Tag: lust

How To Be Better Than The Pharisees, Matthew 5:21-37 (Ordinary 6 Lent -2 Year A 2023)

Matthew 5:21-37

In last week’s Gospel passage from the preceding verses, Jesus said that his kingdom community was being watched by the world and so needed to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.

But he then went on to say a third thing: that the world needs to see that we are better than the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law. We are not just forgiven people, we are people on a journey of transformation.

This week’s passage puts flesh on those bones. In these verses, Jesus gives us specific examples of how we are meant to be better than the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law.

Jesus does this by taking examples from the Ten Commandments specifically and the Jewish Law, the Torah, generally. You will have noticed there was something of a formula going on in each example in the reading. First, there is a statement along the lines of ‘You have heard that it was said long ago’, followed by the law in question, and then Jesus says, ‘But I tell you’ and he then proceeds to up the ante and make that particular Law even more challenging.

This formula of ‘You have heard that it was said’ followed by ‘But I tell you’ is one that several Jewish teachers used. It’s a way of saying, ‘I have a different and better interpretation of the Law than what you have heard up to now.’ Well, you can bet Jesus has!

What is he trying to get over? That it’s not enough to obey externally in our actions the letter of God’s Law, what God is looking for is more than that. He is looking at our character.[1]

Now it’s easy to see what sort of character faults Jesus is condemning here, but maybe we should take those and reverse them to see what character traits he is commending as worthy of his kingdom.

So let’s look at the four examples he gives that we read.

Firstly, when Jesus talks about the command not to murder, he identifies anger, putting people down, and broken relationships as character faults behind the outward action and similar to it. The positive quality he identifies as important for his followers is reconciliation (verses 21-26). Be reconciled to the person who has something against you before you come to worship. Be reconciled to the person who is taking you to court for a debt.

We know how this fits into wider Christian theology. Because God has reconciled us to himself through the Cross of Christ, he calls us to be reconciled to each other. The church is meant to be a community of reconciliation.

We reflect this at least in part in our denominational structures in the Methodist Church. If a formal complaint against someone cannot be resolved to the satisfaction of all parties in the local circuit, it is passed onto the District. And the body there which tries to resolve the problem is called the District Reconciliation Group.

It’s a shame, then, that some people in our churches would rather complain and assassinate someone’s character, and even make up false accusations rather than seek reconciliation. And after I first wrote those words, I reflected on the expression ‘character assassination’ – you can see why Jesus links attitudes of the heart to murder there.

When I call for reconciliation I am not asking that we sweep differences or pain under the carpet and pretend they don’t exist. That is not reconciliation.

Of course, reconciliation can be difficult, if not downright painful. Sometimes we need a mediator to steer all the parties on a helpful course. It can help to have some mediators who have had particular training and gained certain skills.

But make no mistake, reconciliation is core to who we are as the Christian church. If we undermine it or despise it, then we are undermining our very identity as the church. We become not a place of life but of murder.

Secondly, when Jesus talks about adultery and the adultery of the heart that is lust (verses 27-30), he is calling us to the positive character trait of contentment. For what Jesus is doing here is linking the commandment not to commit adultery with the commandment not to covet. If a man lusts after another woman, he is lusting after someone else’s spouse or partner or daughter.

Jesus does not, of course, refer here to passing attraction, “but the deliberate harbouring of desire for an illicit relationship”[2].

When we are not content with our possessions, we covet buying more. When we are not content in our relationships, we covet someone else.

One of the problems we have with relationships today, and I think I’ve said this before, is that in the absence of belief in God, we expect too much of our romantic partners. We expect them to fulfil all sorts of needs – not just physical, but emotional too. We place a heavy burden on them that really only God can fill.

So when our loved ones fail to meet all our needs, the seeds of discontent are sown. And as those seeds grow, they burst through the surface of the soil as weeds that strangle our contentment. We begin to think that someone else would suit us better.

It’s a delusion. It doesn’t work. And if the thought is allowed to proceed to action, then two families can get destroyed.

As the church, we need to be a community that resists the lies of our world that say we shall only be satisfied with more, more, more. It bankrupts our bank accounts and it breaks up our families and relationships. Betrayed spouses may spend years before they ever trust someone again. Children suffer in their upbringing, however heroic many lone parents are.

