Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Matthew 5:21-26, 43-48
I have this image in my mind of the Sermon on the Mount; I don’t know where it comes from. Gentle Jesus is sitting cross-legged on top of a hill. His followers are seated around him—crowds that extend all the way down the hill. Jesus has a tender, compassionate look on his face; the people are beaming as they gaze into his loving eyes.
A lovely image, but it doesn’t fit with the words we just heard. If you are angry, Jesus says, or if you blurt out “you fool” after your sister says something really obnoxious, it’s as though you have committed murder. The crowd is no longer sitting there joyously absorbing his love; they are looking at each other saying, “What? That’s not fair.” Jesus goes on: “I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Now the crowd is getting restless. Surely he doesn’t mean they should love the Roman soldiers who glare at them, or the landowner who refuses to pay them for their work.
And then the kicker: Be perfect, Jesus says. Really, Jesus? We’re having a hard time just being good enough, and you want us to be perfect?
I don’t understand why the crowds keep getting larger and larger as Jesus keeps demanding more and more of them.
I’m aware that my response to this speech is shaped by the ways these words have been twisted over millenia. It’s a short leap from Jesus’ words to the message that anger is bad and should be squelched. How many people have withstood abusive treatment because they were told their anger was wrong? How many people have turned their anger inward in self-destructive ways, or denied it until they exploded in violence? “Love your enemies” is just as easily distorted—into permission for those enemies to keep hurting us. And “be perfect”? I envision waves and waves of despair rolling through the centuries as people try desperately to live up to this command and keep failing.
While it may be tempting, it is not fair to blame Jesus for the ways his words have been twisted. And the crowds who don’t disappear once his teachings get hard challenge me to stick with this text to try to understand what it may mean for us today.
It is helpful to start with context. Often, in his parables and sermons, Jesus is deliberately provocative—making outrageous statements and outrageous demands. He’s not laying down the law for all time; he’s not speaking in order to be recorded for posterity and quoted in cathedrals. He’s provoking a conversation. He wants people to scratch their heads and look at each other with raised eyebrows. He wants them to argue about what he means as they walk home. He wants them to puzzle it out, to ask questions, to go deeper than the surface meaning.
This morning, I invite you to join with me in scratching our heads, asking questions, and puzzling it out.
This part of the Sermon on the Mount has traditionally been called “The Antitheses,” because Jesus begins by quoting Hebrew scripture, followed by “but I say to you.” More recently, as we have recognized the tendency to interpret Jesus’ words in a way that disparages Judaism, theologians have questioned that name. Jesus is not putting down his own people’s religious laws; he is challenging them to dive deeper into the laws, so they are not just about external actions but about their whole selves–thoughts and feelings as well as actions. He pushes them to identify the root causes of acts that tear society apart.
On alternate Tuesday nights, a group gathers in Sue Dickerman Hall for meditation and teachings, led by Bhante Pannasiri, a wise, gentle Buddhist monk. My rudimentary understanding of his teachings gives me a fresh perspective on Jesus’ words about anger and murder. Buddhist meditation is about mindfulness, self-awareness. As we sit in silence, we practice noticing sensations in our bodies, thoughts that zip around our brains, emotions that bubble up. The purpose of our stillness is not to stop those sensations and thoughts and feelings, but to become aware of them and realize they are always changing. Suffering, in Buddhist philosophy, is the result of our tendency to grasp hold of things–including those sensations, thoughts and feelings.
Sometimes we grasp hold of our feelings because we like them so much; other times our grasping is because we want to eliminate them. Either way, when we do, we build up more and more layers of thoughts and emotions around them. Before long, they are controlling our lives and we are miserable.
Trusting Jesus’ invitation to wrestle with his words, I’m going to experiment with viewing his teaching about anger through the lens of Buddhist philosophy. What if Jesus is telling us to pay attention to what we do with the very natural human emotion of anger? When something makes us angry, do we grab hold of that anger and nurse it, fanning its flames until it takes over our lives? Watch out, Jesus says. Before you know it, you’ll go from feeling anger to insulting your sister to calling your brother a fool, until you spiral out of control and commit murder.
When something makes us angry, do we get so uncomfortable with the feeling that we grab hold of it to try to choke it out of existence? That too is a kind of attachment that leads to suffering, for the more we fight with an emotion, the more it fights back. We know that our internal battles often spill out into external actions.
I hear Jesus’ words about anger as a challenge to go deeper inside ourselves–to pay attention to anger as it rises up in us, to discover what comes before and what comes after, to notice when we are inclined to nurse it or fight with it, and instead to practice harnessing its energy to work for justice and healing.
That’s just the first paragraph in this section of the Sermon on the Mount. Each of the paragraphs that follow, which I have chosen not to read, challenges us to take a law that governs external actions and go deeper to examine the thoughts and feelings behind them. The section culminates with one of Jesus’ most quoted lines: “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” Jesus’ reasoning is elegant in its simplicity: God loves the people we define as our enemies; if we understand ourselves to be children of God, then we are called to try to become more like God.
What if we hear these words, as well, as an invitation to go deeper, to ask ourselves challenging questions. Whom have I identified as my enemy? Is it an accurate label? It might not be, and sometimes it is. Can I, even for a moment, move beyond my own perception and see my enemy as God might? Do I pray for God to smite them or make them who I want them to be? Can I broaden my praying just a little bit, even if only to ask God to help me find a prayer that honors my enemy’s humanity? How can I work with passion for what I believe is just while honoring the belovedness of those who oppose me?
These are powerful questions to ask. Answer will surely elude us. If we ask with honesty and courage, the questions themselves will change us.
We live in a time when this challenge to go deeper, to look inward, is crucial. Anger is swirling all around us, and perhaps within us. Unexamined, it has the potential to destroy our lives, our nation and our world; harnessed with thoughtfulness and care, anger offers energy for the holy work of transforming our world. Our culture right now pushes us into camps based on whom we define as the enemy and lures us into convenient and sloppy ways of dehumanizing them. Jesus calls us to resist convenient divisiveness, and instead to look deep within to examine how we can both acknowledge very real differences and seek understanding.
As this section of his sermon winds up, Jesus makes one more outrageous demand: “Be perfect.” What do we do with what seems to be an unhelpful and unhealthy denial of our humanness?
On Thursday, I ran into my colleague Don Pachuta, who studies biblical Greek. I asked him about the Greek word that is translated here as “perfect.” The word is “teleos”–the root of the word “teleological,” which mean moving toward fulfillment or completion. Jesus doesn’t say, “Be perfect.” He says, “Be complete.” Be whole. You are more than your actions, he says. You are a whole being, with thoughts and feelings that are reflected in your actions. Pay attention to all of who you are: to the feelings you’d rather ignore, to the ways you get hooked by someone else’s interpretation of the world, to the thought patterns that tempt you toward self-righteousness or despair, to your definition of enemy and the prayers you can’t figure out how to pray. God created you as a whole human being: know and claim the whole of who you are.
Hopefully, by now, the baskets have made their way around the room and you are holding a shell. None of these shells is perfect–they have been broken, battered, and reshaped by the realities of ocean life. None of us is perfect–we too have been broken, battered and reshaped by the realities of human living. These shells, while not perfect, are whole–made into something new on their journey to the shore. They are beautiful. We too are made whole by our journeys and our struggles. We too are beautiful.
My we claim the whole of who we are–body, mind and spirit; hopes, fears and regrets; thoughts, feeling and actions. May we claim our beauty. Amen.