“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ 22 But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.
Matthew 5:21-22
I am the middle child of 5 and all of my siblings are about 1.5 years apart...and we are all pretty competitive. Let's just say the quote below from Phillip Yancey's The Jesus I Never Knew hit close to home!
"Growing up with an older brother, I fretted this verse. Can two brothers weather the storms of adolescence without relying on words such as "stupid" and "fool"?
We must remember as we look at this verse what we talked about last week...that Jesus introduced this part of the sermon by stating that unless our righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees we will not enter the kingdom heaven. I like what Yancey wrote about the six "You have heard that it was said/ but I say to you" statements that Jesus makes in the sermon on the mount. In fact, I like them better than I feel that I can write about them, so most of this post will be his writing. First he points out that,
"Using the Torah as a starting point, Jesus pushed the law in the same direction, further than any Pharisee had dared push it, further than any monk has dared live it....Jesus made the law impossible for anyone to keep, then charged us to keep it."
But then he says,
"For years I had thought of the Sermon on the Mount as a blueprint for human behavior that no one could possibly follow. Reading it again, I found that Jesus gave these words not to cumber us, but to tell us what God is like....Why should we love our enemies? Because our clement Father causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good. Why be perfect? Because God is perfect....How could I have missed it? Jesus did not proclaim the Sermon on the Mount so that we would...furrow our brows in despair over our failure to achieve perfection. He gave it to impart to us God's Ideal toward which we should never stop striving, but also to show that none of us will ever reach that Ideal. The Sermon on the Mount forces us to recognize the great distance between God and us, and any attempt to reduce that distance by somehow moderating its demands misses the point altogether.
The worst tragedy would be to turn the Sermon on the Mount into another form of legalism; it should rather put an end to all legalism. Legalism like the Pharisees' will always fail, not because it is too strict but because it is not strict enough. Thunderously, inarguably, the Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper throwers.... We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace."
We say we know it...that all sins are equal before God. But we never think twice about losing our temper with our families or with a particularly worrisome, annoying, or selfish person in front of us. And we typically feel justified in our lashing out. Do we not take seriously Jesus' instruction about bursts of anger being liable to the fires of hell? Are we willing to bet our eternal souls that He didn't really mean what He was saying and was simply exaggerating to make a point!? Or do we despair, because try as we might to change our attitudes and control our tongues, the fire keeps fanning into flames that burn our families and neighbors occasionally?
The answer in Christ...is a resounding neither.
We aim for God's "absolute Ideal," as Yancey calls it, with everything that we have...not out of legalism, but out of desire to imitate the love that we have seen and experienced in God. Picture it as a child who looks pitifully cute standing in his daddy's clothes that are way too big for him to fill. But he puts them on anyway because he wants to be like his daddy. And the scrawny little boy trying to fill his daddy's full-grown clothes couldn't possibly make his dad any prouder.
Yes, we aim for the absolute Ideal and when we fail and fall short of it, we glory even more in God's grace as we see through scripture his smile at our desire to "wear his clothes." And that smile causes our desire to be as forgiving and as loving to others as our Father is to us grow even more. And one day...even if it is the day we meet Jesus in the air, we will finally fill out those clothes and they will fit perfectly naturally for the rest of our eternal lives.
BUT WE MUST AIM AND NOT SETTLE FOR BEING "GOOD ENOUGH" AND/OR BETTER THAN THE MURDERERS
FOR OUR GOD IS PERFECTLY RIGHTEOUS!
What are you aiming for? What are you trusting in? What would it look like for you to aim for God's patience, God's "slow to anger" nature, God's love, and God's forgiveness this week?
In Mt. 23:17 Jesus angrily calls the scribes and Pharisees "blind fools." Has he committed murder? No, because they are in fact fools. In 7:26 Jesus says the foolish man is the one who hears his words and does not do them. In contrast, the one who does the will of his Father is his brother, and sister, and mother (12:50). So Mt. 5:22 is about not calling your brother (your fellow disciple) a fool (out of anger over a certain sin), murdering him by judging him as not a disciple. A similar teaching is behind 7:1-5 where one condemns a brother due to a small speck (sin); that condemnation is murder, and a big log in one's eye; the one who judges his brother thusly is in danger of being judged by God (in the end), just as in 5:22.
ReplyDeleteThat's a great point and I'm glad you brought it out. Jesus' teaching was definitely about one's intent and one's heart in the heat of the moment...just the same as in the verses to come about adultery being adultery in the heart if a man looks at a woman to lust after her (we'll talk about that more in the future). I would caution, however, that we typically don't "call people names" angrily in as righteous a way as Jesus did. Jesus was defending God's honor....we typically get into heated battles more about our honor. I believe in context, what Jesus is addressing are the outbursts of uncontrolled rage which are always sin. Gal. 5:20 calls them "fits of rage." It's that heart of uncontrolled anger that is to be rooted out of the heart of a follower of Christ.
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