I’ve quoted before in weddings the old saying that the bride’s aims and goals on a wedding day are Aisle-Altar-Hymn. But we need to accept one another’s imperfections and frailties, showing some of the grace that God has shown to us in Christ. We need to be less concerned with changing them for the better (and if they don’t, changing them for a newer model) than with changing ourselves.

Thirdly, when Jesus talks about divorce (verses 31-32) the positive character trait he has in mind is faithfulness.

We do have to read Jesus’ words here in parallel with what he says elsewhere in Matthew (in chapter 19) where he underlines sexual immorality as grounds for divorce, and what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7, that if a Christian is married to a non-Christian and the non-Christian wants out, that too is a ground for divorce, but what is at the root of this teaching is that marriage is meant to be one man and one woman exclusively for life. The New Testament scholar Craig Keener says that Jesus and Paul

… exonerate those who genuinely wished to save their marriage but were unable to do so because their spouse’s unrepentant adultery, abandonment, or abuse de facto destroyed the marriage bonds.[3]

Jesus in his typical use of extreme hyperbolic language is not here sending abused wives back to their abusers, as I have sadly heard some Christian ministers do, but calling on those who have done wrong to mend their ways.

The other week Byfleet church hosted a wedding blessing for another church – one that doesn’t have its own premises. As the pastor took the young couple through their vows, I noticed that when he asked them questions such as ‘Will you be faithful to her/him until you are parted by death?’ their answer was ‘I will.’

Now that’s fine up to a point. ‘I will’ indicates both that it is a promise going into the future, and that sometimes love and faithfulness is an act of will. Because for all the joys of marriage, it will also be tough at times.

I much prefer our marriage service, where the bride and groom don’t say ‘I will’ but ‘With God’s help I will.’ God is ready by the Holy Spirit to help us with those challenging assignments he gives us.

And that isn’t just about marriage. It’s about us in the church being faithful to Jesus and faithful in our commitment to each other. Does Jesus see faithfulness to his teaching and to one another among us?

Fourthly and finally, when Jesus talks about whether or not you should swear an oath in court (verses 33-37), he has in mind the positive character trait of integrity.

Jesus’ banning of oaths wasn’t an unique position, but it was rare, and of course there are examples of oaths in the Old Testament, where the expectation is that if you make an oath you must keep it, even at great cost to yourself. It also warns against foolish oaths.

The intention behind Jesus’ teaching is probably similar to the ancient Greek view that your word should be as good as your oath. It makes me think of my late father’s experience of working in banking in the City. When the so-called ‘Big Bang’ happened in the financial world in 1987, my father bemoaned the fact that what disappeared overnight was the notion that a gentleman’s word was his bond. So much business was conducted in the city on a well-founded basis that if someone gave their word they would keep it. A handshake sealed the commitment of both parties. But this was replaced by lies and suspicion that had to be kept in check by laws.

Jesus is calling his people to be so known for their commitment to truthfulness that our reputation means no-one needs to ask us to back it up in some legal way. He calls us to remember that when we speak, we do so not merely in the presence of human witnesses, but in the presence of God. Yet how much do we live our lives in the knowledge that God is present? Should that not have an effect on our commitment to truth?

In Jesus’ day, some people thought it OK to break an oath and deceive people if they swore on something trivial, such as their right hand, but he wants his people to be different. In our day, we know how easily some people find it to engage in bare-faced deceit. Sadly in the last couple of years we have had too many examples of that in Parliament, but it’s not the only arena where we’ve witnessed this disturbing trend. Some people think they can say anything they like on the Internet, and there will be no consequences. They are wrong.

So if Jesus calls us to be people who are habitually known for their truth-telling, it is another way in which he is calling us to be distinctive in the face of the watching world.

The same is true of the other character virtues we’ve been thinking about today. His call to faithfulness comes to us in a society that has replaced lifetime faithfulness with serial monogamy, and now ‘throuples’. His call to contentment comes to us in a society where we are forever meant to buy bigger and better things, regardless of whether we need them, relationshhips included. His call to reconciliation comes to us in a society where we seem to have caught the American disease of ‘If it moves, sue it.’

How is God calling me to be distinctive as a Christian today?

How is he calling us as a church to be distinctive?

How indeed shall we be the light of the world?

[1] Craig Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, pp 180-182.

[2] Op. cit., P189.

[3] Op. cit., p192.

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Good News in a Bad News Story (Mark 6:14-29) Ordinary 15 Year B

Mark 6:14-29

I expect that, like me, most or all of you have been besieged in the last few years with scam messages – some by phone, some by email, others by text message.

