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Ashes: Matthew 5 + Luke 6
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Last week was all about revenge. And I think one of the interesting things is often when we look back, particularly at the Old Testament, we see all of these stories that are violent and vengeful and we sometimes just don't know what to do with that. And yet I think if we can step back from the way we might have been conditioned to approach the scriptures and we simply read these stories as they come to us, I think what we find is that they are not celebrating or glorifying revenge as much as they are clearly intended to be cautionary tales. So we saw last week in the story of Sampson. These are tales about how revenge first blinds and then intoxicates and then leads us into an endless spiral of escalation and one upmanship.
Speaker 1:And that's why Jesus says, it doesn't matter how many times you count an offense, you need to learn to forgive. And so last week we talked about two strategies to help diffuse revenge. Now the first was to humanize the person who has hurt you. I don't excuse or condone what they've done but recognize that they are acting out of their own fears and insecurities. This is where all of our worst selves comes from.
Speaker 1:It's what happens when we become disconnected from the safety and the grace of God. Hurt people hurt people. That's a cliche and you've probably heard it before but let that sink somewhere into your brain because it helps us to at least humanize and see that person as a struggling human being. Second, we talked about the idea that your pain is personal. And so when we pursue revenge as a strategy, what we think we're doing is we're getting even.
Speaker 1:But the problem is pain isn't just this objective thing that we can measure and create and transfer to someone else. It doesn't work that way. You can never make someone hurt the way that you do. And so rather than pursuing a strategy that can't ever deliver on what it promises, What we need is to find healthier ways to deal with our hurt. And that takes us back to our conversation that we had about remembering and naming, processing, and then choosing to let go of old hurts and leave them behind.
Speaker 1:But what about when you want to forgive? What about when you think you are ready to move forward and leave those hurts behind, but that person continues to aggravate or irritate or perhaps even injure you in some way as you're trying to move forward. Well, that's what we need to talk about today. So let's pray and we'll invite God to be with us as we speak tonight. But then today, it's forgiveness and why that needs boundaries.
Speaker 1:Almighty God, we approach you again as the one to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden. And we do this recognizing that to speak of forgiveness, our transparency and our vulnerability are paramount. And if we hold back from ourselves, we can never truly process our own emotions. And if we hold back from each other, we lose the support and care that community was designed to be for us. That when we hold back from you, we can never truly be healed in the way that you imagined for us.
Speaker 1:And so we open ourselves to this conversation. But more than that, we open ourselves to your spirit. We ask that you would be present and near and close to our broken hearts. Helping us to create healthy habits, helping us to practice healthy patterns, but more than that comforting and healing and helping us to catch a glimpse of the wholeness that you have in mind for us. Would you teach us about our limits tonight so that we might become the generous source of compassion and grace that you intend for us to be in your world.
Speaker 1:In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Alright. Boundaries. Lots to cover today and so I wanna start by diving straight into a passage from Jesus.
Speaker 1:And this is a section that appears both in Matthew five and then again in Luke six. And we're actually gonna look at both of those tonight because I think they help to flesh each other out a bit. But we're gonna start in Matthew five with what is one of the most difficult passages when it comes to boundaries. And in fact, this is one passage that has been used to argue that followers of Christ should not have much in the way of boundaries at all. You'll probably recognize at least some of this language.
Speaker 1:Jesus says in Matthew five, you have heard that it was said eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth. But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. And finally, if someone forces you to go one mile, go two miles with them.
Speaker 1:Now, couple things here. First of all, Jesus starts this with one of his most famous phrases, you have heard it said. But what you have to understand here is that when Jesus says you have heard it said, he's not just talking about well known phrases or common sense ideas. He's actually quoting directly from the Hebrew scriptures. And here, this eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth bit comes from several places in the Old Testament.
Speaker 1:Exodus 21, Leviticus 24, and then again in Deuteronomy 19. However, the concept actually predates that. The code of Hammurabi, which is an ancient Mesopotamian document from roughly 3,800 ago. It's actually the oldest long form document that we have ever found and translated. It uses these exact same phrases.
