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May 13 - July 4, 2017
Now, to say that this passage in the Gospel of Matthew was a sermon or a talk means that it is organized around one purpose and develops along a single line of thought.
Why, then, is it important that we understand Matthew 5–7 as one talk or sermon? It is important because, unless we understand it as one discourse, purposively organized by its highly competent speaker, its parts—the particular statements made—will be left at the mercy of whatever whims may strike readers as they contemplate each pearl of wisdom. Their meaning cannot then be governed by the unity of the discourse as a whole. And this is, for the most part, exactly what happens today.
The keeping of law turns out to be an inherently self-refuting aim; rather, the inner self must be changed. Trying merely to keep the law is not wholly unlike trying to make an apple tree bear peaches by tying peaches to its branches.
The aim of the sermon—forcefully indicated by its concluding verses—is to help people come to hopeful and realistic terms with their lives here on earth by clarifying, in concrete terms, the nature of the kingdom into which they are now invited by Jesus’ call: “Repent, for life in the kingdom of the heavens is now one of your options.” The separate parts of the discourse are to be interpreted in the light of this single purpose.
His teachings illustrate how those alive in the kingdom can live, through the days and hours of their ordinary existence, on their way to the full world of God.
For all the vast influence he has exercised on human history, we have to say that Jesus is usually seen as a frankly pathetic individual who lived and still lives on the margins of “real life.” What lies at the heart of the astonishing disregard of Jesus found in the moment-to-moment existence of multitudes of professing Christians is a simple lack of respect for him.
However, “the law” they had in mind and that they rubbed up against every day was not the law of God. It was a contemporary version of religious respectability, very harsh and oppressive in application, that Jesus referred to as “the goodness of scribes and Pharisees” (5:20). Law as God intended it remains forever essential to the kingdom, and Jesus made it clear to his hearers that his aim is to bring those who follow him into fulfillment of the true law.
In Matt. 5:20–48, then, we find out precisely what fulfillment of the law would look like in daily life. In this crucial passage, where the rightness of the kingdom heart is most fully displayed, there is a sequence of contrasts between the older teaching about what the good person would do—for example, not murder—and Jesus’ picture of the kingdom heart. That heart would live with full tenderness toward everyone it deals with. This passage in Matthew 5 moves from the deepest roots of human evil, burning anger and obsessive desire, to the pinnacle of human fulfillment in agape, or divine love.
The remainder of the Discourse on the Hill, chapters 6 and 7, then provides a sequence of warnings about practices and attitudes that will deflect us from living from the kingdom.
Finally, Jesus gives us urgent warnings about failing to actually do what he calls us to do in his teachings and mentions the specific things that are most likely to trip us up in this regard. Dietrich Bonhoeffer forcefully states, “The only proper response to this word which Jesus brings with him from eternity is simply to do it.”6 Remarkably, almost one sixth of the entire Discourse (fifteen of ninety-two verses) is devoted to emphasizing the importance of actually doing what it says.
To understand correctly what Jesus is teaching us to do in his Discourse, we must keep the order of the treatment in mind and recognize its importance.
The various scenes and situations that Jesus discusses in his Discourse on the Hill are actually stages in a progression toward a life of agape love. They progressively presuppose that we know where our well-being really lies, that we have laid aside anger and obsessive desire, that we do not try to mislead people to get our way, and so on. Then loving and helping those who hurt us and hate us, for example, will come as a natural progression. Doing so will seem quite right, and we will be able to do so.
It is precisely Jesus’ grasp of the structure in the human soul that also leads him to deal primarily with the sources of wrongdoing and not to focus on actions themselves.
Wrong action, he well knew, is not the problem in human existence, though it is constantly taken to be so. It is only a symptom, which from time to time produces vast evils in its own right.
