Dire Circumstances (Matthew 5:21-37)
Rev. Peter Heckert
02/12/23Â
+ Grace to you, and peace, from God our heavenly Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. + Amen.
The text for our meditation for this sixth Sunday of Epiphany comes from our Gospel text, especially where Matthew records Jesusâ words, âIf your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.â Here ends our text; my dear Christian friends âŠ
The warm glow of Christmas has waned. The awe and reverence of the Magi before the young King of Israel is a memory. The joy at the Spiritâs descent on Jesus in the Jordan has faded. By this point in Matthewâs gospel, the fully-grown Son of God has been baptized, tempted in the desert, and picked up where His forerunner, John the Baptist, had stopped: proclaiming, âRepent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.â Heâs chosen His first disciples, healed all manner of diseases and infirmities, and now, in our text for today, Heâs in the thick of, likely, the most famous sermon of all time: the Sermon on the Mount, proclaimed to the same crowds He had been ministering to.
But we pick up today right as Jesus is launching into the âLawâ section of the sermon, and boy, does His declaration of the Law put us pastors to shame! â⊠I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, âYou fool!â will be liable to the hell of fire. ⊠I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. ⊠I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.â
There are pastors today would shrink away from such ⊠violent and offensive rhetoric. Jesus doesnât. He doesnât hold back. He is less concerned whether someone will be offended by His teaching, and more concerned that the people hear the Truth. And the Truth that He explains is ⊠theyâre in deep, deep trouble.
Since Jesus is preaching these things, itâs not unreasonable to assume that, to most of His hearers, what Jesus was saying was groundbreaking. They had never considered that, while their hands may have never shed blood, simply by being angry, let alone insulting someone else is breaking the 5th commandment, and meritorious of a one-way ticket to hell. It never occurred to them that merely looking upon another with lustful intent is tantamount to adultery and is therefore worthy of damnation. And while divorce was (and remains) unideal, the people of Jesusâ time gave it a pass as an unfortunate happenstance, so long as the fellow gave his wife a scrap of paper saying their marriage was over. No doubt, then, that Jesusâ words came as an unpleasant surprise, hearing that anyone who divorces and remarries, except in cases of sexual infidelity, commits adultery.
These words likely hit the people like a ton of bricks. âThis guy, nice as He is, just told us, in essence, that weâre going to hell!â After all, who here hasnât gotten angry with someone in your life? Who here hasnât insulted another person? Who here hasnât lingered in looking at another for a little too long? Jesusâ words are a bit of a gut-punch because there is not a human being who has not done these things. You and I, weâve all lost our cool, oogled at someone not our spouse, and at least certainly know and love people who have gone through a frivolous divorce. There isnât a commandment that God has given that we havenât broken in some way, shape, or form. Jesus is painting the cats into the corner, leaving no room, no berth, for us to attempt to escape the bitter truth: we are sinners.Â
We have no righteousness in and of ourselves. Our ability to keep Godâs perfect commandments is non-existent. We can try, and indeed we ought to, as we just sang about how Godâs Law is good and wise, but all the Law can do simply presents that fact before us. It gives us the knowledge of what God demands, not the ability to do it. Frankly, Godâs Law is good, wise, and perfect ⊠and thatâs why it kills us. Sin is not merely something that we do or donât do; itâs intrinsic to our being. We can no more escape it than we can our dependence on breathing to survive.Â
Thatâs whatâs being revealed to us in this text, and itâs Jesus Himself who is revealing it: âYou are sinners. Itâs an inescapable fact. You deserve to go to hell, whether you murdered someone in cold blood or called your friend a poopyhead when you were five years old. Your inability to keep the perfect commandments of My Father has earned you a one-way ticket to perdition. Utter destruction, death, and damnation is what you deserve ⊠but, trust in Me. Trust My Word is true. Believe that I have taken the punishment that you deserve and youâll not only be spared the wrath to come, but instead, youâll be welcomed, with open arms, into My Fatherâs house.âÂ
Only Jesus can do and say this because He alone kept Godâs commandments perfectly. He alone obeyed the Fatherâs will without question or hesitation. He alone was obedient unto death, even death on a cross. See, Iâm of the opinion that this is the reason why this text was chosen for the later part of Epiphany. This season is all about Jesus being revealed to the world as the Savior, the long-promised Messiah of both Jew and Gentile, the Seed of woman come to crush the head of the enemy. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Himself reveals our depravity, the true hopelessness of our estate and our inability to save ourselves ⊠and our need for the Redeemer.Â
As the season draws to a close and we look ahead to the somber and contemplative season of Lent, itâs fitting that we should be reminded of the reason why the Son of God, the Babe of Bethlehem, King of the nations, took on human flesh in the first place: to suffer and die in our stead. We poor, miserable sinners need Jesusâ self-sacrifice on the cross because without His crucifixion and death, we would have nothing to look forward to but death and damnation. For all who trust in Him, however, whether one be a murderer, adulterer, divorcee, oath-breaker, gossip, rage-monger, liar, or idolater ⊠forgiveness and redemption is already theirs. We are sinners, this is true. Thanks be to God, Jesus is the Friend of sinners.
+ In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. + Amen.