Setting the Record Straight

Matthew 5: 21-48

          Outside St. Giles Church in Oxford, England, stands a beautiful neo-gothic spire known as Martyr’s Memorial. It was erected in 1842 as a tribute to three men who were burned at the stake for heresy in the reign of Bloody Mary during the sixteenth century. If you walk about twenty meters down Broad Street, you will come to a cross of bricks set in the road, the actual site of the execution of Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, two Anglican bishops, and Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s just a small place in the street where the pavement is peeled back. Cars drive over it all the time. Those men lived during the English Reformation, the time when the Church of England broke from the Roman Catholic Church. During the short reign of Mary after Henry VIII died, she wanted to return the Church to Roman Catholicism. The Oxford Three resisted her and found themselves convicted of heresy. Mary had her own set of rules. They wanted to set the record straight, but it would cost them. It was a tough time to be a Christian in England.

          Forty years earlier, across the English Channel in Germany, a young college professor named Martin Luther was struggling mightily with the many rules of the Church. The printing press had been operating for almost sixty years and people were learning to read, as reading material was becoming accessible to everyone. The Church didn’t like this, but Luther became convinced that the Church had lost sight of its central truths. It was 1517. Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the church because he wanted to set the record straight. Luther knew that salvation comes from God’s grace, and God’s grace cannot be bought with tithes and indulgences.  The Protestant Reformation had started.  

So many more, before and after, from Steven, the first martyr for Christ, to Paul, to Thomas Beckett, to Dietrich Bonheoffer. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is full of stories of heroes of the faith. Why did they try so hard? Why didn’t they learn to compromise? Why did they have to die just to make their point?

Chapters 5-7 of Matthew’s gospel are loaded with pearls from Jesus as he teaches his disciples. In this passage, Jesus says not once, but six times the phrase, “You have heard that it was said, but I say…” or something close to it. This section is often called the six antitheses because all six sections begin with this phrase. Jesus uses it as a setup phrase. In each case, he is about to clarify the meaning of Scripture or to correct some misinterpretation of it.  Jesus talks about murder and anger, adultery, divorce, oaths and swearing, retaliation, and treatment of our enemies. All the Scriptural references except one seem to come from the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. In looking at what Jesus is teaching, it is again helpful to understand what he is not doing before we move on to what he is doing. Jesus is not saying that what they know is false and what he teaches is true. He does not contradict the Scriptures. Also, he is not trying to play legalism against real commitment. So what is Jesus doing?

Like so many other times in Scripture, we need to feel our way. God speaks to us in Scripture. God speaks and things happen. Oceans and mountains are formed. God breathes and mankind comes into being. The Hebrew word is ruach, meaning breath, or wind, or spirit. When God speaks though the written word, we must wait for it to come alive in our hearts, to quicken and be breathed into our souls.

Jesus talks about murder and says that anger can be a sin just as grievous. He tells us to apologize and make up before we ask for God’s forgiveness. He talks about adultery and tells us that the lust of our minds wounds God as deeply as the act itself. He condones adultery only on the grounds of sexual immorality.

When it comes to oaths and swearing, acts that had severe consequences in the first century, Jesus says speak the truth grown from  your own character and let that be enough. As to the old law of retaliation, called lex talionis, an eye for an eye, Jesus seems to be saying that the law was meant to purge evil from among us and that the best way to do so is to act from charity and generosity.

The last item on the menu is loving one’s enemy. The Old Testament never said that we should hate our enemy. It was a given that God hates evil, so it wasn’t such a leap to think that we must be correct in hating those who embody evil. The thing is it’s not there in Scripture. We are to love our neighbor and we know that neighbor is a pretty comprehensive term. So what does Jesus say? He says leave the judging to God. Emulate his love and leave the rest to God.

In all these teachings, Jesus clarifies misunderstandings and points to the truths contained in the law of God. The law of God is not a “don’t” religion, but rather a “do” religion. It is not the letter of the law that brings us to the throne of grace. It is, rather, the spirit, the ruach, of God breathed in us and through us that captures the essence of the gospel.

          During his short ministry here on earth, Jesus broke a lot of rules. He healed on the Sabbath. That was “work” according to the Pharisees’ application of Jewish law. He overturned the tables of the money changers in the temple courtyard. He equated himself with God. Breaking the Sabbath, causing a near riot at the temple and blasphemy. Jesus was a rule breaker. He didn’t play by the rules of the day. The rules of the day were made by men. Even when they quoted Scripture, they applied their own limited understanding to the interpretation of those rules.

Jesus taught his disciples, and we are numbered among that group, the law of love. It is a simple law. Love your way through the hurt. Love your way through the pain. Love your way through the darkness and back into the light.  1 John 4: 8 tells us that God is love. Listen to that again. God is love! Play it backwards. Love is God! Pass it forward. God is love. Want to be with God? Love somebody. Love somebody who is hard to love. Love is hard. Love is rich but it is costly. Love hurts. Love heals.

Jesus never changed a single word of Scripture. Jesus never broke a single law of God. He just applied the rules with love. Why was it so important to set the record straight? After all, he could have lived much longer if he had just stayed inside the lines with the religious rulers.

Jesus had no choice. He loves us. Love does. There is no bending the rule of love. Love is the ruach, the spirit, of life.  When Hugh Latimer went to the stake with his friend Nicolas Ridley, he uttered these famous words: “Be of good cheer, Master Ridley, and play the man, for we shall this day light such a candle in England as I trust by God’s grace shall never be put out.” What a candle they and others lit for the Reformation! But we don’t have to burn at the stake to keep God’s record straight in our own lives and our own homes. We just have to see the rules for what they are and know how to color outside the lines when we are called upon to do so.

So when you read God’s Word, feel your way. From the light God created in Genesis 1 to the light God supplies in Revelation 22, God is our light. He is loving you as you pour over his Word. There is a message there for you and it is pure. Read for the dos, because love does. The record is straight on that, too.

Let us pray

2/16/14