Matthew 5:21-37
Epiphany 6 / Year A
It
happened without warning on Thursday afternoon.
I was driving my car and glanced down at the dashboard only to see the
check engine warning light was on. Ugh! The car felt fine. The engine was humming along. It was not making a funny sound. There was no strange odor. What to do?
Every
automobile comes with an Owner’s Manual.
It spells out in exacting detail how to operate and maintain your
vehicle in order to get optimum performance and long life out of it. Now, if you want, you can ignore some of the
advice. You can put off having the oil
changed. You can fail to properly
inflate the tires. And, in my case, you
can wait to see if the check engine light will disappear – which it did
yesterday – or deal with it once smoke starts wafting out from under the
hood.
Or,
instead of being negligent, you can be downright rebellious. You can put oil in the gas tank, gas in
washer fluid container, and washer fluid in the oil case. No one is stopping you. After all, it is your car! However, these decisions will have
consequences; consequences which will affect your car’s performance and
longevity. It is up to you. You get to choose.
In
today’s first reading from Scripture we hear a portion of what is known as
“Moses’ farewell speech.” The Hebrew
people are about to cross the Jordon River and enter the Promised Land after
wandering forty years in the wilderness.
Moses himself will not go with them, so these are his final words as he
reminds them of God’s commandments. And
just as the directions in your Owner’s Manual are far from arbitrary, so too
God’s commands are not just directives selected willy-nilly by the All-Mighty. They set out what to do and how to do it in
order for human life and society to flourish.
And
just as you can choose to adhere to the Owner’s Manual or not, Moses says you
can choose what to do with God’s commands.
What you choose, he says, has consequences. One leads to life, the other to death. And the death comes not because an angry,
vengeful God is going to punish you for being disobedient. It comes because you have ignored or rejected
the principles which God has conveyed to optimize life.
Our
reading from the Gospel of Matthew is another portion of Jesus’ teaching known
as “The Sermon on the Mount.” In it he
offers a critique of the commandments revealed through Moses. Jesus has already said he has not come to
abolish the law or the prophets, but to fulfill them. So, something about the life Moses offers is
incomplete. Jesus does not want to
eliminate these laws. He desires to
deepen them.
Consider
the commandment, “Thou shall not kill.”
It places a restraint on behavior, but not on thought. You may be angry with your boss, you
neighbor, or a family member, but if you don’t take their life then you have
kept the commandment. But Jesus says
anger itself is a problem. It is not
enough simply to suppress your temper, your temper itself is a destructive
force at work in your life. If you
seethe with hatred and bitterness you are not living at an optimum level. In order to let go of your inner rage you
must have a spiritual transformation of the heart.
St.
Paul writes the Old Testament laws function something like a set of
shackles. They prevent you from doing
things you may want to do, but shouldn’t.
Those who are in Christ, he says, are free from the law and have no need
for it because, in their hearts, they live it to the fullest intention. It is like the difference between my dog and
my neighbor’s. I have a fenced in
backyard because without this restraint my dog would run off. My neighbor’s dog sits on the front porch
with no leash or gate. It is free to roam
off the property if it wants, but doesn’t.
It knows what its owners want it to do and not to do and complies
willingly. Paul says those who are in
Christ are like this. Even more, we know
why Christ desires this for us. We have
a heart for the Lord.
I have
invested, so far, more than six hours writing a memorial resolution for
diocesan council for the Hon. Rev. Dr. Canon Joe Green who died in early
January. He truly was a remarkable person
who combined faith with love of the church and leadership in the
community. He served for thirty years as
Rector of Grace Church in Norfolk. He
was appointed to the Norfolk School Board and then elected to city council, the
first person of color on it since Reconstruction. For ten of his twenty years on the council,
he served as Vice Mayor.
Back in
the mid-sixties, Joe and his cousin enrolled at the School of Theology at the
University of the South in Suwannee, TN.
There, as with much of his life, he encountered unimaginable racism in
the era of Jim Crow. Once, after all the
white people had left, Joe and his cousin went for a swim in a pool. The next day it was closed “for repairs” and
never reopened the rest of the semester.
It makes me angry just to read about this episode and I’m sure it made
Joe angry too. I first met him in
2007. Every time I was Joe he had a
smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye.
He knew the secret to optimum performance and longevity. Joe had Jesus and Jesus’ love deep in his
heart. This gave him the ability to
endure and even to thrive in the midst of every indignity, every slight, every
injustice, every slur, every insult. It
is possible only when you know Jesus’ love for you and for every human being is
absolute and unfailing.
It is a
secret I hope you know and it is a secret I hope you share.
