Revised Common Lectionary: Year A Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany
February 12, 2023
Highlighted Text: Matthew 5:21-37
Summary of the Text
The teachings contained in this passage are, for my money, as difficult to preach as any lectionary text. Not only is each teaching difficult in its own right, but each has also been used (and in some Christian communities continues to be used) to sanction or excuse abusive behavior. Numerous recent reports have detailed how criminal child and domestic abuse has been hidden and perpetuated in certain church communities through a twisted application of “come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court,” turning a teaching about forgiveness into a pretext for avoiding bad PR by dealing with abuse “in house.” Men have blamed undisciplined eyes (and worse) on women’s beauty. Women have been guilted into staying in dangerous, toxic relationships.
So the challenge here is not just preaching a challenging teaching, but working to redeem abused texts without rejecting Jesus’ words as naïve and outdated, or blaming the scriptures themselves for harm that has been done using them as a warrant.
Summary of the Text
The Letter and Spirit of the Law
Later in Matthew (23:23), Jesus chastises the Pharisees for following to the tee the minutiae of tithing regulations for various spices, while “neglect[ing] the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.” This tendency to focus on the “letter of the law” to the neglect of the “spirit of the law” is often illustrated with various teachings from the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus moves from external practice to inner orientation.
Yet we need to be careful also not to focus so narrowly on the letter of what Jesus is saying in this sermon that we miss the spirit. Is the point of 5:21-26 that Christians should avoid secular courts of law, or is it a deeper message about reconciliation? Is the point of 5:33-37 that Christians should avoid taking oaths of any kind, or is there a more central point there about speaking with integrity?
What Would the Opposite Look Like?
At the risk of suggesting that the nuances of complex ethical situations can always be reduced to merely two extreme options, it can be instructive to consider the difficult teachings from this section of the Sermon on the Mount in light of what an opposite teaching could look like. What would be communicated about the life of the mind and about objectifying others if the message were, “No harm in looking”? What would the underlying message be about the value and seriousness of the marriage covenant if the teaching were, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”?
“Do Not Judge”
Let’s use adultery as the example for this. Notice that there are three levels of adultery either mentioned or assumed in 5:27-32: sleeping with another’s spouse or with someone not your spouse (adultery “proper”), situations arising from divorce (5:32), and looking lustfully at someone who’s not your spouse (5:28). It’s easy for people within these various “levels” of sexual sin to cast judgment on those at a different level. The divorcee might look at the cheater and think “Well, at least I went through the proper channels.” And the guy with a wandering eye might look at the divorcee and think, “At least I make my marriage work.” Yet all of this falls into that broad category of “adultery.” And while we can and should strive as a community to avoid all of its forms, this terminological equivalency ought to curb our impulse to pronounce judgment.
The Pedagogical Use of the Law
The entirety of the Sermon on the Mount, with its internalizing of external sins, is useful for teaching the pedagogical use of the law (with “pedagogical” in this sense referring not to teaching methods but in the more etymological sense of “leading” one [to Christ]). But this section in particular highlights the impossibility of perfectly obeying God’s law—not just avoiding murder, but anger; not just avoiding adulterous acts, but lustful looks—and the desperate situation of all whose hearts are sullied by these sins. These teachings lay bare our inner brokenness and our absolute need for God’s grace. The challenge in preaching this is to discover a proper balance between “cheap grace” (“Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?”) that discounts the law due to our inability to follow it, and a desperation so deep that the message of grace fails to connect.
A Reminder to Preach Grace-Infused Truth
Regardless of who is sitting in our pews, a sermon that fails to communicate God’s grace has missed its mark. But with texts like this, we have to be especially mindful of the particular situations of individuals in the congregation. For instance, there is almost certain to be at least one divorced person in any congregation, and quite likely a couple where at least one spouse is remarried. Regardless of how exactly we take Jesus’ words about divorce, we must express our interpretation with tremendous sensitivity, lest our words aggravate or reopen wounds, or the message of grace be drowned out by a callous approach. This is a good practice in preaching in general, to consider how our words might be heard by those in a variety of life situations.
Word Study: rhaka and mōre
“… and if you say “Rhaka” to a brother or sister, you will be liable to the Sanhedrin, and if you say, ‘Mōre,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire” (5:22).
Any Scripture that summons the fires of hell is going to get our attention with an added urgency to make sure we fully understand the threat involved. Much effort has been given to trying to discern the precise difference between these two terms—the Semitic loanword rhaka and the Greek mōre—and why one seems to be infinitely more offensive than the other. It doesn’t help that some scholars take mōre to be the Greek translation of rhaka. Others take rhaka with its common sense of “empty” and refer it to insulting one’s intelligence (not unlike the insult “you’re basic” that the kids say these days), and take mōre (“fool”) to be a more cutting insult of one’s character.
Regardless, it’s unlikely that Jesus is here establishing the precise insult line we are to avoid crossing if we’re okay with some legal fees but don’t really want to burn in hell.
A couple observations, though: it’s possible that the mōre here is meant to recall the cognate mōranthē just nine verses earlier in 5:13. Expressions of salt “losing its saltiness” or “losing its taste” rather take the sting off of what is effect being said about this “moronic” salt—it is worthless, good for nothing, might as well be dead. And that would indeed be a strong insult.
