12th October 2008- Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5: 38-48Today we continue with our study of the Sermon on the Mount, which we are trying to seen not as a lot of separate sections but as a whole. Please turn to Matthew, Ch 5.
To recap briefly; we started by noting Jesus's call to repent because the kingdom of heaven is near, in Ch 4, v 17. We saw how the nearness of this presence of God's kingdom was proclaimed everywhere Jesus went by his healing of the sick and his ability to drive out evil spirits. We see at the end of Ch 4 how a vast crowd has come out to Jesus in the wilderness, a vast crowd of ordinary people. After walking among them and healing them we read at the beginning of Ch 5, that Jesus sits down to teach this same crowd. They are blessed, he tells them, in what we call the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1 to 12) because though they are spiritually poor, grieving, trod upon, done violence to, the kingdom of the heavens has touched their lives in their meeting with Jesus.
But the blessing of Jesus is not just for themselves. In Matthew 5:13 Jesus tells these ordinary people that they are now called by God. They are called to be his salt in the world, flavouring the world with God's Kingdom values, cleansing the world by their faithfulness to those values, preserving what is good in a world that always corrupts, always destroys. They are to be salt and light not to draw attention to themselves, but that through their presence others may see God.
Jesus is calling this crowd to be his disciples, to be his leaders in the world, but they are to be servant leaders. So having called them, he now begins to teach them about the character they must have as his followers, and it has to be of a much higher calibre than that of the religious leaders of the day (verse 20), the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. They only care about their public image, how they look on the outside. God cares passionately about what is going on on the inside of a person, about our hearts, and if the world is to be changed into the
So in verse 21, Jesus starts opening up the deeper meaning of some of the 10 Commandments. Yes, they were told they must not murder, Jesus says, but they must not even hold anger against anyone. Why? Because what ends in murder starts with anger and evil thoughts in our hearts. Our hearts have already rejected and demeaned our brother or sister and the poison of hatred is festering in us. We must forgive, Jesus says, so that our hearts are free to serve the kingdom.
And it is the same with adultery (verse 27). Adultery is simply the final out working of fantasy, lust, deceit and betrayal, that we have allowed our minds and hearts to dwell on. If we are lusting after others, we are already betraying our loved ones. Watch your hearts.
So we come to today's verses, Matthew 5:38 to 48, so often misunderstood. Jesus seems to be saying in our modern translation (verse 39) ‘Do not resist one who is evil.’ Does this mean that Jesus is saying, let the bully win: let yourself be walked all over; on the contrary.
The word that we translate as ‘resist,’ is in Greek antistenai. Now we all know what anti means: we use it in English all the time. Anti means against, as in anti-clockwise. Stenai means stand. So antistenai means to stand against, and in the old Testament, we usually find this word used as a technical term in warfare. Two armies stand against each other.
Jesus resisted evil with every fibre of his being. There is not a single instance in which Jesus does not resist evil when he encounters it. So what did he mean when he said, do not antistenai, do not resist evil. A modern expression,’ upping the anti,’ might best describe it. You come at me with an insult: I come back at you with a worse one. You slapped my face: I threaten with my knife. You take out a hand gun: I take out a machine gun, etc, etc. Jesus is saying something much stronger than simply resist. He is saying do not do what people in the world generally do. Do not resist violently. Do not resist evil on its own terms. Don't let your opponent dictate the terms of the opposition. Jesus is trying to break the spiral of violence. He is saying don't turn into the very thing you hate
We see Jesus demonstrating this very teaching at the moment in which he is nailed to the cross, a moment at which most victims cursed their executioners and often railed against God. At that moment Jesus forgives and breaks the spiral of violence. But he also does something else. He refuses to lose his sense of identity.
So if we refuse to fight evil, are we not just going to have people walk all over us? Jesus never said, don't fight evil. He just taught us that we don't have to do it violently. Mahatma Gandhi said, everyone in the world knows that Jesus and his teaching is non-violent, except Christians. Gandhi in with the Salt Marches, Martin Luther King in with non-violent protests against racism, won in the end and the people who took part in these marches and demonstrations never lost their dignity or their sense of identity. At the end of the day they could look at themselves with self-respect because they had not done violence to another person to get what was rightfully theirs, even though violence was often done to them.
