The following is the manuscript version of the sermon I gave at both services of liberti PCA church in Philadelphia on Sunday, September 25, 2005. I’ll link to the church’s audio file of the sermon as soon as they have it up.

Matthew 5:17-26 (NIV)

The Fulfillment of the Law
17″Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19Anyone who 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 practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.

Murder
21″You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ 22But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.
23″Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, 24leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.
25″Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still with him on the way, or he may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison. 26I tell you the truth, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny.

We don’t hear the words of Jesus like we should. They’re too familiar, too old fashioned, too “religious” for us to hear the way we hear other speech. They don’t have the impact on us that they had on the people who first heard them. That’s why we’re sometimes bewildered by how confused, upset, and even downright angry many people got back in the day when Jesus first spoke. We need to try to hear these words as if we’re hearing them for the first time; even as if we don’t already know the whole story (“Jesus is going to make it all OK in the end. No sweat”). We need to let these words rock our world the way they did for 1st century people.

A couple of weeks ago Steve said that it’s easy to treat the Beatitudes like sweet little sayings on a Christian plaque, with a background of roses draped over a piano. But in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is not only seeking to comfort the afflicted, but “afflict the comfortable.” And he doesn’t let up a bit in the passage before us today.

The Sermon on the Mount, as we call it, was no collection of “suitable for cross stitch” sayings. Think about the setting Matthew gives us, for one thing. We call it the “Sermon on the Mount” because Matthew starts it by making the point that Jesus went “up on the mountain” (εἰς τὸ ὄρος). The Greek word there can mean either “mountain” or just “hill,” but I think Matthew was intending us to read “mountain.” My wife and I have visited the northern shore of the Sea of Galillee where this teaching occurred. There isn’t even a hill, let alone a mountain–just a gentle slope leading up from the sea. So why does Matthew set in upon a mountain? To first century Jews, this would have had stunning significance. Who previously had gone up a mountain and then delivered the Law of God? Moses, of course. Jesus seems to be intentionally putting himself in the place of the founder of the Jewish way of life. He has gone up a mountain and he is giving Law, as we shall soon see.

Jesus starts our passage by saying that he didn’t come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. For the Jews to whom he was speaking, that was like saying, “I haven’t come to eliminate the Bible.” What would you all think if I stood up here and said, “Now I want you all to know that I’m not here to wipe out the Bible.” You’d all be wondering, “Why is he saying that? Why does he think that we might be worried about that?” The shock value of that for the Jews lies in what he is about to lay on them.

Rabbi Jacob Neusner wrote a book called A Rabbi Talks with Jesus. He tried to imagine himself as a first century Jewish rabbi interacting with this itinerant preacher from Galillee. Much of what this Jesus of Nazareth had to say the rabbi really liked. It fit nicely with the traditional interpretations of Torah, the Jewish Bible. When Jesus talked about God’s comfort to persecuted people, as well as a city set on a hill, the rabbi would think, “He’s talking about us, about Israel. He’s right in saying that we’re meant to be on top of things, not squashed under the thumb of Rome.” But now Jesus says some things that shock, even anger him. “You have heard it said…” – no problem here, Jesus is just repeating the words of Torah. But then: “But I say to you…” This the rabbi cannot stand to hear. Jesus is changing the Law, making his own Law. Only God can do that. At this point the rabbi decides there is no way he can follow Jesus.

We love the Bible’s depiction of Jesus the merciful, Jesus the gracious, Jesus the friend of sinners. And well we should. It’s lovely and it’s true. But the Bible also gives us moments of Jesus saying hard things, shocking things, things we want to run away from. Jesus often seemed to cause his own public relations disasters. For example, in John 6, he seemes to be on top of the world. Hundreds of people are following him around the countryside, marveling at his miracles, hanging on his every word. He had fed the crowd and they wanted more. And just at that moment he decides to start talking about himself as the real bread they needed to feed on. Weird! And then he makes it worse by saying, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” Woah! Super weird. Not surprisingly, verse 66 tells us that “after this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.” Hey, Jesus, thanks for the all the fish, but eat your body? I’m outa here!