Speaker 1:There, explicitly, but also in the biblical text as well, the idea behind an eye for an eye was to limit the escalation of revenge. So everything we talked about last week with the problems inherent as revenge as a strategy, how it spirals and it builds and it escalates out of control. All of that is actually bundled up and carried along in this phrase. In fact, in the Talmud, there's this fascinating section where the twelfth century sage Maimonides is explaining these passages from Torah. And he talks about how you might go about determining how much an eye for an eye would cost you.
Speaker 1:So, if you were to accidentally injure someone and they lost their eye, he talks about how much you would figure out or how you would figure out how much you owe them in order to honor an eye for an eye. In other words, it sounds like this was always understood as figurative language not literal. In fact, there is no record anywhere of Jews going around poking people's eyes out. Instead, what they were doing was trying to determine fair compensation. Now that might sound strange, but if you were to look at my long term disability insurance, it will say something like, if I lose a finger, get a thousand dollars.
Speaker 1:And if I lose an arm, I get $10,000, etcetera, etcetera. The question is, what do I need to be made whole so that I can move on with life? And that's actually the idea here in the old testament. So first of all, an eye for an eye was probably not as barbaric as it might sound at first blush. But more importantly perhaps, it was never designed to endorse or promote revenge.
Speaker 1:It was always about limiting the damage that revenge could cause in society. And yet now, along comes Jesus and his endless forgiveness that we talked about last week. And he is not interested in limiting the damage that revenge can cause. He's actually interested in reversing the damage that revenge has already caused. And so he gets up and he says, you've heard it said an eye for an eye and you've come to believe that this is the best we can do.
Speaker 1:But I want to suggest there's something better. And this is what Jesus thinks is better. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek turn to them the left. If anyone sues you to take your shirt, hand over your coat. If anyone forces you to go a mile, go two.
Speaker 1:And I might admit, if I was in the audience here, this is where I might think about throwing a tomato or two at Jesus just to see what he would do. Maybe he'd make a salad and bring it over. We'd go for lunch. It'd be great. But that's because this is also where a lot of well meaning Christians have assumed that Jesus is calling for a doormat spirituality here.
Speaker 1:And he wants us to be walked on or walked over, no backbone or pride, nothing fierce inside. But that doesn't sound like Jesus. And so I don't think that's what's going on. And in fact, the majority of scholars don't think so either. Now, for my money, one of the best treatments of this passage is by a man, a scholar named Walter Wink.
Speaker 1:And he talks about how in the context of the ancient world, each of these examples that Jesus gives, these are very clear acts of protest. So here's how it works. If someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the left. In the ancient world, you always interact with your right hand. Now, the gory details of that involve the fact that you use your left hand to clean yourself after you use the restroom in the ancient world.
Speaker 1:This is why sitting at someone's right or left hand was a big deal in that culture. But if you were to imagine facing someone and you were to strike them using your right hand on their right cheek, what does that look like? It looks like a backhanded slap. Right? Now, if they turn their right cheek away from you and they turn to you their left cheek, what option does that leave open to you?
Speaker 1:Well, it means that if you intend to strike them again, it's going to be with an open hand. Now this is gonna sound strange, but how you slap someone in the ancient world was actually a sign of social status. A backhanded slap is how you would discipline a slave. An open handed slap, this is how you might discipline a child. It put you in the same social cast.
Speaker 1:And so turning your left cheek is a way of saying, won't fight you but I will demand that you see me as an equal, as a human being. Next, if anyone takes your shirt, hand over your coat as well. Now, shirt here is not a shirt the way we understand it. It's actually your underwear. It's that body length piece of clothing that you wore next to your skin.
Speaker 1:And your coat, this is not just your outerwear that you put on when you go outside and it's cold. This was actually the heavier outer garment that you wore around as clothing in the ancient world. Now the context here is that no one would ever sue you for your underwear. Maybe there is some bizarre outside case of this off somewhere but I've never read about it. Likely, this is just something that's not going to happen.
Speaker 1:The issue here is that Torah specifically forbids you from taking, from suing someone for their cloak. So the outer garment, if that was all you had, that would be what you wear during the day, but it would also be what you sleep in, it's what kept you warm at night, All kinds of different uses in the culture. And so you could sue someone for their house or their livestock, but if all they had left was their cloak, Torah actually says that's off limits. And so Jesus presents this sort of bizarre scenario where someone is so consumed with revenge that they are trying to get around the laws of Torah by suing you for your underwear. If I can't take your coat, I'll take your shirt.
