Sermon on the Mount (3) Matthew 5:21-37

Matthew 5:21-37 Gospel reading for Sunday 13th February 2011

This week we are right into what many would regard as the hard sayings of Jesus. In this little segment of The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus really starts to turn up the heat on his readers. What is radical about his teaching here is the move from externalizing to internalizing the law. The radical shift not just from looking at behaviour but to also including the underlying thinking and attitude in the heart. So being angry with a brother or sister Jesus says, equates to murder. Implication: none of us can keep the law.

I believe that one of the great problems of the Christian faith is a lack of understanding of what the Bible is. If we focus our thinking on it being a book of rules for living for us today, then we have missed the point. This results in most of what we read and interpret through that lens of thinking being totally up the creek! On the other hand if we see the Bible more as the unfolding of God's story with humanity and of him revealing to us the mystery of the way he thinks, acts and works and in particular the mystery of the kingdom and the mystery of Christ, then we start to appreciate what its all about.

Let's engage in a little paraphrasing here to try to bring out what is going on in the Sermon on the Mount.

"OK you lot ... (Jesus speaking) ... you think you are so good ... I tell you that you are not. You think you have stuck to God's rules that were given long ago ... I'm telling you now that you have not ever come close. On the surface you may not have killed any one or been unfaithful to your partner ... but I'm telling you that inside you, in your inner thoughts and in your attitudes to others, you have been far from squeaky clean. The bottom line is you just don't measure up. You cannot satisfy the demands of God when you are required to follow his rules. You may have done an OK job of sticking to the letter of the law ... but with regard to the spirit of the law, you have never been even close. Therefore I'm telling you now that under that system you're stuffed! The reality is that I am the one who has come to fulfil the law ... I'm the only one who can do that, you have no chance. In the end ... that's great news for you. I'm here to tell you that we can celebrate ... God has actually had a better plan in place all along ... where quite unbelievably, you don't actually have to do anything to be OK with him! ... (you lot are not going to like all this and will eventually nail me for it ... and then just to prove that everything I have said is true ... I'm going to show you the real power of God and bounce right back out of that grave where you put me.)

(The last little section is bracketed to indicated that Jesus didn't directly say that in The Sermon on the Mount ... that is progressively spelt out as his ministry unfolds.)

So for us in Lutheran Schools, we have the huge challenge of helping people in our world (classroom, staffroom, carpark) to be able to "see the forest despite the trees getting in the way" ... or to be able to start to see the bigger picture of the mystery of how God really works and what this God stuff is all about, without the view being obstructed.

Nev