The other day my mobile phone began ringing and it identified the calling number as being in Czech Republic. I have no connections with that country. At a push, I could name one or two of their footballers, but that’s about it. So I ignored the call.

It nevertheless went to my voicemail, and I later retrieved a message accusing me of misusing my National Insurance number and demanding I press 1 on my keypad to speak to an officer. Well, not likely! And all the more so, given that much of my work in the Civil Service was to do with National Insurance numbers! I can’t say I lost any sleep over it.

But sometimes these messages hope to trick people by playing on a possible sense of guilt. That’s certainly the idea behind those messages which say they’ve loaded software on your computer and they know all about your viewing of pornographic websites. The criminals hope that someone who has done that will be so terrified that they will be duped into the scam.

When there is lurking guilt over our past actions, all sorts of things can trigger a response of fear. I think that’s what happens in our reading when Herod Antipas hears about the ministry of Jesus. He thinks that John the Baptist, whom he ordered to be beheaded, has been raised from the dead (verses 14-16) and perhaps he’s come back to haunt him or expose him.

This is not the same Herod as who tried to kill the infant Jesus – that was the so-called Herod the Great. This is one of his sons. Herod Antipas proved to be every bit as ruthless as his wicked father, but he didn’t have the same political skill. He wasn’t actually a king, but he liked to be known as one – hence ‘King Herod’, as Mark calls him, is an ironic title. He also loved luxury and magnificent architecture. Jesus summed up his character in Luke’s Gospel when he called him ‘that fox’[1].

If you want an example of his lack of political skill, the divorce which John condemns morally here got Herod into trouble politically as well. His first wife, whom he so cruelly dumped for his sister-in-law, was the daughter of Aretas, king of Nabatea, a region east of the Red Sea. Aretas took out reprisals against Herod, inflicting a crushing military defeat on him in AD 36. Three years later the Emperor Caligula had had enough of Antipas, and he banished him and Herodias to Gaul (modern-day France)[2].

Ultimately, the life of Herod Antipas is a story of someone who was never willing to be free of his baser instincts. They harmed him and others. Imagine the innocent people killed when Aretas took out his reprisals – all because Antipas wouldn’t control his lusts. Imagine the pain of John’s disciples and family at his execution, because Antipas wanted to suppress his conscience and also made such a foolish vow in front of witnesses to his daughter.

When we would rather pursue our own selfish desires there are costs not just to ourselves but to others as well. It’s surely clear that one of the reasons for the huge rates of family breakdown in our society is to do with that. I know the situation is more complicated than that, but by way of illustration consider this: Becky more or less forgot Father’s Day this year. Why? Because she had planned to go out that evening with five friends. None of those five friends had a father living at home, and so Father’s Day just wasn’t on their agenda, and hence Becky, mingling with these friends, forgot too. Obviously, I don’t know why all her friends’ parents split up, but inevitably I wonder.

The life of Herod Antipas, then, is a sombre warning for us about what life looks like and what life leads to when we live without the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Sin has devastating consequences. If we cherish our sin above other things, we wreak havoc in our lives and the lives of others, both those close to us and strangers.

And that’s without even talking about the eternal consequences of choosing sin over grace. In some respects the consequences in this life can be variable. Depending on how just the society is and how much power the offender has, someone may or may not get away with brutality or slavery to one’s own senses and appetites.

But eternity is different. There, a verdict is certain and so is a sentence. It involves eternal separation from God, the source of love, truth, and beauty. What kind of existence would that be?

But while that sentence may be certain it is not inevitable. What Herod Antipas needed was grace. It was tantalisingly close to him, if only he had accepted it. John the Baptist’s call to repentance was the call to put himself in the place where he could receive the free and unmerited grace of God. The ministry of Jesus that he heard about and which evidently troubled his conscience would have done the same, only more.

When we struggle with unhealthy desires, or with good desires gone bad, there is a remedy, and it is the grace of God. For in Christ God looks at each of us with favour yet in the full knowledge of our sin, providing forgiveness at the Cross. There is hope for us when we struggle with our besetting sins. There is hope for those who are addicted to their passions. That hope is found only in Jesus. To him we turn in our own need; to him we point when others are in similar need.

So, if one thing we learn from history in this passage is about our need of grace, what might we learn from the context of the reading?

You see, all we’ve done here is read this particular episode. But this story is the filling in a sandwich, something Mark does quite a bit. He puts one narrative inside another. So, if this is the filling, we need to look at what forms the slices of bread.

