Speaker 1: Here's your yearly reminder that you cannot follow Jesus by avoiding anything. What you don't do doesn't make you a Christian. Righteousness is an active posture in the world. It is a vital disposition toward the good. Welcome to church.
If you are new to commons, we are so glad that you're here. We really honestly don't take it for granted that you spend part of your weekend to worship with us. But if you are new to commons and you're looking to jump in, maybe hear a bit more of our story, then next month, we are launching our new First Steps class, four weeks that will walk you through our story at Commons, your story as a volunteer, your potential as a leader, and your participation here as a member of Commons. And all of these classes will start next month, but they run every week after that starting or during the 10:30AM and the 7PM services here at the Kensington Parish. So you can check out commons.life, and you can read all the details, you can register there.
Also, we finished our Beatitudes series on YouTube this week, so there's about another half hour of us talking about those declarations online. You can subscribe there if that's your thing as well. However, last week, we jumped out of the beatitudes and into Jesus' sermon proper, and we looked at these two striking metaphors that Jesus uses to describe the life that grace begins to create within us, salt and light. And personally, I think these images, as familiar as they are, still carry within them a lot of meaning just waiting to be mined. And, yes, that was a salt pun for those of you who are really into salt production.
But as we said last week, salt was actually this incredibly important commodity in the ancient world It was used to preserve food. It was used to make food taste better. Considering the importance of food for living, salt became pretty central in the ancient world. So when Jesus says, you are the salt of the earth, this was an image that really landed in that ancient world. You are here to bring out the best.
As Eugene Peterson says, you are here to bring out the God flavors of the world. You are here to make everything taste just a little bit better. But along with that, salt also preserves what is good. Salt covenants have a long and storied history that we dipped our toes into last week. But the fundamental idea is this, that if we are the salt of the earth, then we are part of the promise of God's continued commitment and fidelity and investment, the promise to preserve the world.
However, there is one more small thing that we didn't have time to talk about last week. Jesus says this, you are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. And in English, that kind of rolls off the tongue pretty easily without much thought. Earth and world are fairly synonymous for us.
But in the Greek, there is a meaningful distinction here. Earth is the word gay. It's literally stuff that you walk on, the dearth beneath you. World, on the other hand, is the word cosmos in Greek. And they use that a little differently than we do.
It did not necessarily mean the stars and the galaxies and the solar systems that we take for granted when we think about the cosmos, but it was much more than just the Earth. The cosmos was everything in the earth, everything on the earth, all of the systems and structures we create. The apostle Paul uses the term principalities and powers for this. He's talking about religion and politics and economics and everything that shapes our experience of the earth. All of that was bound up in this word, cosmos.
And why that's important is because when Jesus says, we are the salt of the ground, we are the light of the cosmos. He is saying that your commitment to the story of God runs the gamut from the ground we till to grow our food to the systems and structures that define our relationship to everything that surrounds us. He's saying that sustainable food production and equitable economic systems and healthy concepts of neighbor and opposition to patriarchy and white supremacy, That small scale moments of kindness and large scale justice initiatives that balance the scales of the world, all of these live on the same continuum for Jesus. They are not either or. They are both and.
You are the salt of the ground beneath you, and you are the light of the cosmos above you. So don't despise small moments of generosity. The smallest act you take is beautiful before God. But at the same time, don't be surprised when a few small acts of beauty turn into a life of purpose and a commitment to change the world in ways that you can't even begin to imagine right now. There is far more in you than you realize, but all of it starts in the ground beneath you right now.
Now, today, we change gears and we begin to talk about the law. So let's pray, and then we'll dive in together. God of grace and peace, who opens us up to the beauty of welcome and embrace as we sink into your arms, as we come to know ourselves in the light of your love, as we become the salt and light of the world that brings out the God flavors and the divine colors that surround us always. May we come to know your story so well that it begins to leak out of us, that it informs all of us, that it becomes our grounding in this cosmos. And yet today, for those of us who have come into this room carrying weight that we were never meant to, and we are perhaps tired because of that or scared for it, and the idea of law feels like one more burden bundled up and put on our backs.