Speaker 1:That's the idea here. And Jesus says, if someone is going to be that silly, they want to embarrass you so badly, then here's what you do, you strip down and you hand it all to them. And you let your refusal to be humiliated by them, embarrass them by showing just how petty they are in front of everyone. Finally, he says if anyone forces you to go one mile, go two. And this one comes from the rules that governed the Roman army.
Speaker 1:Jews were generally not Roman citizens. Now, some like Paul were, but most like Jesus would have been living in the Roman Empire but without the rights of a citizen. And there was a well known clause in the Roman laws called impressment. And this allowed any Roman soldier to conscript any non citizen living under Roman protection to carry their bags for them. Now, it's actually a very common idea.
Speaker 1:The British Navy had similar impressment laws until about a century ago where they would take over a port and they could conscript anyone living in the area to do certain labors for them. Loading their ships for example. And generally, you don't want to have the populace turn against you and revolt when you conquer them. And so impressment laws were meant to subjugate the people within certain limits so that they would know their place, but also so that we wouldn't be driven so far that they would start to fight back against the governing power. In Rome, what this meant is that non citizens could be legally forced to carry a soldier's bags weighing up to 100 Libra.
Speaker 1:That's roughly 80 pounds today. And they could be forced to carry that for a Roman mile. That's 1,000 paces, which is roughly a mile today depending on the length of your legs. And so Jesus says, if someone tries to rob you of your autonomy simply because you are a non citizen, If they treat you as lesser, as a commodity, then even if it hurts, you show them that your choices are yours. Because there is dignity in self determination.
Speaker 1:And Rome may be powerful but you are still a living, breathing, thinking human being who controls your own steps. And Walter Wink looks at this section where Jesus teaches us not to fight back, but to demand that we are seen as equals. And not to fight back, but to demonstrate that we will not be humiliated. Not to fight back but to retain our autonomy in the face of subjugation. And he says that human evolution has provided us with two deeply instinctual responses to violence.
Speaker 1:Fight or flight. Jesus offers us a third way. Nonviolent direct action. Now here's why we need to start with this when we talk about boundaries. Because it demonstrates that the first step even when we choose the forgiving non violent path of Jesus is recognizing that we still set the terms of our engagement.
Speaker 1:The way of non violence, the path of forgiveness, the road that chooses to forgo revenge, this may be an alternative view of the world. It may even be in some small way a rewriting of human history, but it is not an obligation of our essential autonomy as human beings. Even when you forgive, perhaps especially when you forgive, you are no longer at the mercy of someone else because you have chosen for yourself to set that pain behind and move away from it. In fact, what Jesus is saying is that when you forgive and you choose to let go, when you choose non violence over revenge, you are taking back control of your emotions and your actions and your pain and your dignity. And so it's only once Jesus can affirm and reaffirm this in his audience that he can now begin to speak to them more directly about what it means to create healthy boundaries.
Speaker 1:You need to know that you are worth being healthy before you can start to move towards health. And some of us need to hear that tonight. Because just like Jesus' audience of Jews who've been living under generations of Roman occupation, you have started to believe that you deserve to be treated the way you have been. And Jesus says, violence, bitterness, unforgiveness, that will get you nowhere, but you need to know that you are worth more than the way you have been treated. There is nothing in forgiveness that means you need to internalize hurt as your fault.
Speaker 1:In fact, forgiveness, this is part of how you take back control of what's happened to you. And you return that dignity to yourself by choosing to leave it behind. Now, in the very next verse, Jesus says, you have heard it said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I tell you, love your enemies. And this is where we need to jump to Luke to flesh things out a bit here. Because Luke records a bit more detail for us from Jesus.
Speaker 1:Luke chapter six verses twenty seven and twenty eight. But to you who are listening I say, love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you.
Speaker 1:So Jesus says forget what you've heard, here's the new deal, love your enemies. And in the light of everything that we've just spoken of, here's how you're gonna do it. Three things. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you.
