Does It Really Say That?

Matthew 38-48; Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18; 1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23


For $50 the State of Ohio will issue you a specialized vehicle license plate if the wording can be put into seven letters, isn’t already taken, and isn’t offensive. Some plates are simple to decipher, others take some creative thinking. An “8" can be used for that sound. A “3" is sometimes used for an “e”. Often vowels are left out, but we can get the message.

The human mind is often pretty good at filling in the blanks; sometimes better than the auto-spell on our phones. If we are given a text with only consonants appearing, we can often read it without difficulty. Our minds skim over words so quickly that it knows the sequences and can fill in missing letters.

But sometimes our minds can get a little sloppy. I’ve told the story before about how for years I misread a sign on the court house square across from the Presbyterian Church in my home town. It wasn’t until I was high school that I realized the sign didn’t say “Presbyterian Crossing,” but actually said “Pedestrian Crossing.”

We do the same thing with scripture. If a certain saying sounds like a Bible verse, we assume that it must be. Or we take a verse and supply information that is not there. Matthew does not tell us how many wise men came to find Jesus, but we assume it was three because there are three gifts listed.

Jesus plays with our minds and what we think we know. In last week’s reading from Matthew, Jesus said several times, “You have heard that it was said....” Then he explained the statements’ real meaning. The original statements could have been mis-remembered, misquoted, or misinterpreted. Alternative reality is not a new phenomenon.

Jesus proceeds with two more reinterpretations in today’s reading. They are packed with trouble for those of us who claim to live in the real world. What Jesus spoke of is foreign to us. We live an irenic and cloistered existence when it is compared to the daily reality experienced by Jesus and his contemporaries. The incidents he cited occurred every day in many parts of Galilee and Judea. So we ask, what does this have to do with us in 2017?

While Jesus was talking about the world he lived in, the truth is that our world is as distressed and conflicted as his was. Evil was as real then as it is now. Neighbors were just as difficult to live beside. Poor people begged in the streets and we see them on the off ramps and intersections in Columbus, Chillicothe, and even occasionally in Waverly. In Jesus’ time, a Roman soldier could actually order a Jew to carry his pack for a mile whether that Jew wanted to or not. Today’s talk about immigrants approaches that level of belligerency. Nationally, a number of police departments, large and small, are under investigation or oversight because of a deep-seated culture of racial or ethnic insensitivity, profiling, and excessive force. The desire for retributive justice – vengeance, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” – was a direct quote from the Hebrew scriptures (Deuteronomy 19:16-21, cf. 25:11; and Numbers 35:9-30).

Jesus’ audience was as shocked then as we are today. Most people knew the vague generalities of the law. After all, the ten Mosaic commandments were explicated in 613 laws and regulations. Only the religious institution lawyers knew the ins and outs of the legal fine print. And they argued over the implications of many of them. What Jesus did was to take the application of some individual laws much further than anyone could be expected to go in ordinary living. Did he really expect his fellow Jews in Galilee or Jerusalem to be so scrupulous in carrying out the full detail of the law? None of us are moral perfectly. Not even close. The disciples and the hillside hearers weren’t any different in terms of achieving moral perfection. Life is never that simple or that easy. Does keeping both the letter and the spirit of the law require us to go beyond the basic requirements of holy living?

Jesus names what is widely taken for granted, and then speaks against it. Throughout his sermon he preaches in an adversative style, naming supposedly sound advice and then contrasting it against his own. Like any good rabbi, Jesus carefully explains the scripture, interpreting the law within its proper context and according to its proper use. Sometimes this task involves criticism of particular features and interpretations of the sacred text itself.

In discussing the “eye for an eye” situation, Jesus paints a portrait of active non-retaliation. This stance is so far from resistance to opponents (do “not oppose those who want to hurt you”) that at first it seems to give into them, offering them another cheek, another shirt, another mile. Looking closer, we find that his approach is grounded in profound resistance, the kind that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., espoused. This is an unexpected refusal to play the opponent’s adversarial game. By voluntarily going a second mile, for example, the first mile is reframed from something “forced” into something chosen. On the surface this looks like being docile; on a deeper level it is a form of non-adversarial defiance. It robs the oppressor of the exhilaration of abasing the victim.

A number of years ago a Korean-American pastor, Kenneth Bae, felt God’s call to go to North Korea and preach the gospel despite regime’s prohibition against any religion. After being arrested, one of the tortures inflicted on him was to stand motionless in the center of his cell for six hours. He was so filled with the Spirit as he stood there that he smiled. This response so confounded his captors that they ended the torture and told him to go to sleep.

As Jesus interprets the law, “an eye for an eye” means that the proper restitution for a wrongful act is its mirror image or reversal (as in, “if you take an eye, then you will lose an eye”). But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He argues that the true reversal of an opponent’s opposition is not another act of opposition but an act of non-opposition, a creative response that works toward extinguishing the opposition rather than the opponent.

Jesus broke down the entrenched assumptions of people on all sides of life. That is a message that we desperately need today. All sides today have become so entrenched, so rigid in their beliefs, their assumptions, their perceptions, that it is increasingly difficult for us to love when others are seen as enemies rather than neighbors. Colleague Thom Shuman says that “It’s not just ‘America First’ that presents a crisis in this moment, it is the ‘My Viewpoint First’ that is at the heart of the discord, the division, the disunity facing us right now.”(1)

Shuman continues, “Leviticus, Jesus, Paul all tell us of the gracious invitation God offers to us to live in neighborhood where reconciliations is the norm, not revenge; where trying to accumulate more takes a back seat to caring for the kids of the single parent who works two shifts a day; where we put our angry words out with the garbage, and recycle the grace God has given to us; where the losing side in elections invites the winning supporters over for coffee and dessert to talk about working together; where the quaint old notion that I best show self-love by loving the other is lived out.”

According to pastor Brian Donst, presidential counselor Steve Bannon says that we are living in a time of open war between civilizations.(2) Donst thinks Bannon is wrong in thinking that the warfare is between Christian and Muslim, or between any “competing” religious traditions. More accurately it is a war between a civilization of openness, love, honest dialogue, humble community, and honest efforts towards shalom (in any of its million faces), and a civilization of anger, suspicion, fearful exclusion, and self-righteous isolation. That means the battle line is not between different religious traditions, political parties, nations, classes, or races, but rather that the battle line runs right through the middle of each and every tradition, party, nation, class and race, precisely because the line runs right through each and every one of us. The enemy we must fight is first of all that part of ourselves which is subject to the lower and more sinful spirit of our age.(3) The salvation of Jesus is salvation from the worst that we would be without him.

We ask, “Does it really say that?” To which Jesus says, “But I say to you..., just as your heavenly Father is complete in showing love to everyone, so also you must be complete.” Or as Eugene Peterson paraphrases Jesus, “In a word, what I am saying is Grow up. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live graciously and generously toward others, the way God lives toward you.”

God is indeed generous to us in Christ. Jesus did say that. May we live the truth of that reality.




(1) Thom Shuman, Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 11:21 AM, midrash@lists.joinhands.com.

(2) Brian Donst, Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 2:32 PM, midrash@lists.joinhands.com.

(3) Donst, Ibid.




Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.

Copyright © 2017 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.