May we come to see your sacred text in new ways through your eyes as gift and blessing and inheritance that lightens our load and frees us to love and calls us to engage with the full spectrum of the human story rather than run from it. May our anxieties be replaced by peace, our insecurities by trust. May our loss slowly be replaced by your love. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.
Okay. Whenever I talk about the beatitudes and whenever I get going about grace, inevitably, someone will ask me about truth and law and justice and all of that good stuff as if there was some kind of contradiction there. And it seems to me that Jesus seemed to be similarly confronted, which I take a little bit of solace in. However, far from running from them, it seems to me that Jesus turns to face into those questions directly. Because after welcoming us into this new imagination of reality that we call the beatitudes, and after talking about this life that that imagination lights inside of us, he now turns directly to answer those who feel like his image of God is maybe just a little bit too good, which, by the way, is always an indictment of our lack of imagination.
If your God is not better than you can imagine, you really do have a problem. But as we pick up from last Sunday, tonight we need to talk about the whiplash of the two Torahs, Shammai and Hillel, and what the law is really all about. However, let's begin by reading where we left off last Sunday in Matthew chapter five verse 17. Jesus says, do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. And let's pause here for a second because if Jesus begins, do not think I've come to abolish the law or the prophets, what should that tell us about what is probably going on in the minds of his audience?
It should tell us that some people seem to think he was here to abolish the law and the prophets. In other words, the tension between Jesus' interpretation of the law and the religious status quo of the day was obvious to everyone who heard him. And to miss that is to miss a big part of the story. If you have thought that anything we have said in the last two weeks was scandalous, well, so did everyone else in the crowd, so welcome to the party. I have come not to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them.
For truly, I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, which is another way of saying it's not gonna happen, Not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, and this is that famous jot or tittle from the King James, will by any means disappear from the law until everything is accomplished. So step back for a second and imagine this scene. Jesus begins this section by saying, I know what I'm saying flies in the face of everything you've been told to believe about the divine. I know that everything I'm telling you sounds a little bit too good to be true. I know that some of you right now are fuming.
You are furious in your tunics as you listen to me, but follow me on this one. The law is not going anywhere. Chill. Because the law has divine purpose to it. Except that just as those in the crowd who are shocked by what they've been hearing are perking up now and pulling their eyes away from their ancient phones and the ancient nasty tweets they were about to send, hashtag heretic.
Jesus then says, you have heard it said, you shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment. But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. You have heard it said, you shall not commit adultery, but I tell you that anyone who looks lustfully has already committed adultery in their heart. Again, you've heard it said, don't break your oath, but I tell you, do not swear an oath at all, either by heaven for it's God's throne or by the earth for it's God's footstool or by Jerusalem for it is the city of the great king, and do not even try to swear by your head because you can't even make one hair on it white or black. Are you kidding me with this stuff?
Jesus says, you've heard it said, eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth, but I tell you, do not resist an evil person. You've heard it said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I tell you, learn how to love everyone that surrounds you. Now you understand how incredibly strange all of this is. Jesus begins to teach a random crowd of people. Some in the audience think it profound and beautiful.
Others think it's dangerous and heretical as if Jesus is throwing out centuries of religious law that has guided the community. And so Jesus says, actually, no. That's not the case. In fact, I love the law. In fact, I'm here to complete the law, accomplish the law.
I wanna bring the law to its ultimate fulfillment. And then he quotes five laws and says, nope. I mean, that's some whiplash here. This week, my son and I were playing, and he turned to me out of the blue without prompting. I promise.
And he said this, dad, one day, I am gonna be a great dad, maybe even the best dad, because every day I watch you being a dad, and I keep learning how to be a dad. And, also, I really like your shoes. And my first thought was, this is the most meaningful interaction I have ever had in my life. I need to capture this moment right now. My second thought was, what does this kid want?