Speaker 1:Pray for those who mistreat you. Now, it's really easy to blow past this, because this is not language that we use in normal life. I mean, know that there are people who say things like hashtag bless up, but that's ridiculous. You should not say that. And yet, there is something really significant going on here.
Speaker 1:One of the things that you see in Hebrew writing, particularly poetry, is something that we call parallelism. This is when you state an idea and then you immediately restate the same idea in a slightly different way that helps to increase the intensity or give a different nuance to it. Well, Jesus is not writing poetry here, but he is following a very similar pattern. Now, look at the language that he uses to describe this person that you are interacting with. Someone who hates you, someone who curses you, someone who mistreats you.
Speaker 1:Now, we might have emotional resonance with one or more of those words, maybe past experiences that color them for us. But essentially, what you have is someone who has an intense, perhaps irrational dislike of you. They hate you. Someone who speaks negatively of you, someone who says harmful things about you and they curse you. And then someone who actively injures you, who goes out of their way to hurt you, they they mistreat you.
Speaker 1:So the intensity and the enmity in the relationship is escalating, it's spiraling out of control here. But then on your side of the equation, the side that belongs to us, Jesus says three things as well. Right? He says, do good, bless, pray. And there's a progression there as well.
Speaker 1:But I think it's one we often misread. Now let me ask you this. What is harder? To do something nice for someone who's a jerk or to wish the best for that same person? Be honest because I can almost guarantee it's the second.
Speaker 1:And I can almost guarantee that because I'm a human being. And I know how hard it is to get my actions into the right place, but I also know how deeply hard it is to get my heart into the right place. Right? Caesar says, if someone hates you, maybe it's completely irrational, maybe you've done something and you've hurt them in some way, then go out of your way to be present to them. Show them who you really are.
Speaker 1:Demonstrate that you've changed in some way. Be there with a presence that offers healing and grace in your relationship. Do good for them. That's what it means to love your enemy. Now, if they start to curse you, and to be fair, we don't talk about cursing very often today either, but the word here is and it can mean everything from putting a hex on someone all the way to just speaking badly about them.
Speaker 1:But the idea here is more than gossip. It's the idea of trying to injure someone with your words. And Jesus says, if if that's the case, then you speak well of them. So if their words are full of venom and bile, you ensure that your words are full of light and love. Perhaps this, when they come up in conversation and your first instinct is to run them down, He says, you don't need to lie, you don't need to make them out to be something that they're not.
Speaker 1:But speak truth, not exaggeration. And do that from a place of love, not retaliation. Finally, he says, if someone mistreats you, if they actively injure you, if they choose to hurt you and they do it over and over again, the verb here, it's actually in the active participle form. So it's really if they are mistreating you right now in this moment, then you pray for them. And this is more than just doing good things for them.
Speaker 1:This is more than just saying nice things about them. This is about actually actively wishing the best for them. And this is without a doubt by far the most difficult, intentional, the most taxing thing that Jesus asks from us in this passage. To actually hope good for the person who stands in front of us and hurts us. And so, as the intensity of their evil escalates, Jesus says, the counterpart of your response needs to increase proportionately.
Speaker 1:But, what is the third unstated part of this equation that is building and forming as Jesus walks us through what it means to love our enemies? It's the intentional distance that we create between ourselves and sources of pain in our life. If you don't like me, then I will be there in your life trying to do good things. And if you start to say bad things about me, then I will step back, but I will still speak well of you. And if you mistreat me, if you try to hurt me and you continue to be toxic then I will step back again and I will limit your access to me in my heart but I will still wish the best for you.
Speaker 1:That's what it means to love your enemies. Because healthy boundaries are not a sign of unforgiveness, they are what help you forgive well. Now, Brene Brown talks about this. Then in her research, she has found that often the most loving people are the most boundaried people. And that is certainly true of my experience of myself.
Speaker 1:If I lose sight of my boundaries, and it's not just with toxic people, it's with my time and my energy, it's with my emotional capacity, what happens is that I find I just don't have anything left to give. And so if I let my boundaries fall, my reservoirs eventually run dry and I have nothing left for my family during the week. I have very little left for Sunday when I show up. I have no empathy left for you when we sit down and we have a coffee and we speak. And you can run-in emotional deficit for a time, sometimes you need to, but eventually that will catch up with you.
