Choose Life!
The Sermon on the Mount: best understood as a Beginner’s Guide
to the Kingdom of Heaven. We tend to think Jesus is breaking new ground as a
departure from the commandments, ordinances and traditions of the God of
Israel. Yet, when we last heard from him in chapter five, Jesus makes it clear:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have
come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and
earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the
law until all is accomplished.” [i]
That is, he is in fact interpreting and reenforcing what
Moses says just before the escapees from Egypt are to leave the wilderness,
which itself was a 40 year-long “beginner’s guide to living with God and
neighbor,” and enter into their new homeland: “I call heaven and earth to
witness against you today that I have set before you, life and death, blessings
and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the
Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you
and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to
give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” [ii]
In chapters 5-7 of Matthew, Jesus is reviewing what Moses
and Jesus’s own people had learned in the wilderness: how to walk in the Way of
the Lord. And that this Way is life and a blessing. And to abandon the way of
the Lord is death and a curse. Jesus reminds us all: Choose The Way of Life. Thus,
Matthew presents Jesus as the “new prophet” Moses promised will one day come: “The
Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your
brothers—it is to him you shall listen…”
Which raises the question: Have we been listening to him? Five
times he says, “You have heard it said….but I say.” He is not, as some have
suggested, creating new commands, new law, or a new Torah. He is outlining how
we all might fulfill the existing code of behavior and ethics outlined in Torah,
the books from Genesis through Deuteronomy.
For instance, as regards the command against murder, Jesus
says: “But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you
will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be
liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the
hell of fire.” [iii]
Jesus here practices a long-standing rabbinic tradition
called ‘building a fence around the Torah.’ It is a way of keeping you at arm’s
distance from a familiar commandment, in this case, “Thou shalt not kill.” Our
anger, calling people names, insulting one another can be viewed as a kind of
murder, as character assassination. Such behavior does not exemplify what it
means to Love God and to Love neighbor. If we can avoid doing these things, we
will get nowhere near to murder.
Liable to judgment, however, is vague. It may refer to Genesis 9:6, “Whoever
sheds the blood of a human, …by a human shall his blood be shed.” This and
a few other passages also deal with homicide as a capital offense. Yet, both
the Bible and post-biblical Judaism undercut any thought of capital punishment.
In Genesis 4, for instance, God spares the life of Cain. And in Exodus 2,
although Moses murders an Egyptian, he is not executed, and becomes God’s
chosen leader to liberate God’s people from slavery. And after telling Noah
about punishment for homicide, God goes on to say, “For in his own image,
God created humankind.” [iv]
This introduces a problem: those who commit murder are also made in the image
of God – they also represent the divine image. Therefore, we need to come up
with a response that is not execution. [v]
Which is just what Jesus does when he urges us to avoid anger, name calling,
insulting one another – essentially, treating one another as enemies. Indeed,
in The Beginner’s Guide to the Kingdom of Heaven, he urges us to pray for and
to love our enemies! He repeats the idea of ‘an eye for an eye,’ which by his
time referred to financial restitution, not physical, throughout both Israelite
and Roman cultures. And he stops short of saying ‘a life for a life.’ Any claim
that Jesus would approve of capital punishment receives support only from what is
not said. [vi]
Instead, building this fence is important in so many ways because
of behaviors we see rampant among us today, especially the kinds of public
name-calling which has become common place daily. We often say, “Sticks and
stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me.” Yet, we know this not
to be true. Names kill when young people are bullied and cyberbullied to death;
people take their own lives because of the barrage of insults they suffer; individuals
even strike out at others, often others they do not even know, in mass-killing
events that often end in their own death also – either by law enforcement or at
their own hand. Jesus is right. Names kill. If only we would listen to him. [vii]
A brief word about the kind of “hell” Jesus invokes. The
Bible has no word or image for hell as Dante’s Inferno imagines it. In fact,
the Bible knows of no place called hell, but rather imagines we end up dead one
day in a pit – all of us – awaiting some sort of judgment day, or the final
establishment of God’s kingdom. Rather, ancient Israelite and Persian cultures
believed that on that coming ‘day of the Lord,’ some may awaken to everlasting
shame and contempt – not eternal torture – a kind of self-imposed annihilation
or oblivion. Such feelings of shame and contempt can burn like a fire within us.
Like his co-religionists, Jesus believed in Sheol, the pit, where all of us,
good and bad alike all end up. And where the prophet Ezekiel imagines possible
resurrection as the Valley of Dry Bones is blown upon by the divine-ruach,
the divine spirit-breath, and brought back to life once again! A new kind of life
we cannot even imagine!
We would do well to consider what General of the Army, Omar
Bradley, once said after World War II: “Ours is a world of nuclear giants
and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace; more
about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the
atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.” Jesus’s remarks do not reject
the Scriptures of Israel, nor the interpretations of rabbis, Pharisees and
others. He interprets the traditional commands and ordinances, and builds a
fence around them to keep us from harming ourselves and others. We pray, “Mercifully
accept our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without
you, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may
please you both in will and deed.” Jesus, like Moses before him, sets before us
life and death, blessing and curse. Let us choose life!
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