Matthew 5:43-48; Leviticus
19:1-2, 9-18
Perhaps it
is out of fashion these days, especially among the young, to imagine a
Christianity devoid of the hard-to-believe stuff, like miracles, and
stripped of its more complex dogmas, like the Virgin Birth and the
Trinity. But there have been hosts of
people, especially over the last couple of hundred years, who have claimed to
delight in the ethical teachings of Jesus, wishing that we could just get on
with practicing the Sermon on the Mount and not bother about the rest. Thomas Jefferson is a great example of that
sort of thinking, and is perhaps the only person who went so far as to take
scissors and cut out of the Bible what seemed foolishness to him while
retaining the parts that made sense.
Have you
actually read the Sermon on the Mount?
While there is some sensible advice there, much of it is far too
challenging to have much appeal to the average person. And that is perhaps what led G. K. Chesterton
to quip that the problem was not that Christianity had been tried and found
wanting but that it had been wanted but never tried.[1] You will find scores of biblical literalists
who will hurl Leviticus at you (though not necessarily the passage read today)
and carry on about this and that in St. Paul’s letters, but who are strangely
silent on such texts as “Love your enemies” and who would imagine giving your
coat away when asked to be the undoing of free-market economics, the economics
they presume to be most pleasing to God.
Make no
mistake about it: Jesus was a complete
surprise to the biblical literalists of his day. Of that we have mountains of evidence. “You have heard that it was said of old,”
became, “but I say to you….” Jesus was
the arch-revisionist. People don’t like that. Most of us want a Jesus we can manage. Even social radicals want Jesus to behave as
they behave and believe what they believe.
We are all busy cutting him down to size, nailing him down on some new
cross, making him fit what seems to us to be the slot into which any thinking
god would naturally slide.
If you
think that I am somehow talking about all those other people out there, or
maybe even about you, let me come clean.
I am talking about me. I am
frankly a little worried that I might be too eager to jam Jesus into a
structure of my own making that I have built over the years with a little of
this, a little of that. And I am about
to suggest that maybe Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, was preaching something
that is quite a shock. At the same time
I realize that the “shock” is something that resonates deeply within me and
therefore is more comfort than shock. So
be warned. I have told you.
Let’s cut
to the chase. Matthew 5:48. “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father
in Heaven is perfect.” I remember
reading that when I was a boy thinking simultaneously that Jesus was giving me
a difficult assignment and at the same time imagining that I might be able to
pull it off. God knows I wanted to be
perfect. Are you a perfectionist? Then you understand. Perfectionists might allow that perfection is
impossible, but that does not keep us from trying to achieve it. Andrew Tobias wrote a about forty years ago a
book called The Best Little Boy in the
World. That would be the perfect title
for an autobiography I would write. I
wanted to be the best little boy.
“Best,” however, meant lining up on the side of the angels, on the side
of Mrs. Long and Mrs. Lemmon and others of my teachers, on the side of the
preacher, on the side of my mother and grandmother and the other great mothers
including Mother Church. Being the “best
little boy” meant being neat and handing in homework on time and not smudging
my papers with nasty erasures and not soiling my clothes at stupid games like
baseball where you had to slide in the dust in order to reach a stupid
base. In short, being perfect meant
being clean, and I was pleased at age 11 to note that one of the twelve
commandments in the Boy Scout Law was that a scout was clean and that I surely
measured up in thought, word, and deed.
I tell you
all this not because I think my childhood is all that picturesque or admirable,
but simply to put in starker relief what I but dimly acknowledged. I had a dark side, too. In fact that dark side was sometimes a direct
by-product of perfectionism, as when I would become irritable to the point of
being irascible because other people failed to meet my expectations, resulting
in a sullen mood that Mama termed “a bull spell.” But that was the least of it. I was secretly fascinated by boys whose dirt
and dirty language disgusted me. Almost
more than anything I wanted the acceptance and approval of my big brother whose
hands frequently dripped of grease from the motors he worked on. And, as a growing little human, I did to some
extent what all of our species do when we secretly admire something we are
not: I detested and even loathed those
who were the polar opposites of clean, good, well behaved. But I saved my greatest loathing for the parts of myself that deep
down felt attracted to that other pole.