Speaker 1:Because you and I, we are not bottomless pits of relational vitality. On the contrary, we need to seek out intentional people who will pour into us. And when you find them, then you need to guard and protect that reservoir because a healthy you, this is the most important thing you can ever offer to someone else. And so practical boundaries, when do I answer my email? And how much of my day do I dedicate to social media?
Speaker 1:All of these are important for each of us to think through in our lives. But when it comes to forgiveness, this gets even more important. Because if you don't know how to limit someone's access to you, And if you can't learn how to say, no, it can't go back to the way that it was. At least not right now. If you can't say, I love you, I really do, but you are unhealthy.
Speaker 1:And I can't afford for you to be accessing the deepest parts of my soul because I need those clear and healthy and in line with the person that God created me to be. If you keep yourself stuck in cycles of hurt, it will grow and fester until it starts to feel like all of that pain is part of you. And if that happens, then you will never be able to pray for the person who mistreat you. And you won't be able to say nice things about the person who said nasty terrible things about you. You certainly won't be able to do good things for the person who hates you.
Speaker 1:And that means that you will never be able to let go of the pain, which means you will carry that hurt around with you forever. It means that the gift and the power and the transformative significance of forgiveness will never get to release you from all that you were never meant to carry. Healthy boundaries are not the antithesis of forgiveness. They are what enable you to forgive well. And so if you struggle with unforgiveness, we've talked about this this month and you know that there are hurts that you just can't seem to let go of no matter how many times you try.
Speaker 1:Perhaps, where you need to start is to sit down with as clear ahead as possible and to ask, am I giving this situation, am I giving this person too much access to the vulnerable parts of my heart? Are they healthy? Are they life giving? Do they pour into the best parts of me or do I need to forgive and bless and pray deeply and honestly for them, but at the same time begin to limit my exposure to that toxicity. And it's not about closing yourself off.
Speaker 1:It's about choosing where you will open yourself up. Because you were meant to be an open book but not everyone was meant to get past the cover and that's okay. Healthy boundaries will not make you less loving, they are part of what will free you to be forgiving and graceful to every single person that comes across your path in an appropriate way. And so my prayer today, as we close this conversation on forgiveness, is that you would begin to recognize that you are worthy of more than the way that you've been mistreated. But that you can reclaim your autonomy and your dignity far more powerfully through forgiveness and non violence than you ever could through revenge and hanging on to bitterness.
Speaker 1:That you would know that you need healthy boundaries in your life. But not just to protect yourself, you need them so that you can forgive well and live from a place of health and love from a place of overflow. Might you face into the future today with a renewed imagination of what is healthy for you, with habits that you can begin to practice daily in your life, and with hope for the day where you can find yourself free of all that you thought would be with you forever. Let's pray. God, we ask that by your spirit you would be present to each of us wherever we are.
Speaker 1:That if we have been hurt so deeply and for so long that we have started to believe that we deserve that, that that's what we are worthy of. And God, would you remind us that there is dignity in who you have created us to be. And our worth as human beings comes from our relationship with you. That we don't need to fight back. We don't need revenge as a strategy.
Speaker 1:Instead, we can choose this nonviolent direct action where we demand our own autonomy and our own dignity by choosing to forgive even when someone else wouldn't expect it. We take back control of our emotions and control of our pain and we choose to set them behind us and move forward. But then at the same time, as we do that and we get healthy God, we pray that we would each be able to form healthy boundaries in our lives. Sometimes practical ones, sometimes ones between us and people who seek to injure us over and over again. And we pray that that would never become shorthand for a way of cutting people out of our lives when what we really need to do is open the door again and welcome them back for another chance.
Speaker 1:But when someone has shown that they are not interested in moving forward, they're not interested in reconciliation or restoration, that we could forgive, and we could bless, and we could pray, and we could honestly hope the best for them, but at the same time, we could begin to protect ourselves so that we can be loving and forgiving and graceful all the time. God help us to wade through those difficult discussions. By your spirit, lead us into healthy boundaries in our lives so that we can follow your example and be graceful in this world. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.