Let’s go back to see what might “weird us out” in Matthew 5. Now we’re not like Jacob Neusner’s imaginary rabbi. We’re fine with Jesus being God. That doesn’t shock us any more. We may or may not believe it is true, but we don’t get riled up about it. But hold on…Jesus isn’t going to let us stay in our comfortable little 21st century distancing of ourselves. We often want to hold on to “Jesus has set me free” and then add to that phrase “so I can do whatever I want to.” But Jesus says (verse 19), “Anyone who 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 practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” Wait a minute. Keeping the commandments? I thought Jesus did away with all that. What about grace? What about freedom in Christ? Now we’re going to see in the end that it really is all about grace and all about freedom in Christ, but first we need to feel the impact of Jesus’ words: it really does matter what we do about stuff that God says is important. In fact, Jesus says we have to be more righteous than the Scribes or Pharisees, who were the most righteous looking people of their day (verse 20). If that’s the standard then we’re sunk, aren’t we? I think in a way that’s exactly what Jesus wants us to feel: we’re sunk, we’re done before we even started. The green starter flag just got waved, and our engine has blown a rod. He wants us to feel that…because it’s the only way we’ll get to his real answer for us. But we’ll come back to that.

Right now, in verse 21, Jesus reminds us of a part of God’s Law from what we call the Old Testament. “You have head that it was said to the people long ago,” he begins, “do not murder.” We’re good with that. In fact, that’s one law that just about all cultures everywhere agree on. Do not murder. It isn’t good for us to go around unjustifiably killing one another. No problem there, Jesus. We’re not murderers. You tell ‘em!

But then we come to the next verse, and the phrase that was so revolting to Rabbi Neusner: “But I say to you…” Jesus is going to lay down the new law, the law of his Kingdom. Now with our “gentle Jesus meek and mild,” romanticized ideal of who Jesus is, we would expect him to say something like, “it’s OK. God can forgive anything. Even murderers can come to me.” But no, instead of talking about the people who all us decent folk agree are dirty sinners, he squeezes right down on us. “But I tell you…tell YOU…that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment.” That’s a condemnation none of us can escape. No matter how mild our disposition, somewhere, sometime, we all have been angry at someone. And here Jesus is saying that we’re just as deserving of judgment as a murderer!

The radical turn that Jesus is making here is that in his kingdom, external, superficial compliance with the letter of the law is nothing. He wants to take his rulership down deep inside us, to the core of what makes us behave as we do, what the Bible calls the heart. The reason we are no better in God’s sight than a murderer if we harbor hatred toward our brother or sister is that both the murderer who sticks a knife in someone and the person who walks around with bitterness towards someone else essentially have the same heart. Deep down inside them is the same seed. Look at James 4:1-3…

What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? 2 You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. 3 When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.

James says that our outward bad behaviors—fights, quarrels, even killing—come from “[our] desires that battle within [us].” There is something inside us that is very, very broken. The Bible calls it sin. Most of us probably grew up with the image that sin is just bad things we do: “Don’t smoke, don’t chew, don’t hang with folks who do.” But the Bible tells us that we are really in far worse shape than we think. Sin isn’t just a set of bad habits that we can overcome with the right shrink or self-help book. Sin is something deep down inside us that we have no control over. According to James in what we just read, it takes our desires, which may be perfectly good to start out with, and turns them into a batlle within us, setting one desire against another. How does sin do this?

First of all, by leading us to worship anything but God. Worship is so much the issue here. We were created as beings with a built-in need to worship. There really is no such thing as a non-religious person; everybody worships something. James said at the end of verse 2 that we “do not have” the truly good things of life because we “do not ask God.” He’s not just saying here that we forget to pray, he’s saying that we willfully turn away from God and look to other sources. That’s clear from the next verse. It’s not that we forget to pray (which is just another way of saying asking), it’s who we pray to that makes the difference. James says we don’t get good things—peace in our lives; meaningful, deep relationships—because we “ask with wrong motives, that we may spend what we get on our own pleasures.” We’re praying to a god alright…and that god is ourselves!

