel by Babylon, the destruction of the temple, the loss of the land and the loss of an identity as God’s chosen, blessed people.  And it’s while the Jewish people are kept enslaved in Babylon that they begin to rethink their choices, to struggle to hold onto their identity as Israelites among a foreign people, and to wait for the time when God would restore them as God’s people and keep the promises that God had made to them.

Eventually, Babylon is conquered by the Persians and the Persians by Rome.  Israel is eventually restored as a nation, under Persian and then Roman rule, and they work to maintain their identity as God’s people.  And this is the situation into which Jesus preaches - the scribes and the Pharisees have taken these laws and made it their life’s work to define those laws down to the last letter - what constitutes working on the Sabbath?  How, exactly, does the law define adultery?  If I make a promise, how am I supposed to word it so that I don’t take God’s name in vain?  Or what promises am I bound by the law to keep because of how I worded them?  Suddenly, the task of “obeying the commandments,” of keeping God’s laws, stops being about “choosing life” and starts being about looking for loopholes, finding ways to live in the letter of God’s law without having to live in the spirit of God’s law.

This is the context into which Jesus speaks, and this is what some biblical scholars think is at the center of Jesus’ teachings on the law and righteousness.  It gives us at least some way to make sense of why Jesus speaks so severely about what the law means.  Jesus is setting a choice before the people again - life and good, the blessings of God given to God’s people, or death and evil, the consequences of a life lived on our own terms.  It’s not just about following some particular set of rules - Jesus’ statements aren’t necessarily just giving us “harder rules to follow” - otherwise, there’d be no reason for us to speak of grace or forgiveness from the pulpit.  If we take Jesus’ teachings and turn them into further legalism, then we make his words shallow and meaningless - we take the whole radical nature of the life of blessing that Christ offers us and turn it right back into a life spent checking our actions against lists of things that we shouldn’t be doing: when I get angry at the guy who cuts me off on the highway and call him names, did I just put myself at risk of fire and brimstone?  How far are a person’s thoughts allowed to extend before they cross the line and lead us into the danger that Jesus warns us about?  Jesus’ teachings here show us how foolish it is for us to simply turn our faith into a series of rules and laws that have to be followed - and in taking such a hard-line stance on sin, he shows the natural consequences of that line of thought - namely, that we set ourselves an impossible task that ultimately leads to our inevitable failure.  This is why Christ first says that he has come to fulfill the law - because we cannot fulfill it on our own.  Only through Christ can we even expect to be considered truly righteous before God.

And yet, somehow, even this answer isn’t quite satisfactory - after all, if we lessen the strength of Jesus’ words, if we try to explain away their impact, the discomfort that they instill in us, and somehow convince ourselves that Jesus isn’t really serious about the high calling of the Christian life… we also make his words shallow and meaningless.  We can’t afford to take Jesus’ words lightly - they’re too serious not to take seriously.  So then, where does this leave us?  If we take Jesus’ words at face value, we're all doomed - if we take them as purely exaggeration, then Jesus is ultimately not calling on us to change a thing about the way we live our lives and his words become sails without wind behind them.

And so Jesus draws a line in the sand.  He presents us with a choice.  And as we look at that choice, I have to ask: does it really have to be one or the other?  Are we seriously forced into just one of two options?  Or can it be both?  Just as Moses stands before the people of Israel and urges them to choose life, Jesus’ words here should carry that same message to us today.  Choose life.  Choose to live a life that is held to a higher calling and centered squarely in the grace and love of Christ.  Choose life, not out of fear of hell or of breaking any law, but because we have been freed to serve Christ in love and gratitude.  Because in grace, we are able to live a life that is blessed, that is held to a higher standard, and that draws other people to Christ through our witness.  Choose life.  To God be the glory.  Amen.