What I am
describing, of course, is the modus
operandi of hate. We hate with a
vengeance those people who mirror the parts of ourselves that we have learned
to spurn, repress, deny, even kill. So
when Jesus says, “Love your enemies,” and “pray for those who persecute you,”
he is challenging us to re-think and re-do our neatly polarized, dualistic
world of clean and unclean, good and evil, included and excluded, love and
hate, enemies and friends. And then, at
the peak of this part of his sermon, Jesus goes over the top and says, “Be
perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
But by that he does not call us to moral perfectionism, or to some kind
of impossibly high standard. The word he
(according to Matthew) uses is the word that means “whole,” and it alludes to
passages in the Hebrew scriptures such as Deuteronomy 18:13: “You shall be perfect before the Lord your
God.”[2] You shall be whole. Now that, of course, can mean lots of things,
perhaps the most conventional of which is that we must serve God
wholeheartedly, and so on. I think it
means more than that. I think to be
whole means to claim the parts of ourselves that we have not yet claimed, to
embrace the parts of ourselves that are weak, ugly, dirty. To do so greatly reduces the probability that
we project those unattractive parts of ourselves onto other people, for
example, and hate in them what we hate in ourselves.
We can
think up any number of reasons for having enemies and treating them as
such. The main reason is that enemies
wish us harm and do to us what we do to them, which is, in a word, to
dehumanize. We can defend incessantly
the rightness and usefulness of hanging on to our cloaks or pocketbooks when
somebody demands that we surrender them.
We can rationalize forever stopping at a mile when somebody pushes us
beyond our limits. But the world of
rationalizations and defensiveness is not the life of wholeness that
characterizes God, who generously sends rain on just and unjust alike. So rather than thinking up reasons why Jesus’
sermon is so unrealistic for us, we might think instead about the God whom
Jesus calls us to be like.
Interestingly,
it is in that much-spurned book of Leviticus that the Holiness Code describes
how we are to behave like God. Be
generous with the poor and the alien. Be
honest. Let your word be true. Give your employees their wages when they are
due. And, most interestingly, do not
revile the deaf.
Joe and I
saw the play Tribes this week at Studio
Theatre. It is about a young deaf man
who has grown up in a family where language and speaking are in some way every
other family member’s gift. His parents
do not want him to grow up marginalized and relegated to minority status, so
they treat him like their other children.
Makes sense? Yes, except that it
doesn’t take into account that he is by his very nature excluded from all the
comments, much of the humor, in short anything that requires the refinements of
complete hearing. When he finally discovers
the Deaf Community he realizes what he has been missing, begins to learn sign
language, and begins to experience the exhilaration of being a part of a tribe
that he naturally belongs to. The entire
play examines the subtleties and complexities of how languages unite and
separate, how words and sounds can express a variety of things that register
quite differently on people depending on what they can understand. “Do not revile the deaf.” Perhaps the way we want to include others is
not necessarily best for them. Exclusion
does not happen in only one way. And it
is not always intended.
This God
that we keep talking about is nowhere other than everywhere, including the transactions of our daily lives. Thus this holiness that we are called to
participate in is not the same as, yet intimately connected with, this
wholeness that we can embrace. Does that
sound like a contradiction? Perhaps. But it is more like the union of opposites,
the necessary components of a harmony that cannot occur until at least two
elements blend. Find that deep part of
yourself that is generous in lending, that can love even your enemy, that
refuses to revile the deaf and will not sanction a stumbling block for the
blind. At the same time, acknowledge
that there is even on your brightest days a shadow-world that lives inside you.
So much of
Christian teaching is about how to live in the light, and that is fine. But equal emphasis needs to be placed on
embracing the parts of ourselves that are unlovely and unlovable. It is these very parts of us that the Power
of Christ reaches out to love and to accept, dissolving thereby their strange
hold on us, redeeming and healing the places in us that dwell in darkness and
the shadow of death. Come, Lord Jesus,
speak the word only and we shall be whole.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2014
[1] http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-faith-column/2008/03/public-life-christianity
, accessed February 22, 2014.