The problem with that god is that it is a false god, what the Bible calls an idol. We need to stop thinking about idols as cute little chubby Buddha statues people used to keep around the house for good luck. Sure in ancient times people made their idols very visible, but the Bible doesn’t let us sophisticated moderns off the hook. Whenever we choose to not ask God but rather to seek our own selfish desires, we are serving an idol every bit as much as people in an ancient temple bowing down to a stone statue. In some ways, our idols are even worse, because we take them into our very hearts.

Now if you’re a Christian, if you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and you choose to ask the idol of your own selfish pleasure rather than ask God, James tells us that you’ve set yourself up for a battle, with your heart as the battleground. He says that at that moment your desires battle within you. Jesus tells us a little later on in the Sermon on the Mount that where our treasure is, there our heart will be also. Your treasure is what you have your heart set on, what you worship, what you really want deep down inside, no matter what you may say you want with your lips. If your treasure is in heaven (which is just a way of saying that you want the things that God wants), then your heart will be drawn towards the things of heaven, the values that Jesus sets before us in the Sermon on the Mount. You can readily and happily afford to spend yourself in sacrificial love for others, because your real treasure is in a place where nothing can touch it and it never can lose a cent of value. If your treasure, however, is your own selfish pleasures, then your heart is drawn into yourself. You can’t possibly afford to love others. Life becomes a zero-sum game. If you give anything, if you let anyone else have benefit, it will be at a loss to yourself. So you fight and argue and distance yourself…you’re protecting your treasure.

John Piper tells a story from just after the wars in Serbia and Croatia. The fields around a certain village were littered with land mines planted during the war. One day the villagers discovered to their horror that a small child had wandered into the very center of one of the mine fields. They frantically called out to the child to not take another step. But now they were at an impasse. The child could not come to them. But if they went to try to rescue the child, they risked being blown up themselves. Hours passed with the child and the villagers staring at each other across the field, weeping without comfort at the hopeless situation. Suddenly, one of the men of the village strode out across the field, picked up the frightened child in his arms, and carried him back to the astonished villagers. “How could you do that?” they wanted to know. The man calmly explained that he was a Christian. He knew his treasure, his very life, was in heaven with Christ. He knew that if he got blown up, it was no ultimate loss. He’d be with Jesus. And if not, then the child was saved.

Now very few of us are ever going to be called to such a momentous life or death decision. But my point is that the choices we make in even the small things of life are moved by the same issues that motivated that man in the mine field. Every outward behavior we manifest (outside of those behaviors caused by physiological problems) is the result of who or what we were worshiping at that moment. To apply this to the direct situation at hand in our main verses for today, when we get angry or harbor bitterness toward our brother or sister, it’s because in that moment we let sin rule our desires, making them desires for self-preservation and self-exaltation. We will fight fiercely to defend that which we worship, so if we perceive that someone else has attacked us, hurt us, wronged us, ignored us, or even just annoyed us, we take that as an affront on our favorite god—ourselves. Our anger and bitterness, and the outward manifestations of sarcasm, rage…or at the extreme, violence…are just the inevitable outworkings of our inner turmoil. James puts it this way back in chapter 1 of his letter, verses 14 and 15: “…each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. 15 Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.”

Back in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus draws a picture of the same slippery slope in the image of former friends winding up in court. In verse 25 he warns that if you don’t reconcile yourself to your adversary, “he may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison.” We’ve all heard stories like this. Maybe some of you have seen it happen first hand. Someone gets in a disagreement with a friend. The next thing you know, one “friend” is taking legal action against the other. Soon, someone ends up with a hefty penalty. Almost every night you can find a story in the news of some little conflict between people that escalates until it erupts into violence, an end that no one seems to have intended in the beginning. Even if the brokenness of our relationships never reaches the violence stage, the seed is the same. The prison Jesus says we’ll wind up in if we don’t find reconciliation doesn’t have to be the one with razor-wire fences and guard towers; more often it’s the prison of loneliness and despair that we build around ourselves when we let anger and bitterness rule.

So how do we break this pattern? How do we keep from leaving a string of fractured relationships behind us? The Sermon on the Mount provides us with the answer at two levels, one intensely personal and practical, the other “big picture” and foundational. I’ll start with the personal/practical. Notice that right before he depicts that slippery slope that leads one to the prison of a selfish soul, Jesus gives a way to avoid it. He tells us to “settle matters quickly with our adversaries.” In the two verses just before that, he draws another picture of what that should look like.

