A Sermon for Epiphany 7A
The Sermon on the Mount—Jesus’ signature sermon—is incredibly long. I never preach that long (and I know you appreciate that)!
Today is the fourth week we’ve had a gospel lesson from the Sermon on the Mount. There is so much to consider that the lectionary breaks it up into bite-sized pieces and today is our last one. We heard about the Beattitudes and how we are salt and light and cannot lose the essence of who we are as God’s children and how we must flee from sin. All of those are difficult teachings but nothing like today’s. Here Jesus dishes up the hard stuff. Are you ready for it? Do you have your seat belts on? He hits us with the final doozy: “Be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect.”
Okay, then. That about sums it up. What more can say? Go ahead. Be perfect!
Are you kidding me? Be perfect?! Hold on—before this drives us over the edge let’s try to get a handle on what Jesus means by this. When he says what is translated here as “be perfect” he is using a Greek word with the root telos, which means: goal, end, or purpose. It is about reaching your intended outcome. For example, the telos of an arrow is to reach the target. The telos of an apple tree is to produce apples. Telos is the direction in which we are going. So what is your direction—in your life, I mean? Where are you going? Jesus wants to know.
Are you going to go with the flow and live a normal life like everybody else or will you raise your sights and look at your telos, your end goal? Do you even have an end goal? Is it a worthy one? Hope so because God is with you to help you get there.
This part of the Sermon on the Mound sounds like a demand—an impossible demand—at first but when read this way, it is more about promise. God has plans for you. God sees something in you, maybe more than you see in yourself. And God intends to bring something spectacular to fruition in your life. As you live into this telos, this purpose, you can help transform the world—which is the thing God’s already at work doing. That's an incredible promise.
But how do we do that? Well, Jesus has given us some concrete examples here. Unfortunately, he lived in a foreign land in an ancient time so for us to understand what he’s saying, we’ll need to do consider the context. There is a lot of misunderstanding about these teachings of Jesus’ precisely because people don’t know the context. They think he’s telling us to be doormats. I’m a Christian so I should let everyone walk over me, right? Wrong! That’s NOT what Jesus is saying.
First, he says that if anyone hits you on your right cheek, you shouldn’t strike back—which might be your natural instinct. You should instead, offer him your other cheek, but you should do so without showing submission. The goal here is to bring shame on the one who is doing this evil. In the ancient world where honor and shame were important, doing this would demonstrate the shamefulness of the person’s aggression and this would humiliate him. It is a nonviolent resistance Jesus is talking about, like what Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior did in the civil rights movement. Don’t physically fight back, but don’t let your opponent win either. Bring them down with your clever action.
Then, Jesus recommends a solution to injustice in the courtroom. You see, if a poor person was sued for his garments, the law in Exodus and Deuteronomy forbid the taking of that person's last piece of clothing. Jesus advises that if a rich person sues you for your next-to-last garment, you take off your other garment in court and give it to them as well. In other words, get stark naked and require this rich suitor to experience the shame of requiring a person to have no clothes and thereby break the law. And here’s a fun factoid: it was considered more shameful to see a naked person than to be a naked person! Even without Facebook, the gossip channels would get a hold of this one and everyone would hear about how unfair the suitor had been. This would shame your greedy adversary immeasurably—as long as you had the courage to strip in court.
Jesus also talks about the carrying of soldier’s bags the “extra mile.” We’ve heard this saying, perhaps as a cliche, but do we know what it means? Again, a bit of context helps. At that time, the Roman soldiers traveled by foot and they had heavy bags (as much as 85 pounds) to carry. Because the Romans had occupied Israel, the soldiers could just grab a random person on the street and force him to carry the bag, but only for a mile. There were sign posts at each mile so soldiers knew when to relieve their bag-carrier. Well, Jesus is saying that if this injustice happens to you, do something unusual: when you get to the end of the mile, go on carrying it. Why? Because it’s nice? No. Because it is illegal for the soldier to make you do this and if his commanding officer finds out you’ve been carrying to more than a mile, it could get him in trouble. Again, you can bring down your oppressor by your clever actions.
In each of these examples Jesus is not recommending passive response. He doesn’t say we should endure whatever humiliation or injustice an evildoer heaps upon us, nor is he recommending a violent counterattack. Jesus’ recommendation is to find a third way that demonstrates nonviolently the injustice of what is being done and seeks to right the wrong.
What does this all mean for us today? How can we heed his advise when his examples are all for the ancient context? Can we trust that if we don’t fight back our enemy will be put to shame? Can we safely assume that we are right and our enemy is wrong? I mean what if we are the one oppressing someone and we don’t even realize it? It’s all very complicated. It’s hard to know for sure and we must wrestle with our response to it.
So here’s the part that I think is relevant no matter what: Jesus tells us: “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” He not only said this, he demonstrated it by his own actions. He was quick to love foreigners and outsiders, people who would have been considered Jesus’ dangerous enemies. He didn't deport them, he healed them. In doing so, Jesus demonstrated that God’s love is for ALL people not just people like us. As Dr. King said: “Darkness cannot drive our darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
It boils down to love. When in doubt, LOVE. That’s what Jesus did. Here’s where we like to whine: “But he was Jesus, he can’t possibly expect us to do the same!” Ah, but he does. Be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect. Go with the plan God has for your life. Live your true calling. Keep your end goal in mind. That’s what he’s telling us.
Living this plan for our lives is important. We like to call it our “baptismal vocation,” which means the extraordinary life to which God has called us in our baptisms. In baptism we have been set free. We are promised the unconditional love of God, forgiveness of sins and everlasting life. That’s incredible freedom. Do we really believe it? Do we live like it is true? You see, as I reflect on why we don’t always follow Jesus’ advise to love our enemies, I think it is because we’re insecure. We somehow think we have to hold on to our ego, we have to keep ourselves from looking stupid or wrong. So when someone does something awful to us, our urge is to fight back because that other person is threatening our perceived sense of security. It feels like our identity is at stake.
But let me assure you that your identity is secure. We are God’s own children, claimed in the waters of baptism and nourished at God’s table. We are salt and we are light. We’re not perfect yet but we are on our way with our end goal ever before us and the Holy Spirit filling us.
When we receive the bread and wine at communion, we know that it is more than just bread and wine. We believe that when Christ said “this is my body and this is my blood” he meant it and is somehow truly present. Saint Augustine explained that this sacrament was about identity and so when people were given the bread and wine, he would say to them “receive who you are.” Receive who you are. Yes, you are the body of Christ and so you are simply receiving who you already are. And this will strengthen you to go out there and do the many loving actions that need to be done. So Augustine would say to the people after they’d received the sacrament: “Go become what you have received.”
Turn the other cheek, give your last cloak, go the extra mile, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Yes, Jesus wants you to do it all because that’s what being a Christian means. We cannot shrink from this huge responsibility and stay on the couch binge-watching Netflix shows. But we do not muster the will to do this on our own. We do it in the power and the identity given to through God's word and the sacraments—and therefore, we CAN do it. Our calling is enormous, our end goal is epic, but isn’t that exciting?
Okay, the Sermon on the Mount is finally finished. Now go out there and live it!
© 2017 Laura E. Gentry