Is he already out screen time for the day and he's angling for another fifteen minutes on the iPad? And my third thought was, does he think that parenting is all about appropriate footwear choices? Because I know that's a big part of it, but I'm not sure that's the whole game. See, in my experience, parenting is a lot about responding to a long series of non sequiturs. And there's got to be some people in the audience here thinking the same thing about Jesus.
Like, what is going on here? But to understand what Jesus is getting at, we've gotta understand a few things about how Jewish people thought about some of these terms. Because as Christians, we are very used to hearing law and immediately thinking of our Old Testament. That is not exactly what a Jewish person thinks of though. See, in the culture surrounding Jesus, Torah or law came in two flavors.
There was Torah Shebektav, which meant the written law. This was the first five books of your bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. And by the way, when Jesus says the law and the prophets, that was a shorthand way of including the rest of the Hebrew scriptures as well, what is called the Tanakh today. But when it came to the law, was also Torah Sheba'al Pei or the oral law. Literally, law of the mouth.
And when you read Jesus say Torah or law in your bible, he really has both of those in mind. You see, the Torah, the written kind, had 613 rules. There are 365 prohibitions, things that you should not do when for every day of the year except on a leap year. And then there are 248 impositions, things that you must do as a follower of Yahweh. Now that might sound like a lot of rules, and it is, but, of course, it still could not adjudicate every possible permutation in real life.
And so the oral law was all of the interpretation that followed with it. What it meant to follow the laws, how you follow the rules, when and where and what to do to keep the rules in all complexity of the real world. So in the Jewish culture, Torah Shabbatav was understood to be incomplete without Torah Shabba Al Pei. A rule isn't meaningful until it's interpreted. Now, the Torah Sheba Al Pei stays oral for almost all of ancient history until around the time that the New Testament is being put together.
So around the fourth century, Jewish leaders begin gathering up all of the teachings of all of the great interpreters and those become the Talmud. However, at the time of Jesus, Torah is still the written law and the spoken law. Law is rules plus their interpretation. And so when Jesus says, you have heard it said, but I tell you, what he's doing is giving you the written law and his oral law. You know the scriptures.
Now let me tell you what I think they mean. So, for example, in the written law, there is a rule that says in order to enter the temple, in order to bring sacrifices to God, you have to be ritually clean. That meant that you could not enter the temple within seven days of touching a dead body or blood that wasn't your own. Now, there was also a famous oral law taught by many of Jesus' contemporaries that said, actually, if you really wanna keep the law, if you really wanna please God, if you really want to be clean, then not even your shadow should fall upon anything unclean like a dead body. And so later on, when Jesus tells a story about a man who is lying in a ditch after being beaten by robbers and a priest come by on his way to the temple to offer sacrifices, and Jesus says that he crosses over on the other side of the road to pass by, it's likely that this character is attempting to fulfill that oral law.
And part of the Good Samaritan story is about Jesus challenging that oral law and providing a new interpretation. One that says, kindness takes precedence over purity. You actually fulfill the law by breaking the law to follow a better law. You have heard it said, but I tell you. And this approach puts Jesus right smack dab in the middle of probably the major law controversy of his time.
See, in the years, the centuries before Jesus, two very famous Jewish teachers emerged. And their teachings became known as the house of Hillel and the house of Shemayim. And there's a story that is probably apocryphal, but it helps to illustrate the difference between these two approaches to Torah. It said that a young man, a gentile, a non Jewish person, once came to the teacher Shammai. And depending on who is telling the story, he was either earnest in his inquiry or perhaps simply mocking the extensive rule keeping in Judaism.
But it came to Shammai while he was instructing his disciples, and he said to the teacher, if you can explain your law to me while I stand on one foot, I will convert on the spot and worship your God for the rest of my life. Well, the teacher Shema, I was deeply insulted by this, and he yelled at the man, you do not understand God. Not when yud or katz can be removed from Torah, and he chased the man off of his step. Now a yud is the smallest Hebrew letter. A katz is this little diacritic mark that's used in Hebrew to help distinguish between letters, kind of like crossing our t's in English.
