So where does it “get” you today? What part of Jesus’ words today sting your heart?
This is not one of those “in-the-original-Greek-it’s-different” texts. Jesus has been speaking with the group about kingdom life – what life is like in the
It’s a place that blows away the expectations of those who want to find the ‘deserving’ people there. Yet not in a good way - in the gospel lesson today Jesus takes ‘deserving’ to a whole new level, one that lays out exactly what God wants from us.
And it’s an impossible expectation. If there’s one thing Jesus doesn’t do, it’s leave things at a halfway point. To those who would argue that “by grace we are saved after all we can do ourselves,” Jesus ups the ante. If you look at someone with hate, you commit murder. If you look at someone with lust, you commit adultery. If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. If you arm causes you to sin, cut it off.
They are hard words. Words that sound foreign to ears that are raised in a culture of personal-driven success and steeped in the doctrine of a God whose love is pointless, whose relationship is dependent upon ones own personal choice.
Today, Jesus tells us the deepest matters of God’s own heart, and there is nothing we can do to avoid the inescapable fact that no matter how much we can be affirming to ourselves, we still fall short of the goal set for us by our creator.
We know we should not murder, but we still hate, despise, and argue with each other. We are willing to kill relationships with others, to maintain our own self-righteousness.
We know we should not commit adultery, but we still disrespect others and treat them as less than fully human.
Today, we find that our hearts and God’s heart are mutually exclusive.
God listens to our hearts and knows that even if we can keep from swearing falsely, we are still willing to manipulate others with our words, to lead others astray by what we say, to let our words be meaningless rather than let our yes mean yes and our no mean no.
The diagnosis: our hearts are diseased, unhealthy, disheartened.
And so, in God’s mercy, God gives us law. In the teaching of Jesus, this is law that will not let our hearts fall short of loving as God would have us love. It is law that would have us love in a way that care for others and world Gdo made, as we say in our baptismal promises.
And it is law that ultimately convicts us, because what it demands of us, we cannot do. There’s no way around it. The law always kills – it kills what is bad in us, and it does that by showing us God’s love.
And here again the law shows us God’s love, by showing us our failing and driving us into the arms of our merciful God. St. Augustine put it this way: “The law was given for this purpose: to make you, being great, little; to show that you do not have in yourself the strength to attain righteousness, and for you, thus helpless, unworthy, and destitute, to flee to grace.” The grace of God is there, offered for us. We need only to stop rejecting it.
Moses, the old preacher, sits on the side of a mountain overlooking the Promised Land. He’s old, he’s tired. He’s tired of mediating petty wars and empty hearts. He’s tired of combating the forces of idolatry, idleness, and irateness that abide much more fully in the Israelite congregation than does any genuine love.
But the old preacher still has breath for one last sermon, and so he begins to preach the same message that he has time after time.
“See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity.”
Life or death, Moses says, is a choice.
But it’s not just a ‘today I’ve decided to follow Jesus’ choice. It’s a choice that his congregation will make and re-make every day in their hearts, surrounded by hundreds of other gods and idols demanding their service. It’s a tough choice.
“If you keep the laws, ordinances, and commandments of the Lord your God, you shall live…if you turn your hearts away, you will perish.”
These are tough words. But is what Moses says any different – in fact, are they any harsher that what Jesus says? Not at all.
Yet we want Jesus to be gentle-Jesus-meek-and-mild. We want Jesus to be the exemplary not just of the God of love, but the God of our kind of love, the kind our culture thrives on: shallow, fleeting, not demanding of oneself, empty and easy to please.
In the past, in an effort to separate the dichotomy between the Old Testament and the New, some people claimed that the ‘God of the Old Testament” was a god of wrath, while “the God of the New Testament” was a God of love.
In an effort to keep their own hearts from God, they created two gods; one whom they could stomach and control, and one whom they could abandon.
And Christ stands before us with bleeding hands and heart and cries out “is THIS what I died for?”
God is a god of love; a love so fierce and all-encompassing that it created the world, called God’s people back unto God and kept God stubbornly insistent on mercy, even to the point of death. The law, given to the chosen people, pointed towards God’s love.
The law reveals to us God’s heart; it reveals God’s stubborn insistence to be merciful to us even when our own nature rejects and rebels against God. You know the rest of the story after Moses finishes his sermon today. Do the Israelites actually do what God asks of them through Moses?
No. But time and time again, God reaches for the chosen people. Grafts all of humanity onto the Tree of Life, and fulfills the law in Jesus Christ. As Jesus said in last week’s lesson, “I came not to abolish but to fulfill the law.” Faith in Christ, letting our hearts be as the heart of Christ, let us hear the rhythm of God’s heart.
Discovering our failure to love as God loves is not then a cause for despair. No – it is a call back to God, into the arms of God, who loves and strengthens us, and sends us out to love again; bids us love more fully, more perfectly, because although showing perfect love is impossible for us, nothing is impossible with God.
Do we make a choice to follow God? Absolutely. We choose a hundred ways every day whether or not to follow God, or follow our own desires. We choose life, which fulfills and strengthens, or we choose death, which destroys relationships and shows our faith to be nothing. But still God reaches for us. Still God loves us; still God is willing to go to the cross for us, so that we might choose life again.
Choose life, beloved. Put your trust in the heart of God, and accept the love that was given to you on the cross of Jesus Christ – a love that through dying, lives eternally. Let the law kill your own self, and the love of Christ will raise you again.
Let the people of God say amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment