Matthew 5.23-26
I understand that as liberal, mainline Christians, you assume it’s my job to deploy my expensive seminary education in order to explain to you how Jesus doesn’t really mean what it sounds like Jesus so clearly says in his Sermon on the Mount. Or rather, you want me to tell you what Jesus would have said had Jesus enjoyed the advantage of a Master of Divinity degree. But instead of me protecting you from Jesus, how about we allow the enormity of the Lord’s demand to sit with all of us for a brief moment:
Don’t you dare drop a dime in the offering plate if someone in your life has got a righteous grievance against you. Does that sting? Anyone?
Don’t think about adding your hot air to any hymns or Hillsong hooks, if you’re nursing grudges and resentments in your heart. We’re all innocent, right?
Don’t bother signing up to serve at the Mission Center or assist with a funeral reception or teach children’s Sunday School. There is no merit to it AT ALL if you have let fester any of the wounds you have inflicted. Ouch.
When you come up to the table at which I am the host and if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave. And go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and only then come and receive.
Look, I am officially a teacher of preaching at Duke Divinity School, which means I’m a competent enough con artist to fool people into thinking I know what I am doing.
So I know at least this much:
Remember, Jesus is still at the top of his Sermon on the Mount.
This is not a savvy way to begin a sermon.
You’ve got to charm your hearers into listening. You can’t wallop them straight out of the gate. I don’t know why Jesus would start out by laying such a heavy law on nice, well-behaved people like you, but I do suspect Jesus may have been thinking about King Saul when he said it.
You probably didn’t learn this story in children’s church.
In the first Book of Samuel, the Lord summons King Saul to strike down the Amalekites for the city had refused to welcome the refugees God had delivered from suffering in Egypt. The word of the Lord comes through the prophet Samuel to Saul, “Go and strike down Amalek and offer up as a sacrifice of praise all that they possess. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman…ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”
King Saul mobilizes two hundred thousand men on foot and ten thousand men of Judah. Coming to the city of Amalek, King Saul and his army lay in wait in the valley. Saul defeats the Amalekites east of Egypt, yet he does not obey the Lord’s orders. He does not offer all up in praise of God. He takes the king of the Amalekites alive along with the best of the city’s sheep, oxen, and fatted calves.
That night the word of the Lord comes to the prophet again, “I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and he has not performed my commandments.”
The next morning the prophet Samuel arrives at the Israelites’s camp. He finds King Saul in the midst of worship.
“What have you been doing?” Samuel asks Saul.
“I have just been carrying out the commandments of God,” Saul answers.
“If you have been carrying out the commands of God,” replies Samuel, “what is the meaning of the bleating of the lambs and the lowing of the cattle which I am hearing now?”
“I decided to spare some of them,” says King Saul.
I decided.
And then the prophet brings down the hammer of the Law— and not just on Saul:
“Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey the Lord is better than worship, and to heed to his commands is more pleasing than any offered gift.”
In other words, to put self-imposed limits on the Law is to disobey the Law.
To think our acts of devotion and worship can make up for our failures to follow the Law fully only negates those acts of devotion and worship.
“Behold, to obey the Lord is better than worship.”
If I had to choose between the Lord’s command to Saul or the law Christ lays down on us, I think I might start sharpening my sword. According to the twenty-third thesis of the Heidelberg Disputation, the Law always accuses (Lex semper accusat). You know it’s important when Protestants bother putting it in the Latin, Lex semper accusat.
Like Samuel to Saul, God’s first word, the Law, never comes to you and finds you following it, obeying it to the full.
Lex semper accusat.
The Law always accuses.
I’ve been a pastor for over twenty years, and in all that time I’ve only ever withheld or threatened to withhold the sacrament from a parishioner on a few occasions. One occurred in my second appointment. A matriarch of the church— and the chair of the local Democratic Party— continually railed in her hoarse smoker’s voice against an interracial marriage I had performed in the parish.
In keeping with Christ’s command in Matthew 18, I confronted her about her racism and invited her to repent and seek reconciliation with the couple. Later, leaders in the church did as well. She remained prideful and resistant. I was just a new pastor and had not learned yet that the unspoken goal of United Methodist ministry is to be what Stanley Hauerwas calls “a quivering mass of availability and acquiescence.” I therefore told June that I would no longer serve her the bread and the wine of the eucharist if she stubbornly insisted on receiving them unfaithfully.
“But you can’t do that; I’m in charge of the altar guild!” she laughed a raspy laugh. She stopped her raspy laughing when she realized I was serious.
“Yes, I can do that. And I will. Exactly what do you think my job is here? I’m not a maitre d’ or a cruise ship director. I’m responsible for your salvation.”