This becomes jot or tittle in the King James, but this goes all the way back to the legend of Shammai. The story, however, continues. The man having been chased away by Shammai is perhaps emboldened in his trolling, and so he tracks down the other rabbi in town, Hillel. This time he does the same thing. He shows up while Hillel is teaching his students.
He crashes the class, and he asks, if you can explain your law to me while I stand on one foot, I will convert on the spot and worship your God for the rest of my life. And Hillel looks up from his students, maybe a little amused. He pauses and he says, what you dislike, do not do to your friend. The rest is commentary. Now go and learn.
And he returned to his lesson. Well, the young man, according to the story, is speech less, and the story goes that without a word, he quietly sat among the students and devoted the rest of his life to learning the law under Hillel. Now clearly, that story is told by a student of Hillel. It's clearly not meant to make Shammai the hero of the tale, but the story does illustrate well the central tenant of Hillel's approach to the law. It was called the law of reciprocity.
The shorthand for which became what is distasteful to you, do not do to another. Now, of course, Jesus will come along and take this formulation and flip it on its head. And he will transform reciprocity into the law of love by saying not only should you avoid what is hurtful, you should pursue, you should actually go out of your way to do what is good for another. Don't just avoid what you don't want, do what you do want for your neighbor. And here's your yearly reminder that you cannot follow Jesus by avoiding anything.
What you don't do doesn't make you a Christian. Righteousness is an active posture in the world. It is a vital disposition toward the good. But around the time of Jesus, these two teachers, these two houses, Shammai and Hillel, became synonymous with how you approached the law. Laws are laws because laws are laws, so you fulfill the law by following the law.
Period. Or the laws are hierarchical. Laws are important to all of them, but some laws take precedence. So start with the most important ones and work your way out from there. Just like today, if you wanna pigeonhole someone and skip the hard work of getting to know them and understanding them as a human being, you might ask, are you a liberal or a conservative?
In Jesus' day, you might ask, are you part of the house of Halal, or do you follow the house of Shammai? Except that as Jesus is want to do, he somehow continually finds ways to sidestep these binaries. And here, the sermon on the mount, he begins with divine love, the grace of God that is out there in the world already looking for us, chasing us down even in our poverty of spirit. He moves to the life that love begins to create inside of us, the flavor and the light that bleeds out of us when we let God in. But then it's almost as if he can see people's faces.
He can see it. He can see them struggling to make sense of him, to categorize him. They don't know what box to put him in. And so he says to them, do not think that I've come to abolish the law. Not one yud or kotz, not one jot or tittle, not the smallest mark will fall away for I follow the house of Shammai.
And then just as those people are breathing a sigh of relief and trying to make sense of that, figure out how he fits in that box. He then says, no. I have come to fulfill an incomplete law. I'm not here to destroy anything. I'm here to bring the law finally to life.
So you're sitting in the crowd, and you're amazed by what he says, but you're confused about what box to put it in. And now he says all of it matters, even the smallest stroke because the law is not yet done. And now whether you follow Hillel or Shammai, whether you are conservative or liberal, whether you are a traditionalist or a revolutionary, if you just want to put Jesus in your nice tidy box, well, then all of a sudden, you are a little bit lost. Because for Jesus, every word of the story has meaning. But those who wield those words as a weapon, those who impose them without compassion, they have somehow missed the meaning regardless of the words that they use.
In fact, later in this same gospel of Matthew, Jesus will challenge the religious leaders of the day. He'll say, those that sit in the seat of Moses, in other words, those who adjudicate the law, They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads, and they put them on other people's shoulders. But they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to help. That is not that that can never be good news. So, see, for Jesus, every jot of the law matters, but they matter not so you can quote them at people.