Let us look at verses 38 to 42, and see how Jesus suggested to the people of his own day ways in which they might respond non-violently to common offences and insults. By mentioning the right cheek in verse 39, Jesus is describing a common way that someone like a Roman or a person in power might have demeaned someone of a lower station in life. Most of us are right-handed, so to slap someone on their right cheek, we have to use the back of our right-hand. This is a put down. When Jesus says, offer your other cheek (the left cheek) a right-handed man couldn’t slap the left cheek with the back of his hand. If he was going to hit, he would have to do it as one man hits another man when they are engaged in an equal fight. The one who has been slapped down, insulted, by offering his other cheek, says to his protagonist, ‘I'm as good a man as you are. Hit me me man to man.’ In Roman law, a Roman could only hit someone with their fist or slap them with the palm of their hand if that person was of equal status, so the Roman would now find himself wrong-footed by somebody he had tried to put down, who was now saying, ‘I'm as good as you are.’
In verse 40, we have Jesus' comment about the tunic. The tunic was a poor man's outer garment. He used it as an overcoat during the day and his bed cover at night. In Jewish law, if you were very poor, you could hock your outer garment as collateral for a loan. The creditor had to return this garment every night but could come and get it again every morning, thus harassing the poor man into repaying the debt.
Jesus knew the crowds listening to him were full of very poor people, people who would be dragged into court for indebtedness. The law is on the side of the wealthy. The poor were never going to win their case. So, Jesus said (since the law is an ass) take it to the point of absurdity. When your creditor sues you for your overcoat, give him your tunic as well. Standing in court give him both. Now poor people were too poor to afford underwear, so the debtor would now be standing there naked. He would walk out into the street, naked. In , it was taboo to walk about naked, as it is in our own time, but in , the shame of nakedness fell not on the person who was naked but on the person who observed their nakedness. When word spread as to why this man was naked. the creditor’s life would not be worth living.
The last example Jesus gives is of the Roman soldier forcing a civilian to carry his pack. These packs weighed 65 to 85 pounds. Roman military law allowed a soldier to do this to a civilian, but only for 1 mile, and the civilians would know when a mile was up, because there were markers at every mile. If the soldier made a civilian carry his load more than a mile, the soldier was infraction of the military code, which was always more strongly enforced then civilian code. So Jesus is saying, ‘Alright, the next time a soldier forces you to carry his pack, co-operate, but when you come to the next mile marker, keep going.” The soldier suddenly finds himself in a new position. People always moaned and complained and dropped the pack at the marker, but Jesus said, ‘You keep carrying on.’ The soldier will know that he is now infraction of military law and if his commanding officer finds out he will be in deep trouble. Jesus is teaching the crowd, these ordinary, hassle, put upon people, how to take the initiative away from the oppressors and within the situation of the old order, find a new way of being.
With what delight these crowds must have listened to Jesus. With what laughter they must have responded. How empowered he must have made them feel as he painted this new way of being.
But in the last verses of chapter 5 (verses 43 to 48) Jesus brings his listeners back to the heart: it is not enough to be victorious over your enemies, even non-violently. You, we, Jesus said, must learn to love our enemies. One of the ways to do this (verse 44) is to pray for them.
One thing prayer does is to make us reframe our habitual views of people and situations. It helps us to see people as God sees them. It helps us see the world from their point of view. Over time, it helps us to be more empathetic, more merciful. Sometimes it is very, very hard to even bring ourselves to praise the people who have behaved appallingly towards us and go on behaving like that, but Jesus invites us to do so. You must do this, Jesus says, so that you may be the real children of your Father in heaven. Otherwise you are a son or daughter in name only, not in character.
If we want to be disciples, apprentices of Jesus Christ, we have to work at being more like him in character, in our hearts. Then we will be salt and light in the world.
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