What we are looking at in the contemporary Western world is precisely what he himself foretold. We have heard him. For almost two millennia we have heard him, as already noted. But we have chosen to not do what he said. He warned that this would make us “like a silly man who built his house on a sand foundation. The rain poured down, and the rivers and winds beat upon that house, and it collapsed into a total disaster” (Matt. 7:26–27). We today stand in the midst of precisely the disaster he foretold, “flying upside down” but satisfied to be stoutly preaching against “works” righteousness
The law that God had truly given to Israel was, until the coming of Messiah, the most precious possession of human beings on earth. That law consisted of fundamental teachings such as the Ten Commandments, the “Hear, O Israel…” of Deuteronomy 6:4–5, the great passage on neighbor love in Leviticus 19:9–18, and the elaborations and applications of them by the Jewish prophets up to John the Baptizer.
God’s true law also possessed an inherent beauty in its own right, as an expression of the beautiful mind of God.
To be sure, law is not the source of rightness, but it is forever the course of rightness.
But the question is, How can one keep the law? Jesus well knew the answer to this question, and that is why he told those who wanted to know how to work the works of God to put their confidence in the one God had sent (John 6:29). He knew that we cannot keep the law by trying to keep the law. To succeed in keeping the law one must aim at something other and something more. One must aim to become the kind of person from whom the deeds of the law naturally flow.
And here also lies the fundamental mistake of the scribe and the Pharisee. They focus on the actions that the law requires and make elaborate specifications of exactly what those actions are and of the manner in which they are to be done. They also generate immense social pressure to force conformity of action to the law as they interpret it. They are intensely self-conscious about doing the right thing and about being thought to have done the right thing.
It is the inner life of the soul that we must aim to transform, and then behavior will naturally and easily follow. But not the reverse. A special term is used in the New Testament to mark the character of the inner life when it is as it should be. This is the term dikaiosune.
The human need to know how to live is perennial. It has never been more desperate than it is today, of course—in Los Angeles and New York, in London, Paris, and Berlin. But this need is always desperate. That is an unalterable part of the human condition.
Its first thorough and systematic treatment within the powers of human reason is found in Plato’s Republic, which would be more accurately translated The City. This book is really a study of the human soul and of the condition in which the soul must be in order for human beings to live well and manage to do what is right. The condition required is called, precisely, dikaiosune in the Republic. This is exactly the term that Jesus centers on in his Discourse on the Hill, as we have it in the Greek language. It is usually translated “justice” in Plato’s texts. But this is, once again, an
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The best translation of dikaiosune would be a paraphrase: something like “what that is about a person that makes him or her really right or good.”
In establishing the central term of ethical understanding, Aristotle replaced his teacher Plato’s word, dikaiosune, with arete, usually translated “virtue.” Historically, Aristotle won the terminological battle, and virtue has, more than any other term, stood through the ages for the heart of human rightness. It represents a combination of skill, wisdom, power, and steadfastness for good that makes it very attractive.
A couple of centuries after Plato—certainly beginning sometime prior to 285 B.C.—the Old Testament began to be translated into Greek, yielding the text we call the Septuagint. The term dikaiosune was used to translate the Hebrew terms tsedawkaw and tsehdek, usually rendered in English as “righteousness.” Thus, a great central text of the Old Testament, Gen. 15:6, tells us, “And Abram believed God, and it was counted to him for dikaiosune.” And we see in Isaiah: “All our dikaiosune is like filthy rags” (64:6). And again in Amos: “But let judgment roll down as water, and dikaiosune as an
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It reemerges in the teachings of Jesus, three centuries after the creation of the Greek Old Testament, and becomes the central term in the understanding of Christian salvation represented in the New Testament. Indeed, for Paul, the redemptive act of Jesus becomes the key to understanding the very dikaiosune of God himself (Rom. 1–
The first illustration of kingdom dikaiosune is drawn from cases in which we are displeased with our “brother” and may allow ourselves to treat him with anger or contempt.
Close beside anger you will find its twin brother, contempt. Jesus’ understanding of them and their role in life becomes the basis of his strategy for establishing kingdom goodness. It is the elimination of anger and contempt that he presents as the first and fundamental step toward the rightness of the kingdom heart.