…if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, 24 leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.

Notice first of all that he puts it in the context of worship. Remember earlier that I said that worship is always the issue? If there is a relational break with your brother or sister in Christ, then it does you no good to come worship God first. As we saw before, if there is a breakdown in relationship, then it’s because one or the other of the parties involved (and often both) had at some point been worshiping some desire other than god, and they had perceived that desire being threatened by the other person. There’s no way authentic worship of the true God can take place if you are worshiping something else. This is the God who will have no other gods before him.

So the amazing, shocking, thing here—so counter to what we expect from “religion”—is that Jesus is saying reconciliation takes precedence over worship! He says to drop your gift, turn from the altar, and go all the way back to the person from whom you’re estranged. One teacher has pointed out that when we read that we miss the almost humorous absurdity that would have struck Jesus’ original audience. The typical Jew of his day lived far away from the altar in Jerusalem, often many days journey. The picture here would be like you getting in your car here in Philly and driving three days to a Christian conference out in, say, Dallas. You reserved your spot at the conference months in advance and have gone to great trouble and expense to come. You’ve really been looking forward to the great teaching and awesome group worship. Then just as you pull into the parking lot of the convention center, it pops into your head that you never reconciled with someone in your home church after you’d had a big blow at each other at the church’s annual meeting last week. You turn your car right around and head back toward Philly, determined to get things right with your friend. That’s how outrageous the story Jesus was telling was to his first century listeners. Was Jesus exaggerating to make a point? Perhaps, but that’s how seriously he takes our relationships with each other.

Before I go any further, may I inject a personal observation? There were times in Paul’s letters when he said, “This next thing is not from the Lord, it’s from me.” So I should probably say that this next little bit is not necessarily “from the Lord;” it’s just from me. I can’t give you any Bible verses on it, just my own personal sense. So take it for what it’s worth; if it doesn’t sit well with you, toss it. Here’s my thing…while it’s clear that Jesus wants us to be quick to be reconciled with our brother or sister, I think there may be times when it is actually wise to not go to someone. One of those situations might be when the other person is so angry at you that they will not be able to hear you, or they may even do violence to you. In that case, you may just need to wait and pray, using wisdom about when, if ever, to go to them. The Bible tells us that “love covers over a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8). There are times when it just may be right to, in love, overlook a small offense. We need to use wisdom about that, and not use that as an excuse to avoid reconciliation, but all the same, I don’t think Jesus’ call to reconciliation is a call to be annoying, to make a ‘federal case’ out of every little thing. One more thing…it also strikes me in this passage that Jesus says, “if your brother has something against you” go to him, not if you have something against your brother. What I mean here is that if your brother or sister hasn’t really done anything wrong, but you’re just annoyed at them, the problem is with you…which means the sin is between you and God, not between you and the person. There’s still reconciliation that needs to take place, but it’s between you and the Lord. I keep hearing well-meaning Christians going up to a friend and saying something like, “I want to confess to you that I was bitter at you because you got to lead the prayers at the last home group meeting.” Now by leading the prayers, had that friend wronged you in any way? Had he or she sinned against you? Of course not…the sin was all in your own heart. So what are you accomplishing by “confessing” your problem to that person. Probably all you’ve done is made him or her feel bad about leading the prayers! What I’m saying is, sort out who your sin is against. If its really just your heart turning away from God, then confess to God, receive his forgiveness, and be done with it. If your brother or sister has sinned against you, but you did not turn that to sin against them in their heart, then lovingly and gently confront him or her so they may be healed. But if you took their sin against you as an occasion for you to sin back at them by getting angry or bitter toward them, then be ready to confess before your confront. Does that make sense? If not, like I said, those are just my own thoughts, so you can take ‘em or chuck ‘em.

Back to Jesus’ words. I said earlier that Jesus’ solution to our tendency to murder our relationships had two levels. We just looked at the personal/practical level: if there is sin between you and another person, as quickly as possible seek to be reconciled with them. The other level, the big picture/foundational level, not only helps provide the solution to our dilemma, but also the glorious reason why we should even bother.