She rolled her eyes and snarled sarcastically, “Aren’t you Mr. High and Mighty,” she said, “Just who the blank do you think you are?!”
“I’m the preacher,” I said.
“Yeah, and haven’t you, preacher, stood in the pulpit in the same sanctuary and shared about your unreconciled relationship with your father? Maybe I missed it. Maybe I was absent the Sunday you stopped short of breaking the bread, set the bread back down on the table and then scurried out the side door to go and make right with him. What Sunday was it you did that, pastor?”
And I thought to myself, “Bless your heart.”
But of course…she was right.
Lex semper accusat.
“Behold, to obey the Lord is better than worship.”
I’m sorry—
The Lord does not say we might consider reconciling with a brother or sister before we come to the altar. Nor apparently is the Almighty interested in our special circumstances, our personal excuses, or our particular, self-imposed limitations. He straightforwardly says we must reconcile before we come and offer and receive. Unfortunately when you put Christ and his word first in your life, you soon realize that Christ makes primary the people in your life— especially your enemies and those with whom you’re on the outs.
The New Testament scholar Frederick Dale Bruner calls this the “first little step of the New Obedience.” That someone could consider this a “little step” makes me feel like even more of a phony and a failure than I do on an average day; nevertheless, he’s exactly right that it’s about obedience. Notice, this commandment about reconciliation is the correlative to the antithesis that comes before it. If you violate the sixth commandment by harboring an angry thought against a brother or sister, then you uphold the same commandment retroactively when you work to put things right with that same person. Therein is the rub. This is why the command sits so heavy upon us.
If hatred in our hearts is the equivalent of blood on our hands, then when we come to the table refusing to reconcile with a brother or sister, we approach the altar not as Abel but as Cain.
“The Risen Christ is the host of this table and he invites all of you to come.” I give that invitation every Sunday. And I’m not a liar. It’s all true. If Jesus gives Judas a seat at the Last Supper, I’m not going to refuse you service. At the very least, you are no worse sinners than Judas. All are welcome to the table of our Lord. And yet, according to that same Lord, when it comes to approaching the altar some of us must take a more circuitous journey.
Will Willimon tells the story of a church in Africa that took this command in the Sermon on the Mount with earnestness. Every week on Sunday morning the church members would wake up early in the morning, sleep still in their eyes, and drag their waking bodies down a dirt road to worship. Every Sunday morning, at the bottom of the steps leading into the small sanctuary, the pastor would be waiting, greeting everyone as they came forward towards the church. Grinning from ear to ear, the pastor’s welcome in Christ’s couldn’t have been more invitational and open. Nevertheless, every Sunday morning the sanctuary doors stood shut. Every Sunday morning the church remained locked, the pews remained empty, the organ kept quiet. Every Sunday morning the crowd would grow and grow until everyone from the village was present, anxiously waiting outside the church.
“Look around you,” the preacher’s voice would echo, “with whom do you need to reconcile? Who have you betrayed since we gathered last Sunday? About whom have you been gossiping? Towards whom do you harbor resentment? Who have you grown to hate? Go and find your brothers and sisters. Obey your Lord. Make peace with one another. The table is open but these doors are locked until you do.”
Every Sunday morning, for about twenty minutes or so, the entire congregation slowly milled about the crowd fessing up and asking for absolution and giving grace. This was a small town where you could just stand around and pretend that everything had been perfect since last Sunday. Everyone knew everyone’s business, which meant their Passing of the Peace had to amount to more than a mumbled “morning.”
Without reconciliation, the pastor instructed the people, they had no business entering the church to worship God. And only after he was satisfied that the service of mercy and forgiveness had been offered did the pastor unlock the doors and open church for its service of worship and praise.
I told a longer version of Will’s story in a sermon several years ago. In the narthex after worship a few folks told me they felt challenged by the holiness of such a church’s discipline. More than a few groused to me that the story and the sermon itself struck them as hopelessly holier-than-thou and not a little harsh.
“Wow, we can’t possibly keep a command like that one,” my lay leader, Steve whispered only half-joking, “Most of these people work in politics. Anger and antagonism are what butters their bread.”
But then a man named Rick approached me from the back of the line.
“I found that scripture passage incredibly comforting,” he said to me, shaking my hand.
“Comforting? Uh, were you sitting in the same worship service as me?”
“I think it’s comforting,” he said, “That Jesus has to give us instructions for what to do about the relationships we’ve effed up suggests that Jesus doesn’t expect us to ever be very good at relationships.”
I stared at him, suddenly irritated that this introverted actuarial appeared to be on the verge of a far better sermon than I had just preached.
“Think about it. The rule is also a kind of permission. The command is also an acknowledgment that we’ll never be anything more than broken people following Jesus. I think it’s freeing. It’s like you said, pastor, we don’t have to be perfect people. We just have to be people who put our trust in grace.”
