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Matthew 5:21-37
It’s all the rage these days. Everyone gets their own facts. Like a party favor or a trophy at the end of soccer season, everyone gets one. Like sitting in the studio audience at Oprah – just check under your seat, everyone gets their own facts! You get facts, and you get facts, and you get facts!!!
Actually, no you don’t. There’s not enough to go around. We’ll have to share. See, that’s the way that facts work. Science writer Adam Frank wrote for NPR that “There are two ways of making meaning – personal and public.” He gives an example. If you say that you are in love with the motorcycle-riding, pierced and tatted-up dude in the service department, that’s not something I can argue with, it’s not up for debate. Well, maybe your parents will debate it, but let’s set that aside. But if you think that same guy is an alien from another galaxy, that’s another thing. His origins, place of birth, parentage – these are not matters of private opinion. You can assert all day long…even many years long…that a person was born in Kenya. That doesn’t make it true, nor does it make it an “alternative” to the facts.
But this seems to be a new thing now. If I want to do this and you give me facts that would keep me from doing it, then I get to have different facts that enable me to push ahead. I can’t keep the scene from “The Holy Grail” out of my head, where the black knight forbids King Arthur passage and, in a rather one-sided battle, gets his appendages lopped off one by one…each time Arthur trying to declare victory with the knight responding – Ha! It’s only a scratch! A scratch? Your arm’s off! No, it isn’t.
Alternative facts, you see, aren’t even up to the same task as facts. They are propaganda, manipulation to achieve another goal entirely. They warp reality, causing us to question our perceptions, our observations, even our own capacity to understand the truth of any situation.
Hearing the words that Matthew places in Jesus’ mouth in this sermon, we might believe a similar thing to be happening. Jesus is changing the “law”. He’s giving some alternative facts. It might be considered propaganda for this upstart, rebellious “Christian” come to set things right. This is often how the New Testament is portrayed, Jesus coming to “advance” Judaism, or, worse yet, to replace it. The fact is that Jesus is Jewish, and coming, like many before him, to reform his own tradition. It was much later that a whole different religion was formed in his name. And I often wonder, looking at the history of Christianity, if Jesus would appreciate the gesture.
We need to look carefully at what Jesus is up to in this section of his sermon because the kind of anxiety many of us are feeling these days might, I imagine, be very similar to what the people on the hill listening to Jesus were feeling. This was, after all, some pretty foundational stuff being “attacked” here. Jesus was talking about the “Law”, the thing that provided a major piece of identity to his people, and he seemed, at first glance, to be contradicting it. But here’s where it is important to note that Jesus is not contradicting. He’s not doing away with “the Law”, in fact he actually broadens them, but not for the sake of making the rules harder. No, he is really asking us what we believe. The rituals, you see, the routine and the rules, are meant to take us to a deeper place, but we can find ourselves “going through the motions” and avoiding that kind of deep, inner work altogether. For when you do ask yourself deeply what it is that you believe, it will cause trouble…trouble for you at work, in your family, in your politics…everywhere. It is why at Jesus’ time and today so many of us choose not to engage in what Richard Rohr calls the “necessary suffering” that brings with it a maturity and realism that dogma and rote ritual lacks. The ritual, the dogma, the “law” come out of our spiritual life and growth, they’re not the point of our spiritual life.
Yet that’s not what we see religion up to quite often. Honestly, it’s easier to keep a scorecard, where you add up all the plus column against the minus column and you look to win the game. It’s easier to oversimplify…to think of all people from that place as bad, or all people from this place as good, rather than accepting that there is risk in all encounters, but we take that risk because we value the other. We don’t just follow the rule, we take to heart the reason for the rule. When we don’t, when we build walls or ban this group or that group, we disable the very kind of interactions we must have in order to live authentically as faithful people and we deny that bold and holy claim from the mythical Genesis creation – all of us in God’s image.
These aren’t alternative facts that Jesus is promoting, they are the facts, the reality of what it means to be fully human and to live in wholeness. With every example, he tries to get us to think more deeply about what’s at stake with our obligations to one another. First, the whole murder thing. It’s wrong. Everybody knows it’s wrong. Everyone, or virtually everyone, agrees it’s wrong. And still it happens. Could it be that maybe just saying it’s wrong isn’t enough? Perhaps, just like telling people that catching the flu is bad but never demanding that they wash their hands, we aren’t really contending with the root of the problem. The root is our anger, and the ways that we give it such importance in our interactions. Jesus warns us of this slippery slope – telling us that we’re liable to judgment and even the “separate from God-ness” that Gehenna represents if we insult others. That alone ends the need for quite a few Twitter accounts. We don’t get to righteousness, the Book of James will also remind us, by angrily denouncing and hating and slandering…even when we obey the rule and stop just short of murder.
Or adultery. I can see people of that time, and people today, loudly proclaiming that those people are wicked…shameless adulterers. And what Jesus does with his words that make things a little too real is to remind us that before we see the speck in our brother’s eye, perhaps we can notice the plank in our own. We’re not off the hook because we haven’t acted on the things in our hearts. We don’t get to righteousness by judging.
It is not enough, Jesus tells his followers, to just obey the law for divorce. But that was a tricky task, full of all kinds of ways to be legal and unjust, above the law and hopelessly heartless. We should not treat people as disposable and should instead make sure that the most vulnerable are protected, legally and ethically – and in his culture that often meant women and children. We don’t get to righteousness with legal loopholes.
And oaths. It’s not about getting caught in a lie, it’s about integrity. We take oaths because we have lost our integrity – our yes being yes and our no being no. All of the exaggerated comments from Jesus, the dramatic language about cutting off appendages or gouging out eyes, they reinforce the idea that we don’t keep the laws for God’s sake but for our sake. It emphasizes how critical our treatment of one another is – worth some serious sacrifice. Sure it’s hyperbole, but with it, Jesus is suggesting that we may have to lop off some things we really care about to truly connect with each other…like our precious ideologies or our cherished opinions. We may have to learn with real sacrifice that if our gospel meets suffering, oppression and hopelessness with some law, some mere regulation…it’s not good news for anyone.
This speaks, my friends, to what I think is perhaps the central theological debate in this early part of the 21st century, during what some have called the next reformation in the church. That is the authority of scripture. Is the Bible the literal word of God, inerrant and without flaw? Is it the great instruction manual for our lives, where you can find the answer to any question you might have – except maybe ones about the fossil record? Do we hold it up as high as it’s been held, almost a 4th part of a trinity that isn’t even expressed in it’s own pages? Or, do we see it as an example of what our spiritual ancestors struggled with and use it to try and engage ourselves with a God who is still speaking, learning to take the risks that we must take in order to engage with our own moral and spiritual selves, with our own understanding of God, instead of just asserting the work done by people 2000 years ago? Do we find in it a trail of “necessary suffering” to find maturity, wisdom and the ethical truths that bind us together?
Now, in the midst of the rallies and the outrage, it is even more important to hear the lessons of Jesus. Now is the time for us to develop, to maintain, to exercise the moral muscle in each of us. For as we seek to live the gospel out in the world, to be liberation for the oppressed and voice for the unheard, that our efforts must be disciplined by love. For when we follow the law “welcome the stranger” by alienating the people who seem strange to us for not welcoming the stranger…you see where I’m going? And when we hate hate, or reject violence violently, what is it that we really believe?
We are living in a time of resistance. It is certainly a time to protest and rebel, to organize and mobilize, but we must do so, Jesus reminds us from a hillside centuries ago, holding on to what we believe, informed by our values. Anything less might tempt us to think that it is “us versus them”, when the fact is that for God is it always just us…all of us. Every single one.