It’s possible also to connect the consequences of these insults ahead to what Jesus will say in 7:2 of the sermon: “For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.” There is indeed a sense of these insults boomeranging back to bring the wished-for curse onto the head of the insulter (cf. Haman being hanged by the very gallows he had built for Mordecai in Esther). And this does fit with experience as well—how harboring hatred ultimately ends up eating up the one doing the hating.
Darren Pollock is Pastor of Panorama Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Church History at Fuller Seminary. A graduate of UC Davis (BA in classics), Princeton Seminary (MDiv), and Calvin Seminary (PhD in historical theology), he lives in Temple City, CA, with his wife Ashley, two young children Charlie and Carter, and step-cat Fanny.
Darren is the author of Early Stuart Polemical Hermeneutics: Andrew Willet’s 1611 Hexapla on Romans (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017). He has also been published in Jonathan Edwards Studies, Anglican & Episcopal History, and Word & World, and he contributed multiple entries to The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia (Eerdmans, 2017).
After Christ and his family, Darren most loves crossword puzzles and Scrabble, Zion National Park, good coffee, passion fruit, and the hapless Sacramento Kings.
Sermon Resources
Key Quote
Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Key Illustration
Judging Others Stems from Self-Judgment
But it is important to be aware that the act of judging others has its origins in our self-judgment. As I often tell patients, “Shamed people shame people.” Long before we are criticizing others, the source of that criticism has been planted, fertilized, and grown in our own lives, directed at ourselves, and often in ways we are mostly unaware of.
Suffice to say that our self-judgment, that tendency to tell ourselves that we are not enough—not thin enough, not smart enough, not funny enough, not . . . enough—is the nidus (a place where bacteria grows) out of which grows our judgment of others, not least being our judgment of God. The problem is that we have constructed a sophisticated lattice of blindness around this behavior, which disallows our awareness of it.
and
Don’t Look Down But Up
In his excellent book on the desert fathers, Where God Happens, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams tells of an encounter between two monastic fathers. The first was Macarius, famous in that time as a man of God, humble, gracious, and loving. The other, Theopemptus, exhibited a judgmental self-righteousness that discouraged those who visited him and sought his counsel:
When he was alone with him, the old man [Macarius] asked, “How are things going with you?” Theopemptus replied, ‘thanks to your prayers, all is well.” The old man asked, “Do you not have to battle with your fantasies?” He answered, “No, up to now all is well.” He was afraid to admit anything. But the old man said to him, “I have lived for many years as an ascetic and everyone sings my praises,’ but, despite my age, I still have trouble with sexual fantasies’’ Theopemptus said, “Well, it is the same with me, to tell the truth “
And the old man went on-admitting one by one, all the other fantasies that caused him to struggle until he had brought Theopemptus all of them himself. Then he said, “What do you do about fasting?” “Nothing till the ninth hour,” he replied. “Fast till evening and take some exercise,” said Macarias. “Go over the words of the gospel and the rest of Scripture. And if an alien thought arises within you don’t look down but up: the Lord will come to your help.”
Self-satisfaction is dealt with not by confrontation or condemnation but by the quiet personal exposure of failure in such a way as to prompt the same truthfulness in someone else: the neighbor is won, converted, by Macarius’s death to any hint of superiority in his vision of himself. He has nothing to defend, and he preaches the gospel by simple identification with the condition of another, a condition others cannot themselves face honestly.
Rowan Williams, Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another, New Seeds Books, 2005, 12.
Additional Sermon Resources
Liturgical Elements
Call to Worship
Psalm 19 or Psalm 24 would be a suitable basis for the Call to Worship for this passage. Psalm 19 highlights God’s law and concludes with a focus on the words of our mouths (“whoever says, Rhaka!”… “let your ‘yes’ be yes and your ‘no’ be no”) and on the inner thoughts of the heart. Psalm 24’s mention of “ascending the hill” could prepare the congregation subconsciously to hear from the Sermon on the Mount. The reference to pure hearts calls to mind a goal of Jesus’ sermon. And the counsel not to swear deceitfully fits with this passage’s emphasis on truth in speech, while also somewhat cheekily referring to a “swearing” that (even when done honorably) goes beyond letting your ‘yes’ be yes.
Adapted from Psalm 19
Leader: The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
People: The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the decrees of the Lord are sure, making wise the simple.
Leader: But who can detect one’s own errors? May God clear us from hidden faults.
All: Let the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to the Lord, our rock and our redeemer.
Adapted from Psalm 24
Leader: The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.
People: Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place?
Leader: Those who have clean hands and pure hearts, who do not lift up their souls to what is false and do not swear deceitfully. Lift up your heads, O gates! that the King of glory may come in!
People: Who is the King of glory?
Leader: The Lord, strong and mighty, he is the King of glory.
Prayer of Confession
God of freedom, whether we like to admit it or not, we do not treat everybody with equality. We silently judge others based on appearance, social status, and even race. Please give us the courage to meet others who are different from us, to learn from them, and to partner with them. Please give us a willingness to set aside our own safety and comfort for the sake of others as we silently confess our sins to you now…
Submitted by Austin D. Hill
Assurance of Pardon
Hear the good news! Who is in a position to condemn? Only Christ, and Christ died for us, Christ rose for us, Christ reigns in power for us, Christ prays for us. (Romans 8:34)
Leader: Friends, believe the good news of the gospel.
People: In Jesus Christ we are forgiven!
Benediction
Isaac of Stella
May the Son of God who is already formed in you grow in you—so that for you he will become immeasurable, and that in you he will become laughter, exultation, the fullness of joy which no one can take from you.