Following the Call, August 25
Red Letter Herrings. The Law of Love. Clarence Jordan Strikes Again. Your Turn.
I am so sorry to tell you this, but Jesus was just not a very good Protestant. He was a Jew, for whom good works were not optional. He was the loving son of the Light-Giver who gave the law, and he expected those who followed him to follow it too, right down to the last jot and tittle. Later Paul would mount some good arguments about how the law was God’s grace for Jews, while God had something different in mind for Gentiles. But however our view of the law has changed through the years, our spiritual ancestors had the good sense to preserve this core teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: God expects us to step up. Righteousness is a good thing. Good works count.
— Barbara Brown Taylor (Following the Call: Living the Sermon on the Mount Together)
Red Letter Herrings
I love a good, honest argument—especially about matters that matter. “Iron sharpens iron,” the saying goes. Unfortunately, we have a habit of arguing over things that actually miss the point. This happens whenever we pit one thing against another when they actually belong together—like pitting faith against works, or the Old Testament against the New. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard statements like: Jesus teaches the way of love, the Old Testament teaches the Law; Jesus brings the Spirit and salvation, the Old Testament relies on the inadequacy of human effort; the Old Testament allows killing, but Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek; Jesus looks at the heart, whereas the Old Testament is concerned with social justice; etc.
These oppositions typically rely on caricatures, as if two straw men were dueling it out. I will not address these caricatures directly here. A subtler yet still off-kilter notion is that we should rank the words of Jesus (red typeface in many Bibles) as more important than the rest of scripture. Jesus’ words take primacy, trumping everything else in scripture.
True, Jesus is the author and perfecter of our faith. But red-letter Bible readers often miss how radical Jesus is. He was not a standalone prophet. He was rooted in the Jewish faith, and Jewish through and through. To truly grasp what he taught is only possible by means of the scriptures he lived by. And as a Jew, Jesus never opposed or rejected the Law. In fact, he expects us to follow it, “right down to the last jot and tittle” (Matt. 5:18). As Barbara Brown Taylor says, righteousness is a good thing. Good works count.
When Jesus says, “But I say unto you…” he (like the apostle Paul later) is not calling into question the Law itself but popular Jewish interpretations of the Law. The so-called antitheses in Matthew 5:21-48 are a challenge not to Moses but to these misguided interpretations. Jesus came to fulfill the Law and the prophets, not destroy them. He not only obeys the Law perfectly himself, but illuminates more fully its true intention. Jesus brings to completion all that God began to do through Israel. He is the “greater righteousness.”
This is why the Sermon on the Mount should not be viewed as a new or higher law, comparable to, though greater than, the Mosaic Law. “Jesus is not talking about beating the scribes and Pharisees at their own game,” explains R. T. France, “but about a different level or concept of righteousness altogether.”
The imperative behind Jesus’ “But I say unto you…” is not to establish a better code of conduct. His word is not inscribed on tablets of stone but on the heart. That word produces deeds. His commands describe the character, the lives, and the community of those who, filled with his spirit, belong to God’s kingdom and give evidence of this by bearing fruits of repentance. Jesus never pits the Old against the New, he simply points us back to God’s original will, the righteousness that naturally emerges from the lives of those submitted joyfully to the rulership of God. Jesus transforms the “thou shalt nots” into “thou shalts.” God’s grace, his gift to us, means that his kingdom can be realized here and now.
The Law of Love
Jesus’ greater righteousness ultimately rests on the greatest command: to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. The “old” is made “new” because as followers of Christ we can experience a righteousness that expresses itself in free and glad obedience to God’s original will for humankind.
This righteousness is rewarding because the life Jesus calls us to live is rooted in love. Jesus neither attempts to fix the Law nor set up a new one. He addresses the very foundation of the Law itself: love. What he brings, therefore, are works that surpass every legality. “If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’” writes James, “you are doing right” (James 2:8).
No wonder Jesus puts lust and divorce, for example, on the level of adultery. The ostensible “righteousness” of the scribes and Pharisees is in reality the most profound unrighteousness. From a legal, formal framework, a Jewish male could invoke the law in matters of divorce, thereby justifying putting his wife away. But Jesus calls them out. This is nothing other than masking, with legal right, an impure heart and a crying injustice against women. Jesus reminds us that divorce contradicts God’s original will for marriage: that husband and wife remain one flesh. He exposes the duplicity of Jewish divorce customs and, in the words of Gerhard Lohfink, summons us “to that absolute, unshakable love and fidelity which God means by marriage.”
This is what love does. “Be perfect,” Jesus says, “as your heavenly father in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). Be total, complete, unconditional in your love toward others, including your enemies. Behind Jesus’ words regarding divorce I can hear the apostle Paul: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trust, always hopes, always preservers (1 Cor. 13:4-7). “Against such things,” Paul writes elsewhere, “there is no law” (Gal. 5:22-23).
Clarence Jordan Strikes Again
From a reader who kindly passed me this quote from Clarence Jordan, who founded the interracial community Koinonia Farm in Georgia in the 1940s.
So lofty are the ethical precepts of the Sermon that many people have deified it and relegated the preacher to the role of a lesser prophet. “It doesn’t matter what you believe about Jesus,” these people say. “The Sermon on the Mount is my creed!” Still others would try to cling to Jesus and throw out the Sermon. But the two must never get separated. It is as impossible to dissociate a man from his message as a tree from its sap. They belong together. You can’t fully understand one apart from the other…apart from him, his sermon is senseless idealism – an impossible, frustrating, ethic. It might even make you bitter and cynical. (from Sermon on the Mount)
Your Turn
Is there a tension in the Sermon on the Mount between what we ought to do and what we actually can? What “laws” (or rules) do Christians live by today that miss the heart of what Jesus taught? I welcome your comments, opinions, questions, and personal experiences, and will share a selection with readers each week.
Thanks Jose for what you write. I couldn't agree with you more. I would only add one thing to what you express. Sometimes understanding only comes after genuine actions are taken. We often don't "see" until we obey. This is the main thrust behind Jesus' approach (e.g., John 8:31)
Thanks for the post, Charles, excited about the book and the way it is broaching questions and tensions that I have been wrestling with for a while. I love the quote from Barbara Brown Taylor. The pitting of the Sermon on the Mount against something that I have struggled with most recently is the seeming tension between the Sermon on the Mount and doctrine of justification in the Protestant/Reformation understanding found in Paul's letters. As an Anabaptist, I have long been leery of the emphasis that so many evangelicals give to it. Not because I don’t believe it or because I think it unimportant, but because it has often seemed to be used as way to diminish obedience to Jesus’ teachings, in particular those found in the SoM. It is often presented as the “the Gospel” which to me seems to be a truncated Gospel and different than the Gospel Jesus announces in the gospels, particularly the synoptics. But at the same time, leaning more into this doctrine, in particular in recent study of Romans, has been a balm to the soul and given me permission to be more honest with myself and my own failings. The Sermon on the Mount, in light of Romans, seems less like commands that can be followed perfectly and more like a benchmark which reveals how much we fail in following them. So the tension I am wrestling with is how to hold obedience to the teachings of the SoM seriously, not setting them aside as so often happens or saying they are unrealistic to follow, but also seeking to follow them with greater humility and grace, both for myself and others.