The big picture behind why we need to go through the bother, hassle, and potential embarrassment of reconciliation is found back in the beginning of the passage we’re considering. Back in verse 17 of Matthew 5, Jesus had said that he didn’t come to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfill them. Remember that “the Law and the Prophets” was just Jewish short hand for “the whole story about how God had been working out his plan in history to rescue a people out of the slavery of sin.” Jesus was saying that this story had a fulfillment, an ending, and that fulfillment was not an event but a person…he himself! He was and is the summing up, the climax, of all the great story of God’s work in the human race since humans had chosen sinful rebellion over God’s peaceful rule. This was startling and shocking to the Jews of his day, because it wasn’t the ending they had been expecting. They were looking for the story to end with a military or political revolution that would put their kings back on top of the world. But Jesus instead says that all that they had been longing for could only be fulfilled in him.

It’s like the Israelites had been watching the movie The Sixth Sense. Now I promise I’ll be really careful with this illustration, because it seems like no matter how many years have gone by I keep running into someone who has not only not seen the movie, but also somehow managed to not have its ending spoiled. So I’ll just say that when you watch that movie, you think you understand what’s going on. Then in the last few minutes you find out that everything you thought was happening was wrong. But even more to the point, once you know the ending, you can think back through the movie, or watch it again, and suddenly everything makes sense. Once you know the ending, you can see that everything in it was leading up to the fulfillment, the ending, though you couldn’t see that coming before. In the same way, those who accept that Jesus is the grand finale of God’s plans can look back across all of history and say, “Ah, yes, of course…it had to be!”

Now how does that impact us? We aren’t 1st century Jews with confused expectations about God’s plan. We have the whole Bible. We know how the story ends. But that’s just it, that’s the secret of the power available to us, as well as the motivation to avail ourselves of it. Because Jesus is the great fulfiller of all of God’s promises, we, by giving ourselves over to him and becoming joined to him, become receivers along with him of those promises. Among the promises are those of reconciliation, of healing of relationships, of closing of the divides between us. And the fulfillment of those promises is real for us, secured by Jesus’ death on the cross and proven by his resurrection from the dead. If we receive those things as being true, then we know that nothing that can happen to us matters. Like that man in Croatia, we can walk across the mine field of our own shame and embarrassment, laying down our lives to reach out to the brother or sister we are distanced from.

Not only does Jesus himself provide the power to work for reconciliation, he provides the glorious reason to pursue it. If we go through the symbolic death of baptism and openly confess ourselves as belonging to Jesus, we also belong to his tribe. One comes with the other. No one is saved into isolation. Jesus said that he came to build his church, not his collection of individuals. And he also said that it would be by our love for one another that the world would know we are his. Reconciliation is not optional for us. It is not a nice thing to do if we get around to it. It is so important that Jesus said we shouldn’t even bother to worship him if we are refusing to be reconciled.

One last thing. I would feel it most tragic if you take this exhortation to reconciliation as a task list, as a duty to be performed. This is not a call to be better people or try harder. It is a call to the gospel, to falling on your knees before the King who wants to reconcile you to himself so he can call you friend. How can we possibly have hope that our anger and bitterness and selfishness can be broken and healed? Because Jesus himself took the wrath and anger of the world upon himself when he went to the cross. He, the most innocent man who ever lived, willingly took all our condemnation upon himself, not only the condemnation that we deserve for our sins, but also the condemnation we heap on each other, and even on Jesus, because we are sinners. He took our sin upon himself and put it to death, so that in him we can find healing. We also find true liberty, not the liberty to stay in our sin of anger and bitterness, which is really just greater bondage, but the true liberty that frees us to lay down our lives for one another, and then to corporately and individually lay down our lives to the world, so that it might see that Jesus truly is the great fulfiller of the longings of our hearts.

Where are the broken relationships in your life today? Who are the people you’ve distanced yourself from, the ones you’ve tried to pretend you can go on without? May you find in Christ this day the courage, the motivation, and the power, to cross the minefield to your brother or sister.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 25th, 2005 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Christian Community, It`s All About Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.