They matter so you can understand exactly where the story has been, and you can begin to imagine where the story is going. See, you can believe that laws are laws because God said it and that settles it, and you fulfill the law by following the letter. Or, like Jesus, you can believe that laws are laws because God has always had a bigger story in mind. And we fulfill the law by letting the law inform our imagination so that we can see the story that God is now at work bringing to completion in the person of Jesus. You don't.
You can't fulfill the law by looking back. You fulfill the law by looking forward to Jesus. And N. T. Wright uses the metaphor of a novel to explain this.
He says that scripture is authoritative the way that the opening chapters of a novel are. You can't possibly write your chapter without faithfully understanding everything that has come before every jot and tittle. But you don't write your chapter by copying from someone else's page. No. You write your chapter by allowing everything that has happened, everything that's come before, every word, every story, every beautiful, difficult, messy moment in God's long tail to inform and shape and point you towards the life that God is asking you to live right now.
Jesus says, I have come not to destroy anything, but to show you what all of this story looks like when it is finally fully alive in the world. You've heard it said, don't murder. I tell you that story was meant to end in the pursuit of peace. You've heard it said, don't commit adultery. I tell you that story was meant to end in a world where people aren't objects anymore.
You've heard it said, don't break your oath. I tell you that story. That ends when your actions speak for you. You've heard it said eye for an eye. I say retribution is overrated.
You've heard it said hate your enemy. I tell you that one has been done, and trust me, it's not good news. We need a new interpretation, a new oral law, a new way to understand where this story is going. Because you see, for Jesus, the law wasn't an end in itself. The law was a story, and that story was designed to make us more like him.
But if it doesn't, if the law doesn't make you more kind, more generous, more loving, more Jesus y, then hear me. It doesn't matter where that rule came from or how long it's been around or who taught it to you. It needs to be reinterpreted in the light of the law of Christ. Because within every law is a good that God is orienting us toward. But if we confuse the law with the good and we forsake the good to follow the law, then our story won't end up looking like Jesus.
And we will have missed the point of the story. This is why in the end, understanding how Jesus thinks about law is actually even more important than understanding how Jesus interprets any particular law. Because the truth is we, none of us, we don't live in Jesus' world. We don't occupy the same time and space. We don't face the same dilemmas.
We don't struggle with the same temptations, and yet all of it is okay because Christ is with us, beside us, helping us to make his story our story right now. So at the end of the sermon on the mount, the question that faces us is not, did you get it right? Because for anyone here who is honest with themselves, of course the answer is no. Now the question that faces those of us who follow the way of Jesus is, did we let God's story then become our story now? Do we allow ourselves to become malleable and teachable where we open and responsive?
Did we listen for God's spirit? And when that spirit spoke, did we receive God's grace? Did we come to know ourselves as loved? Did we let that love shape us as it was intended to? Because if that becomes our story, then no matter how badly we mess up the laws, Christ will still somehow accomplish all of it within us.
Love the Lord your God with everything you have. Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets hang on these. Because rules for the sake of rules will only ever rule over you. They will never change you.
But a story that becomes you, This will welcome you into God's kingdom that continues to unfold to this very day. May you come to know the old story so well that Christ can begin to write new stories through you right now. Let's pray. God of grace and peace, God of truth and law, God of righteousness. May we begin to see, to understand, to interact with your scriptures the way that your son has taught us to.
Not as rules for the sake of rules that rule over us and tie up heavy burdens and weigh us down with them, but as a story that unfolds and leads us back to you. It leads us to what a human life looks like when it flourishes in the world, what it looks like when we become more like Christ. God, may we know the story so well. May we sink it deep into us. May we memorize and understand and make sense of every jot and tittle so that when we face new circumstances, new moments, new situations that could never be addressed in a text, we will have your heart, your grace, your love beating through us.
And we can respond in our moment, in our time with the grace of Christ that lives through us in the world. May your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven as each of us begin to use our choices and our words, our steps, and our actions that build your kingdom one small piece at a time. May your life begin to live in each of us. And may we become transformed into the likeness of your son. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray.
Amen.