In its simplest form, anger is a spontaneous response that has a vital function in life. As such, it is not wrong. It is a feeling that seizes us in our body and immediately impels us toward interfering with, and possibly even harming, those who have thwarted our will and interfered with our life.
The primary function of anger in life is to alert me to an obstruction to my will, and immediately raise alarm and resistance, before I even have time to think about it.
It is primarily a function of the human will, and this in several respects. It spontaneously arises in us, as just noted, when our will is obstructed. That is what occasions it. But as a response toward those who have interfered with us, it includes a will to harm them, or the beginnings thereof. Some degree of malice is contained in every degree of anger.9
But it is a third possible involvement of the will in anger that makes it so deadly as to deserve the censure Jesus places upon it. We can and usually do choose or will to be angry. Anger first arises spontaneously. But we can actively receive it and decide to indulge it, and we usually do.
The importance of the self and the real or imaginary wound done to it is blown out of all proportion by those who indulge anger. Then anger can become anything from a low-burning resentment to a holy crusade to inflict harm on the one who has thwarted me or my wishes or bruised my sense of propriety. It may explode on anything and anyone within reach. I may become addicted to the adrenaline rush and never feel really alive except when my anger is pumping.
To rage on I must regard myself as mistreated or as engaged in the rectification of an unbearable wrong, which I all too easily do.
Anger embraced is, accordingly, inherently disintegrative of human personality and life.
Once you see those emotions for what they are, the constant stream of human disasters that history and life bring before us can also be seen for what they are: the natural outcome of human choice, of people choosing to be angry and contemptuous.
But there is nothing that can be done with anger that cannot be done better without it.
But contempt is a greater evil than anger and so is deserving of greater condemnation.
The Aramaic term raca was current in Jesus’ day to express contempt for someone and to mark out him or her as contemptible.
In contempt, I don’t care whether you are hurt or not. Or at least so I say. You are not worth consideration one way or the other. We can be angry at someone without denying their worth. But contempt makes it easier for us to hurt them or see them further degraded.
The intent and the effect of contempt is always to exclude someone, push them away, leave them out and isolated. This explains why filth is so constantly invoked in expressing contempt and why contempt is so cruel, so serious. It breaks the social bond more severely than anger. Yet it may also be done with such refinement.
To belong is a vital need based in the spiritual nature of the human being. Contempt spits on this pathetically deep need.
The fool, in biblical language, is a combination of stupid perversity and rebellion against God and all that sensible people stand for.
To brand someone “fool” in this biblical sense was a violation of the soul so devastating, of such great harm, that, as Jesus saw, it would justify consigning the offender to the smoldering garbage dump of human existence, gehenna.
Today one is apt to feel that Jesus is taking all this too seriously But what is it, exactly, that is being done in the delineation of this threefold progression of prohibitions from anger to contempt to verbal desecration? The answer is that Jesus is giving us a revelation of the preciousness of human beings. He means to reveal the value of persons. Obviously merely not killing others cannot begin to do justice to that.
Jesus is working, as already indicated, at the much deeper level of the source of actions, good and bad. He is taking us deeper into the kind of beings we are, the kind of love God has for us, and the kind of love that, as we share it, brings us into harmony with his life.
On the other hand, not going to London or Atlanta is a poor plan for going to New York. And not being wrongly angry and so on is a poor plan for treating people with love. It will not work.
For all their necessity, goodness, and beauty, laws that deal only with actions, such as the Ten Commandments, simply cannot reach the human heart, the source of actions. “If a law had been given capable of bringing people to life,” Paul said, “then righteousness would have come from that law” (Gal. 3:21). But law, for all its magnificence, cannot do that. Graceful relationship sustained with the masterful Christ certainly can.
One of the most important things in the male mind of Jesus’ day, and perhaps every day, was to be able to get rid of a woman who did not please him. And on this point the man really had great discretion, whereas from the woman’s point of view divorce was simply brutal and, practically speaking, could not be chosen. When Jesus gave his teaching that divorce as then practiced was unacceptable, the men who were his closest students responded by saying, “If that is how things are, it’s better not to marry at all!” (Matt. 19:10).