The filling ends with the decapitation of John, his head presented on the same kind of platter from which Herod’s dinner guests had been eating, and then we get the grief of John’s disciples as they bury his body (verses 28-29). The taste of the filling is pretty horrible.

It makes us think of persecutions right up to this day, where evil regimes and organisations seek to ‘decapitate’ a movement by targeting its leaders[3]. Only the other day I read the story of how the Chinese police had arrested the pastor of a church under false charges of fraud, so that he was removed from his congregation. It used to be that the Chinese authorities targeted the unregistered churches, but now they are also going after the churches that registered with the government as well.

And every week, my prayer email from Christian Solidarity Worldwide documents similar stories around the world – from obvious places like China, North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran to Nigeria, Mexico, India, Sri Lanka and many other nations.

We often give thanks for the freedom with which we can worship God, but we live in a generation where across the world there has never been more persecution of those who own the name of Christ. It’s something the first readers of Mark’s Gospel would have understood well, living in Rome where Claudius had expelled Jews, including leaders of some early Christian groups, and where Nero was using the Christians as scapegoats. Many of them would face the same fate as John the Baptist.

As I said, it’s an ugly filling to the sandwich. It’s enough to cause despair.

But that’s why you need the slices of bread on either side. Because Mark has sandwiched this inside the account of Jesus sending his disciples two by two on mission to villages to proclaim and demonstrate the kingdom of God. In verse 13, immediately before our reading, we hear that they cast out many demons and healed a lot of people; in verse 30, the verse immediately after our reading, they return to Jesus and tell him all their amazing stories.

Therefore if the filling of the sandwich is a sombre warning that being a disciple can come at a terrible cost, the bread of the sandwich tells us that no matter what happens, no matter how much evil forces seek to decapitate the kingdom of God movement, the mission always goes on. God will not allow his mission to be defeated by the forces of evil.

Here is the good news for the faithful believing church. Whatever attempts are made to curb the influence of the Gospel, be it secular opponents, hostile groups from other religions, or even those within the church structures want the Gospel to capitulate to modern cultural norms, the assurance here is that the Gospel will prevail. We could lose our leaders, we could lose our buildings, we could lose our finances and charitable status, but Jesus will never stop building his church.

This apparently gruesome tale, then, is a good news story. There is good news for God’s faithful people even in the face of opposition and suffering. And there is good news for sinners who will cast themselves upon the mercy of God in Jesus Christ.

[1] Luke 13:32

[2] On Herod Antipas, see James R Edwards, The Gospel According To Mark, p184.

[3] I take this idea from Ian Paul’s blog post What Is God Doing During The Beheading Of John The Baptist?

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Links

OK, here’s another round-up of links I found during the last week. Have fun.

A Theremin (remember Good Vibrations?) inside a Russian doll. (Via Mojo.)

A friend of mine once rewrote Monty Python’s Dead Parrot Sketch as the Dead Church Sketch. But now we learn that the ancient Greeks pre-empted the dead parrot sketch.

Jesus spoke about lust as ‘adultery of the heart’. Now, a ‘virtual affair’ in Second Life has led to a divorce.

The Today programme on BBC Radio 4 ponders great drum solos.

Remember the Johnny Cash song ‘One piece at a time’? Well, a Russian Orthodox church has been stolen, brick by brick.

Once it was pizzas looking like Jesus, now it’s Buddha bee hives.

You want a prayer movement – how about this? Artist creates ‘public prayer booths’ in NYC. They look like phone booths, apparently.

If only this were true: hoax New York Times newspaper proclaims end of Iraq war.

My father has a life-long interest in astronomy. Doubtless he will have been excited to read about the Hubble Telescope spotting a planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut and the planetary system discovered by the Gemini Observatory in Chile. (Both links via Personal Computer World‘s weekly email.)

Ruth Haley Barton has written on the loneliness of leadership: loneliness drives us to seek the presence of God rather than any notion of the Promised Land.

Unhappy people watch more TV. ‘TV doesn’t really seem to satisfy people over the long haul the way that social involvement or reading a newspaper does,’ says researcher John P. Robinson.

Go on, you want to make cake in a mug.

MyBloop – unlimited free online storage, max file size 1 GB. Via Chris Pirillo.

Twenty hated clichés. In contrast, here are James Emery White’s top five irritating Christian phrases.

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