Matthew 5:21-32
Fulfilling the Law
James Sledge February
12, 2017
Today’s
Old Testament reading is part of a covenant renewal ceremony. Moses has led
Israel for decades in the wilderness, but before they finally enter the land of
promise, Moses reminds them of the covenant with God made at Mount Sinai, That
includes the Ten Commandments, some of which Jesus recalls in our gospel
reading. You shall not murder. Neither shall you commit adultery. Neither shall
you steal. Neither shall you bear false witness against your neighbor. Neither
shall you covet your neighbor’s wife.
Notice
there’s nothing about coveting your neighbor’s husband. That’s because women
were thought of as property. To covet a man’s wife was to think about stealing
his property. Similarly, adultery was a property crime in that it damaged
another man’s property.
Things
had not changed much by Jesus’ day. Wealthy Roman women enjoyed a bit more freedoms,
but by and large women were subordinate to and dependent on men. When a man
divorced a woman – which could be done easily – she could quickly find herself
in poverty and danger. We live in very different times, but residue of those ancient
views is still with us.
I
recently read a book by local colleague Ruth Everhart. It’s a memoir that
begins with a home invasion at the place she and her college roommates rented
in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Two intruders held the women for hours at gunpoint and
raped them repeatedly. The rest of the book is about the long, long struggle to
put her life back together, to become whole again. The title of the book is
telling: Ruined.[1]
Perhaps
some of you saw Ruth’s column in The Washington Post just before Christmas.
She spoke of a religious “culture of purity” that celebrates the virgin Mary in
ways that only add to the pain of those like her.[2]
Religion has often enforced and encouraged standards of sexual purity that weigh
much more heavily on women, echoes, no doubt, of a time when women were reduced
to property.
So
what to do with religious rules from ancient times and cultures? Christians
have sometimes viewed this as an Old Testament problem that gets fixed by Jesus
and the New Testament, but there are multiple problems with such a view.
To
begin with, the Old Testament itself wrestles with this issue. Prophet after
prophet rails against wooden legalism that loses sight of the love and mercy at
the very heart of God. And the Old Testament even takes its own shots at
patriarchy, declaring that men and women share in “image of God” and lifting up
women in rolls assumed to be for men only. When you consider the time in which
the Old Testament was written, this is truly remarkable.
Then
there is the problem of Jesus himself, who says, “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.” Jesus
insists that he is not the end but the fulfillment of those religious rules,
and in our gospel today, Jesus begins to explain what that means.
Jesus’
teachings are filled with the hyperbole typical of Middle Eastern speech but
strange to us. This can distract us from what Jesus is up to. He undermines
typical notions of God that are perpetual temptations for religious folk. We
often view God is a bit like a cop on the street or a school teacher or
principal, a deity whose primary job is to make sure we behave, that we are
good boys and girls.
Not
that Jesus comes to give us a “get out of jail free” card for breaking the Law.
Rather, Jesus sees the Law rooted in God’s hopes and dreams for humanity. This
is evident as Jesus interprets the commandments on adultery and divorce. Adultery
ceases to be a property crime against men. It is a shattering of covenant and
community that harms all. To speak of women being forced to commit adultery
when men divorce them refocuses the commandment on the vulnerability women
experienced in Jesus’ day.
And
the notion that adultery includes seeing women as sexual objects to be acquired
hardly sounds like an ancient issue. Our culture still objectifies women, still
sees them as sexual objects. And all too often, the Church participates in an
odd version of this where a woman’s worth is diminished if she is too
promiscuous, or if she is “ruined” by an assault she could do nothing to
prevent. Just ask Ruth Everhart about that.
The
problem with religious rules, whether they come from the Old Testament or from
the lips of Jesus, is that they perpetually get coopted by those in power as a
means of control: men controlling women, rich controlling poor, majority
controlling the minority, and so on. This was true long ago when the rich, religious
authorities, the Empire, and law and order types saw Jesus as a threat and had
him executed. And it’s no less true in our day when the powerful, the rich,
patriarchy, whites, religious authorities, or law and order types wrap
themselves in a religious mantle while ignoring Jesus’ teachings.
In
those teachings, Jesus points to a very different understanding of the rules, much
like that of the prophets with whom he so often stands. For Jesus, the rules
point us to an alternative community where all are equals, where the needs of
the other always matter as much as our own. This likely explains why the
earliest followers of Jesus took to calling each other brothers and sisters. They
had all become siblings in Christ.
The
Church has struggled to live into this image of a community that is one family
regardless of gender, wealth, skin color, orientation, nationality, politics,
etc. Our own families sometimes provide flawed models for us, and we have sometimes
trivialized church as family to mean a group of people “like us.” Sometimes
we’ve even distorted it into a place for families, one not welcoming of people
who don’t look like the American, suburban ideal.
Still,
most of have a clear enough sense of what family is supposed to be to know what
Jesus calls us to build: a radical community where everyone is a full member of
the family, as deeply loved and cared for as any other member. It is a
community where reconciling members one to another matters more than any
religious ritual or obligation.
Jesus
did not think this would be easy. In the verses just prior to our reading,
Jesus spoke of our righteousness needing to exceed that of the scribes and
Pharisees, and the Pharisees were champion rule keepers. Being light and salt
for the world does not happen via privately held beliefs. It happens by the
difficult work of building God’s alternative community.
It’s
not unlike being part of a healthy human family. Being accepted and cared for
and loved unconditionally has nothing to do with your good qualities or
achievements or keeping the rules. They are gifts freely given because that is
how healthy families are. Being accepted and loved is a gift, but becoming who
you are meant to be; that is hard work. And in healthy families, rules and
structure are less about control and more about guiding and directing you in
that hard work of becoming the person you are meant to be.
Jesus
loves you more than any family ever could, not because of who you are or what
you’ve done but because of who Jesus is, God’s love for you made flesh. And Jesus longs to
guide us in the hard work of becoming fully and truly human, as we build God’s
alternative community that will be a light to the world.
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