If you remember from last week, I told you that today, as we work our way through the Sermon of the Mount, we will talk more about what the Law means for Jesus and how he invites his disciples to obey it. In the meantime though, I had a very good question that I would like to answer first. Someone asked me: What do we talk about when we talk about the Law in the Gospel?
Well, maybe you have noticed that we actually often hear the expression: “The Law and the Prophets” and it was primarily the way Jewish people referred to the Scriptures. The Law is the “Torah” the first five books of the Bible, from Genesis to Exodus and Moses’ teaching in Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Then “The Prophets” refers to the twelve prophetic books (Jeremiah, Isaiah etc.) and also to what we call the Historic books (Kings, Samuel etc). In the Scriptures, God makes God’s commandments known through the “Ten commandments” of course, but also through all of Moses’s teachings: teachings around purity, food, sacrifices and so on. As we know, the Pharisees made a big deal about it and insisted that all those rules, mostly made for the service of the Temple, would be obeyed in daily life too. For Jesus though, as important as the Law of Moses, was also the will of God made known in the books of the Prophets who insisted a lot on purity of heart, justice and care for the poor. And so this is why last week we have heard Jesus say in our Gospel lesson:
‘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. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
It can come to us as a surprisethat Jesus wants his disciples to obey very strictly the Law, when often we think that Jesus was a little relaxed about it. For example, we may have noticed that Jesus cured on the Sabbath (a day where work was forbidden), or we may have noticed that Jesus’s disciples didn’t wash their hands before eating (therefore didn’t follow the rules of purification). Yet in the reading we have today it’s very clear that Jesus wants his disciples to obey the Law and do even better than what was taught them: Not only they are forbidden to kill, but they shouldn’t even get angry. Not only they are forbidden to practice adultery, but they shouldn’t even look at women with lust. And although divorce was accepted in his time, Jesus says that it is not acceptable for his followers and so on. So how are we to understand that?
1 – First of all, and we talked a bit about that in our sessions after the service, we have to be aware that Jesus was a Jew and it’s very clear, especially in Matthew’s Gospel, that Jesus didn’t mean to bring a new religion to people. If anything, Jesus wanted Jewish people to become better at understanding their Law and what God expected of them. For Jesus, the religion taught by the religious leaders of his time, especially the Pharisees with whom he fought so often, this religion wasn’t faithful to “The Law and the Prophets”. Yes, the pharisees were big on a lot of rules but they didn‘t understand what the Law was really about. They focused on details and missed the true intention of the Law. It is in this sense that we must first understand what Jesus means when he says he comes “[not] to abolish the law or the prophets (…) but to fulfill.
2 – If we want to understand that, we may, again, go back to the Gospel lesson we have read last week, when Jesus invites his disciples to not lose their saltiness or to not hide their lamp under the bushel. Israel was meant to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, the chosen people meant to guide all the nations to God. But at Jesus’s time, religion became ritualistic instead of being transformative. If you have a look at the lesson we have read from Deuteronomy this morning, we see that it was Moses’s first intention to give a Law that would be life giving, life affirming for the people: “If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today (…) then you shall live and become numerous“. Instead of that, religion at Jesus’s time has become crippled: they obey the letter of the Law but not the Spirit. The Letter of the Law matters to Jesus – he says: not one letter,not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished– but only if the people understand the Spirit of the Law.
So what’s the Spirit of the Law?
3 – Well, we have to understand, for a lot of reasons I won’t develop here, that in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus is a new Moses (would it be only because he also “teaches on the Mount”), but even better than Moses, Jesus teaches based on his own authority. If you look a the structure of our lesson today, it reads four times “You have heard” or “It was said“, and then Jesus adds: “But I say to you“. When he does that, Jesus does not oppose or contradict the Law that was given, but he narrows down the intention of the Law, the spirit of the Law, which is always to honor relationships, to love God and to love neighbor. This is why Jesus didn’t find that acceptable not to help someone in need on the Sabbath day, and this is why he didn’t care that much about purity rules. What mattered to him was to show love to people and to God. As many prophets before him, Jesus says that sacrifices, worship do not please God if we treat our brother or sister poorly. So in a way, it seems that Jesus’s teaching about the Law is very relaxed, but if we think about it, it’s not very relaxed at all, actually it is much harder! Most of us can avoid murder or adultery, but who can avoid anger or lust? So is Jesus asking us something impossible to do? His teaching around divorce for example can seem very hard for us today.
4 – I think it helps if we understand that Jesus was in fact doing what rabbinic Judaism calls: “Building a fence around Torah”. As we build a fence to protect what’s in the house, the teachers in Israel understood that to make sure people would follow God’s law, they have to build in their lives the favorable circumstances to observe it. Which make sense does not it? As an alcoholic should avoid visiting bars, if you don’t want to be tempted, well don’t put yourself in a situation where you might be tempted. But for Jesus, it’s even inside our heart that we have to build the fence (He says in another passage of the Gospel: Evil thoughts come from the inside, from a person’s heart. Mark 7:21) Murder starts within the heart, with anger. Adultery starts within the heart, with lust. If we guard the thoughts of our hearts, we will be able to observe the Torah. Renouncing our anger or our desire may feel like plucking an eye or cutting off a hand, but we can understand that it is much easier to cut a branch than to have to uproot a whole tree. How do you come back to a relationship when you have destroyed the relationship? You can destroy a relationship (“throw into hell”) with murder or adultery but more generally we destroy our relationship little by little with a thousand cuts.
5 – So in this way, paradoxically, I think that Jesus wants to make it easier for his disciples. Jesus does not teach difficult things so in the end he can catch us doing something wrong! Jesus says that if from the start we renounce what’s wrong, then we will avoid getting completely lost. And we have to acknowledge humans often do that, trying to see how they can push the limit between what’s sinful and what is not, and then it’s too late when they realize they have really hurt themselves or hurt others. I think this also explains Jesus’s teaching about divorce in this passage: If we enter a marriage thinking about the way to get out of it, we’re not off to a great start. We have to be fully committed, to put our whole heart in the relationship. Jesus recognizes that there are some cases of unfaithfulness that may lead to a divorce (and we can understand that unfaithfulness to our vows can happen in many ways: indifference, abuse etc.) but we have to try our best, to be committed to the relationship! This is why Jesus concludes that when we say yes, we don’t need to swear, we just have to mean it, again: to put our whole heart in it.
6 – As a conclusion, as we have said, Jesus in this passage is teaching Jews to become better at observing their own Law. A few decades after Jesus’s death and Resurrection, the church will understand that people do not need to become Jews to follow Jesus and so there are many rules we don’t have to obey anymore, especially the laws around purity and sacrifice. Yet it is still a temptation to try to determinate what it is that we can “get away with“, instead of genuinely looking for God’s will, God’s intention. I love it that in the end Jesus does not see the Law as just a set of rules we have to obey, but because we are called to be “grown up in faith” (to use Paul’s expression), we have to give more thoughts about what we are doing. It also means that this trust Jesus puts in us invites us to more responsibility. As Christians today, it is our responsibility to live out the spirit of the Gospel in everything we do.