The
Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany, Year A
The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez
Matthew
5:38-48; Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18
Be
perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Does
it ever seem like Jesus is just setting the bar too high? Be
perfect? That’s the standard I’m supposed to live up to?
Couldn’t Jesus have given us something more
realistic? How about, be a nice person? You
know, don’t cheat on your taxes, give some money
to the church, don’t kill anyone. That sounds like something that I could do. But I don’t think I can be perfect.
How about you?
For
the past two weeks, we’ve
heard Jesus explaining the ins and outs of the Law of Moses to his followers. Each of the “You have heard that
it was said”s from the past two
Sundays introduces a direct quote from the Old Testament
Law, which was, at the time, the definitive guide on how to please
God. But Jesus doesn’t seem satisfied with the commands of the Law as written. He keeps intensifying them. Not just “Thou shalt not murder”
but
“Thou shalt not hate.” Not just “Thou shalt not commit adultery” but “Thou shalt not
lust.”
Not just “Thou shalt not swear falsely,” but “Thou shalt not
swear.”
Not just “Thou shalt limit thy revenge,” but “Thou shalt not take
revenge.”
Not just “Thou shalt love those who love you,” but “Thou shalt love
everyone.”
And as if this hasn’t already gotten
hard enough, he ends with that kicker:“Be perfect.”
On
the surface, this is all pretty simple. I mean,
what Jesus says today is so simple that our Sunday School lessons for today didn’t have to do
anything to make this lesson age appropriate.
Kids get this. When I’ve used this Bible
story in preschool chapel, four-year-olds
had no question about what this meant. They got that they were supposed to be
nice and kind. But
where this gets complicated is when we start making excuses. I mean, Jesus can’t just have meant
what he said. After all, this business about
turning the other cheek can’t be about not
retaliating at all. Can it? From pretty much the moment
when Jesus said these things, his followers have been trying to find the out. We
say things like, “For Jews in Jesus’ time, it was considered demeaning to backhand someone. So if someone slapped you, and you turned the other
cheek, the person couldn’t hit you again or
else he’d dishonor himself.” That is
so nice and comforting and so very remote from the world we live in, so it can’t apply, can it?
Can it? For
two thousand years, people like us have been trying to
find the out, because, when you get down to it, it’s not just that we can’t live this way, it’s that we don’t want to.
What
if, just for a minute, we considered the possibility that
Jesus meant what he said. Really meant it, and there aren’t any loopholes, because he intentionally closed them up. If I’m honest, I’m really scared that that’s
the case. Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber,
says, “The law is about … the fact that God loves your neighbor and wants to protect
them from you.”[1] That’s abundantly clear in our reading from Leviticus today, which is full of commandments about how not to cheat your
neighbor. That’s where the Law of Moses gets us: it curbs our human desire to look out for ourselves. But it
doesn’t make us love our neighbors. It gives us lots of wiggle room for that. There are lots of
exceptions, and it gets us to a place where if we’re
not actively harming someone, we don’t have to like them.
But
what Jesus does in the Sermon on the Mount is to close up all of those
exceptions. And, in doing so, he leaves us with a
set of demands that he knows that we can’t meet.
When
we’re left with Law, with a set of “thou shalls” and “thou shalt nots,” we
convince ourselves that we can, on our own, without any help, live up to it. But we can’t. Even with the Law, I would find
lots of ways to be a bad neighbor. What Jesus does is ratchet up the Law
to the point where he boils it down to a single, impossible command: “Be
perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Now,
Jesus doesn’t mean perfect like
we think he means perfect. Jesus
tells us to be perfect like God, our heavenly Father. And the way that God is
perfect is that God is Perfect Love. Jesus doesn’t
want us to be free from error. Jesus
wants us to be overflowing with love, the way that God is overflowing with
love. But
this doesn’t really help me,
because I’m not much better
about being loving than I am being perfect.
Jesus takes away all the loopholes and the exceptions in the Law, so that we’re forced to admit that we can’t keep it.
But
Jesus can.
That
is grace. That is good news. The
good news of Jesus Christ is that I cannot be good enough or loving enough on
my own, but Jesus has fulfilled the demands of
the Law on my behalf. Through Jesus, God reaches in to my
chest and pulls out my heart of stone, which is always trying to figure out a
loophole and find one person who I don’t have to love, and God throws away that hard heart of stone
and replaces it with an actual beating, loving heart. The Gospel is about
God loving us so much that God doesn’t want us to just
not be jerks to our neighbor, God wants us to actually love them. And the space that God makes in our lives when we are freed
with our obsession about being perfect allows God to love us into wholeness, so
that we can be loving, as our heavenly Father is loving. Amen.
[1] Nadia Bolz Weber, “Sermon on Jesus Rolling His Eyes (and also divorce), <http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2014/02/sermon-on-jesus-rolling-his-eyes-and-also-divorce/>
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