“I said that?”
“Yeah, that afternoon in your office.”
And then I remembered.
Rick was about my age but his two kids are much younger than my own. He’d married late and relatively recently. A month or so before that Sunday he’d asked to meet with me. He’d wanted my counsel. “I don’t know how to break the truth to my wife,” he’d told me nervously in my office. Turns out, he’d never told her that before they’d met he’d hit bottom. Nearly all his money gambled away.
He’d never told her about his addiction.
Then they got married.
And then the MGM Casino went up just across the river.
“I drive past it every day just to get to work,” he told me, “It was just a matter of time.”
“How bad is it?” I asked him.
“It could be worse, but it’s not good. What should I do?”
“Tell her the truth. Confess. Put your trust in grace. Even if she can’t show you mercy, even if it kills your marriage, trust that we have a God who loves to raise things from the dead.”
Notice the direction this command takes.
It’s not directed at those with the upper hand.
It’s not: “If you have something against someone, go; seek them out and reconcile with them.” Which, let’s be honest, would really amount to “Go; seek them out and make them pay for what they did to you.”
The command is not given to those with the upper hand. The command is aimed at those in the position of weakness and transgression. It’s: “If someone has something against you…” Think about it. To confront someone and confess, to confront someone who may not even know what you’ve done to them, and then ask for their absolution, that would be mortifying. The command is really an invitation to die. First, you die to the Law. That was the previous text where Jesus says if you’ve even had an angry thought about a person, you’re guilty of murder.
First you die to the Law then you die to the other:
The person you trespassed against.
The one on whose mercy you beg.
You see—
The command takes the form of the Law but it’s really about grace.
It’s about putting your trust in grace. It’s about opening up every aspect of your life to grace to be at work. After all, why do you avoid confronting the people you’ve sinned against? Because you expect them to deal with you according to the Law. If you confess the truth to them, they’ll make you pay, you assume. With this command to those without the upper hand, Jesus is saying, “No.”
It’s not that we believe in grace in the church but Law everywhere else in the world.
The one-way love of God in Jesus Christ eclipses all our ways and works in the world.
As Paul Zahl writes, “Grace has no space for boundaries. Grace has space for everything except boundaries.” To be a person of faith is to trust the grace of God to be at work in every part of your life. And where it’s not, where the Law kills you, you still trust the God who raises the dead to new life they don’t deserve. Every sin you’ve sinned against another is a sin that Christ has already carried in his body on the tree; therefore, you are free. Free not to hide. Free to amend what Christ has already atoned. Free to trust the grace of God to be at work in a real way in your everyday life. Otherwise, grace will remain a staid idea about a past act of God in history. The one-way love of God will forever remain a sterile concept if you don’t lean into grace and let go.
This law is about putting grace into practice.
It’s about opening ourselves up and allowing grace to be applied to our lives.
If we don’t— if we don’t put grace into practice; if it’s just grace in here but law out there— Luther says:
“It amounts to slapping God across the mouth and calling him a liar with his words.”
I remember a few years ago, shortly after I returned from medical leave, I was serving communion at the Saturday evening service. When I placed the host in Shirley’s outstretched hands, she grabbed ahold of my hand, smashing the bread inside our fists. To be heard over the band, she leaned towards my ear and said:
“Wait. I can’t. Not until I apologize to you. It’s been weighing on me.”
“What I asked?”
“All those years ago when He Who Must Not Be Named passed that petition around to get the bishop to move you. I got caught up in all his gossip and I signed it. And I tolerated all kinds of terrible insults he and others said about you, and I never uttered a word against it. I was wrong about you and I was wrong to do that to you. I’m ashamed of it. I should’ve apologized earlier but I thought it’d about kill me for you to know I’m the kind of person who would do such a thing. I just felt like I couldn’t take communion from you one more time without telling you. I’m truly sorry.”
“Behold, to obey the Lord is better than worship.”
It’s hard to bear a grudge when you’re holding the body of Christ in your hand so I said to Shirley, “I forgive you.”
I swear, just then she looked like a burden heavier than Lazarus’s grave clothes had been lifted off of her; and likely, just as astonished as the formerly dead guy in the discovery that grace is real.
This command—
It’s not law.
It’s an invitation to live no less vulnerably in the world than Jesus Christ.
And there’s no better practice to learn to so live than to come to the table with your hands outstretched like a beggar before the first person in your life who has something against you.
Each and every time he gives you more than mercy.
In the bread that is his body and the wine that is his blood, he gives you himself.
So whether you come straight up here or whether you take a more roundabout way, come to the table.
Total Eclipse of the Son