Highest Ideals

A sermon for Sunday, July 19, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God who loves us all, body and soul, thank you for gathering us together. By your Spirit, make your presence known to us. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer.

Some of you may know this, but I imagine most of you don’t: in the United Methodist Church, part of what you have to do in order to be ordained is to submit anywhere between 40 to 60 pages of paperwork, not counting the manuscript for a 15-30 minute sermon. Don’t worry, I’m not going to keep you here for a 30-minute sermon. But I bring this up because our passage from the gospel of Matthew this morning has me thinking about one of the questions in the ordination paperwork. In the paperwork, we’re asked to reflect on how we live out our call to dedicate ourselves to the highest ideals of the Christian life. This passage makes me think of that question.

Not that I think Jesus talks about the highest ideals of Christian life only in these verses. This is early on in the Sermon on the Mount, some of the earliest teachings in his ministry in the gospel of Matthew, and Jesus doesn’t stop teaching in this gospel. But the passage today is on the way to his first full explanation of the highest ideals of Christian life and we’ll talk about that next week. This week, though, I think Jesus is giving us a glimpse into how to live into some of the highest ideals in Christian life, how to live with one another and with God, and he does it in a very Jesus-y way.

So let’s jump in with the first three verses. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.”

Oof, Jesus. At first glance, this is harsh. Where is the “they’ll know you are Christians by your love” in these verses? I mean, many of us have felt heart-palpitating attraction for another human being. Should we all be popping out our eyeballs?

Well, first, I think we need to remember that Jesus was a good teacher and a good preacher and he knew how to use something called hyperbole to get his point across. I think we can trust that the man who heals the blind is not asking his followers to blind themselves. So setting the hyperbole aside, Jesus is drawing a line here, a line that he expects his disciples, the ones he’s called close to him in order to hear this Sermon on the Mount, to pay attention to. And that line has something to do with the word “lust” in verse 28.

The Greek word here is ἐπιθυμέω (epithomeho), I desire, I lust after, I covet, which comes from the root word θυμός (thomos), meaning an outburst of passion or wrath. It means rage. So Jesus here is not talking about that little fluttering you get when someone you’re attracted to walks by. Jesus is talking about looking at someone and wanting to possess them, violently if necessary. Jesus is telling us that it is better for you to cut off your hand than to take someone else’s body without their consent. If you’re going to be my follower, Jesus tells his young disciples, you can’t let the darkness of lust, this desire-turned-into-anger, live inside you.

Okay, fair enough, Jesus. We can get behind that message. But then he moves on to a harder teaching in verses 31-32: “It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”

Now, what you need to know and what I’m sure you know is that the situation in Jesus’ day is different than it is today. Women were considered men’s property. And so even though women ran the household (our word economics comes from the Greek word οἰκονομία, meaning household management, rooted in women’s work), even though they managed everything in the home, they typically didn’t own anything for themselves and they certainly didn’t have a say in what happened in their marriages. A woman’s husband could divorce her for something as simple as not preparing food the way he liked, and if he divorced her, she was left bereft, essentially a widow with no hope of remarriage; or, if she did marry again, she was likely to be treated like a bargain-basement wife, easily picked up and easily disposed of.

You also need to know that the writer of the gospel of Matthew, just like the writer of the gospel of Luke, is careful in how they arrange the teachings of Jesus. Usually, teachings with a similar theme are grouped together, building on one another. If the first teaching is a warning about possessing a woman in the wrong way, this second teaching is about dismissing a woman in the wrong way. You cannot possess a woman violently and you cannot get rid of a woman just because you’re done with her. Adultery, as Jesus is teaching it, is not simply about sleeping around in your marriage or calling into question the paternity of your children, as it might have been understood in times past. Jesus here is doing something that rabbis frequently do: he’s getting at what’s behind the rule, looking for the iceberg of wisdom that lies underneath the tip sticking out, which is the text of the rule. Adultery is, as Jesus teaches us, at its heart, about how we treat one another in our relationships. That is the truth that undergirds the commandment, that holds it up.

And that’s what has me thinking about ordination paperwork and the call for pastors to dedicate ourselves to the highest ideals of the Christian life. It’s not enough to know all the rules and follow them. No, to dedicate ourselves to the highest ideals of the Christian life, we have to know the truth that holds up the rules. The highest ideal of Christian life when it comes to adultery is not, “I don’t cheat on my spouse;” instead, it’s “I treat the person I’m in a relationship with with the respect, honor, and consideration they deserve as a beloved child of God.” Jesus, with these two teachings, is calling us to a much higher standard than the plain text of the law, and not just pastors either. Jesus is beckoning all us Christians, married or not, in a relationship or not, onward and upward, to meet the plain meaning of “Thou shalt not commit adultery” and to go beyond it.

So, then, where does that leave us with our last four verses this morning? “Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.’ But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.” What does Jesus mean here? How does this fit?

Well, he is harkening back to another one of the big ten: Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain. But we misunderstand that commandment all the time. We think it means that we have to substitute goshdarnit instead of that other word, otherwise we’ll be struck by lightning. But what the commandment truly means is, “Don’t do something in God’s name that God didn’t tell you to do.” Don’t say, “By God, I’m going to steal them blind,” when you know that God has nothing to do with your thievery. That’s taking the Lord’s name in vain.

And so, “in ancient times,” as Jesus says, the rule was, Hey, you can swear by God, just make sure you’re going out and doing the righteous thing and keep your vows as you do it. A fine enough law, but as we see when we read the history of the kings of Israel and the prophets, all the way up to Jesus’ time (and to ours too, if we’re honest), there were plenty of people swearing sweeping, violent vows before God and slaughtering people in order to keep them. Instead of all of that, Jesus says, don’t swear by anything at all. Let your yes be yes and your no be no. Anything more than that is not of God. These vows that people swear in the name of the Lord, they’re just breaking the commandment, so let’s do away with vow-making altogether. I will not have my followers making vows of vengeance or violence, not when I’m about to preach about turning the other cheek. No more with “By God, I’m going to…” because, unless you’ve checked with God first, you can’t know whether God is going to approve of what you’re about to swear to.

God likely didn’t intend for women to be seen as property, as was common in Jesus’ day, to be taken when wanted and discarded when not. Surely, God didn’t intend that, when God made the man and the woman in the garden and gave the woman the spark of creation and the joy of curiosity. Surely God would not make a beautiful creation and intend for it to be taken advantage of. And so, just as you must respect those who you partner with on this earth, so you must respect God. Don’t swear in God’s name as if you speak for God. Let your yes be yes and your no be no and in all things, turn to God and listen for wisdom and discernment from the Spirit.

And that, my friends, is where we will have to leave the highest ideals of Christian life for this week, though if you want to read ahead to next week or ponder it on your own, as we’ve pondered this morning, we’ll be tackling Matthew 5:38-48 next week. But let me send you forth, from sitting at Jesus’ feet into the world that needs Jesus now more than ever, encouraging you to live up to the ideals we’ve uncovered today: hold each person you encounter as precious, neither using nor discarding them, but valuing them deeply, especially your romantic and life partners, and do the same for God, neither using God as a tool to support what you want to do nor discarding God when God becomes inconvenient, but in all things, turning to listen to the One who made you, saved you, and sustains you still.

Amen.