Epiphany + 6A ^{12-2-2017 Mt 5 21-37}

A long time ago, I was a parishioner in a Bible study working on the Sermon on the Mount. The minister began by asking, ‘What would you think if I got up in the pulpit one Sunday, and instead of my own sermon, I just read out the Sermon on the Mount?’ One lady responded immediately, ‘I’d be disappointed.’ And she didn’t mean she’d be disappointed because the preacher wasn’t doing his job. It was because she finds the Sermon on the Mount so frighteningly challenging.

And at first hearing, it is. Today, Jesus teaches that we’re not to be angry with each other – that it’s tantamount to murder. If he left it at that, it would be impossible, wouldn’t it. Really? Which way do you turn? Is God really that strict? People do things all the time that will make us angry. We can’t help reacting the way we do. Or can we? … Jesus goes on to warn us not to insult each other and not to maintain a state of conflict with each other. So his concern ‘… seems to be less the having of anger than what one does with it: does anger shape our relationships, or preclude reconciliation?¹ … Now I get it. Living in a state of feud or fury is a living hell. You don’t sleep, you can’t think of anything else, you’re consumed by rage; locked out of normal life until you’re reconciled or avenged; which is it to be?

If we look at the news, we find many stories of the latter – vengeance: domestic violence, road rage, ‘coward punches’ and home invasions. And at a more public level, we see it work out in the law-and-order emphases of so many election campaigns. Anger gets whipped up at particular groups who end up wildly over-represented in our prisons. Or there’s racial profiling, which is increasingly openly expressed in calls to strengthen our public security. Communal anger; it often means feeling so justifiably outraged – so unable to consider the other person’s perspective – that hurting them, hating them, locking them up or writing them off as fully human – that an us-and-them mentality seems acceptable. Jesus says it’s not.

Jesus knows where anger can lead. Ever since his childhood, he was a daily witness to the suppression of his people by a foreign power; he knew the corrosive, impotent fury of the zealot factions calling his people to futile resistance. He had to rebuke his close friends when they wanted to resort to violence. ^{Mt 26.51-52} His own choice was to forgive rather than curse the people who killed him. ^{Lk 23.24}

So he calls us to renounce anger’s power over us; – and in particular, to stop it from making us de-humanise anyone else. With Jesus, there can be no them-and-us; no ‘other’. Jesus modelled a lifestyle which focussed on being with outsiders – humanising outsiders whom no-one else treated as human: tax farmers, Samaritans, Romans, whores, lepers and lunatics. Today, they’re boat people, Muslims, welfare recipients, Aboriginal activists, people of minority sexual persuasions. Imagine if people didn’t believe today’s warnings against outsiders –Jesus is calling us to be that people; to renounce a sense of entitlement to anger; not to let anyone make us forget the humanity of the other. There is no other; only God’s children – us.

The quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer which Katrina sent us describes the difficulty of choosing this mindset, but also how it is ultimately a triumph.

The community of the saints is not an ‘ideal’ community, consisting of perfect sinless men and women, where there is no need of further repentance. No, it is a community which proves that it is worthy of the gospel of forgiveness by constantly and sincerely proclaiming God’s forgiveness.

 Bonhoeffer was gaoled then hanged for living his convictions. …Anger – murder? It’s a question of degree, says Jesus.

Shocking things can happen when we don’t see another person as human – when we objectify them and only consider them in terms of our feelings. And this is the theme Jesus pursues again in the second of his sayings we heard this morning.

²⁷ ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” ²⁸ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

Jesus is telling his followers not to do what the English-speaking world in particular has just about legitimised now: ignoring someone’s humanity and only seeing them as a body that we desire, or that doesn’t interest us; an object. A majority Christian nation just elected a man who publicly judges women by their appearance – humiliating those he doesn’t find attractive. This is not about relationship or respect but ownership; domination. These have nothing to do with humanity – nothing to do with the love God has for all of us, and that God wants us to have for each other.

We live in a world which traffics millions of women and children as slaves in a sex trade. A Royal Commission is investigating how this evil has happened in the Church, and even in this very community. So are Jesus’ words about tearing out our wandering eyes and amputating our offending limbs overstatements? I doubt that a victim of domestic violence or rape or child abuse would think so.

The contemporary Jewish scholar of the NT, Prof A-J Levine writes this;

“By collapsing the distinction between thought and action, [Jesus’] extension of the law against adultery to include lust suggests that no one should be regarded as a sex object. The burden here is placed on the man: women are not seen as responsible for enticing men into sexual misadventures.”

This has implications for the third saying Jesus gives us today – about divorce. In his time, and still in much of the world today, a woman can be handed a certificate of divorce by her husband for burning his toast. This isn’t just possible; it happens, and the right to do so gets fiercely defended. We know how John the Baptist was gaoled and killed for criticising Herod, who divorced his wife to marry his sister-in-law. Women were chattels; belongings. But Jesus’ word about divorce says women and men are equally precious in God’s eyes; there are spiritual implications to violating the humanity of women. Sadly, the Church only saw a prohibition of divorce here, and ostracised both divorced men and women. Wrong again. Jesus was talking about relationship; about respect; about change; about Love. Live what Jesus declared from the mountain-top and we show the world a community of real, humble Love.

Amen