Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
9 February 2014, 11.00am
Matthew 5:13-20 "You are
the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be
restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled
under foot.
14 "You are the light of the world. A city built on
a hill cannot be hid. 15 No
one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the
lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light
shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to
your Father in heaven.
17 "Do not think that I have come to abolish the
law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. 18 For truly I tell you, until
heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will
pass from the law until all is accomplished.
19 Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these
commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the
kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great
in the kingdom of heaven. 20
For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and
Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Isaiah 58:1-10 Shout out, do
not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to my people their
rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.
2 Yet day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the
ordinance of their God; they ask of me righteous judgments, they delight to
draw near to God. 3 "Why
do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not
notice?" Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress
all your workers. 4 Look, you
fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such
fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. 5 Is such the fast that I choose,
a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie
in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the
LORD? 6 Is not this the fast
that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? 7 Is it not to share your bread
with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the
naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? 8 Then your light shall break
forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator
shall go before you, the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard. 9 Then you shall call, and the
LORD will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am. If you
remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of
evil, 10 if you offer your
food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light
shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.
As I was preparing for
today’s sermon earlier this week,
I found myself following intently the trial of five peace
activists
who were arrested in
September
while blocking an entrance to the DSEI arms fair
at the Excel centre in East London.
One of the defendants is well
known to us here at Bloomsbury,
and regularly worships with us in our evening
congregation.
In fact, he spoke to us very
movingly just last week
about the situation that was leading him
to Stratford
Magistrates Court
the following morning.
Now, I’m not going to
rehearse the specifics of their case,
and the details of their successful defence
are well documented online if you’re interested.
But it did make me think, and
think quite carefully,
about whether it is ever right for a Christian to break
the law.
Is it ever justifiable, from
a Christian point of view,
to take a course of action that puts one outside the law
of the land?
At one level, there is part
of me that wants to say a firm ‘no’ to this question;
after all, we live in a free and fair democracy,
and there are mechanisms for
legally registering one’s protest;
whether it be through peaceful demonstration,
or by exercising one’s right at the ballot box.
And, after all, didn’t Paul
say clearly to the church that met in Rome,
- hardly a city that modelled the western values
of freedom of speech and action! -
that even they should ‘be
subject to the governing authorities’
because ‘there is no authority except from God,
and those authorities that exist have been
instituted by God.’ (Rom 13.1)
However, against this I find
myself having to set the lived example
of many great Christians
who have found themselves
imprisoned and worse
for their commitment to the cause of the Gospel of
Christ.
Paul himself faced beatings
and incarceration
for his faithful and uncompromising witness to Christ,
as he refused to be silenced by the forces of the empire.
And Jesus clearly seems to
expect his followers
to face persecution and trial
if they take seriously the path that he calls them to.
We can see this clearly in
Matthew’s gospel,
just a few chapters later than this morning’s passage,
where he warns his disciples
that they will be handed over
to the councils and synagogues and flogged;
telling them that when they
face trial – ‘when’, and not ‘if’ -
they do not need to worry about how they are to speak or
what they are to say;
for what they are to say will be given to them
at that time.
Jesus even promises them that
when they have to defend themselves in court,
‘it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father
speaking through you.’
(Matt 10.19-20)
Encouraging words I’m sure,
if you happen to find yourself at the magistrates court,
up on a charge of disrupting the powers of violence,
torture and death.
And in the beatitudes, as we
saw last week,
Jesus promises the kingdom of heaven
to those who are persecuted for the sake of
righteousness. (Matt 5.10)
So, should Christians engage
in activity
that places them outside of the law?
We’ll come back to that
question shortly…
But first I want us to spend
a few minutes
with today’s passage from Matthew chapter 5.
And I’d like us to focus particularly
on verses 17 and 20.
Let’s hear them again now.
Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or
the prophets;
I
have come not to abolish but to fulfill.
For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that
of the scribes and Pharisees,
you
will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
The key here, it seems to
me,
is the issue of righteousness,
and the relationship between righteousness and the law.
After all, in the beatitude,
the kingdom of heaven belongs to those
who are persecuted for
the sake of righteousness.
And it starts to look as if it’s
an unswerving commitment to righteousness
that might lead one to a position of conflict
with the
powers that be.
This was certainly the case
in the life of Jesus,
as he increasingly found himself, through his ministry,
coming into conflict with those who held
power in Israel.
In today’s passage, taken
from the opening of the sermon on the mount,
we see the beginnings of Jesus’ conflict with the
religious leaders
that would eventually culminate in his execution as a
criminal.
And it all hinges on this
concept of righteousness:
Jesus tells his followers that their righteousness
must exceed that of the scribes and the
Pharisees.
Which is, on the surface, a
very strange thing to say.
If you had asked someone at
the time of Jesus,
to list the most-righteous people that they could think
of,
it’s a fair bet that somewhere
near the top of the list
would have been the scribes and the Pharisees.
You see, righteousness was their thing, it was their obsession.
It was what they were known for.
And the righteousness of the
scribes and the Pharisees
was a righteousness built on their passionate commitment
to observing the letter of the law.
Through detailed scholarship
they had developed a way of living
where not one jot or tittle,
not one letter, or stroke of a letter of the
law was ignored,
and where every command,
from the greatest to the least,
was observed rigorously and with care.
So, when Jesus suggested to
his followers that entry into the kingdom of heaven
was dependent on being more righteous than the scribes
and the Pharisees
he was, on the surface at least, setting an impossible
target to aim for.
But it all comes down to
what is meant by righteousness.
For the scribes and the
Pharisees,
righteousness meant a strict adherence to the letter of
the law.
For Jesus, it seems that
this is not enough,
and that there is a deeper understanding of righteousness
which he wants his followers to discover and live by.
We’ve already met Matthew’s
obsession (for want of a better phrase)
with presenting the significance of the life of Jesus
as being in ‘fulfilment’ of scripture.
In the sermon on the mount,
he makes this theme even more clear,
by presenting Jesus as a new Moses.
Just as Moses went up the
mountain to receive the law from God,
which he then mediated to the people of God,
so Jesus ascends the mount,
and offers the definitive interpretation of the law.
It even begins, as we heard
last week,
with a sequence of short statements
that provide a loose parallel to the ten
commandments.
In our passage today, the
presentation of Jesus as the new Moses is even more clear,
as he offers a new interpretation on the relationship
between righteousness and the law.
The righteousness of the
scribes and the Pharisees
was a righteousness that led to exclusion;
And they maintained their righteous
state
by ensuring that those who would contaminate or
compromise their holiness
were excluded from the community.
They used the law, which for
them was the Law of Moses,
based on the ten commandments,
to mark out the boundary
around their community,
and if you kept the law, you were in,
but if you didn’t keep the law, you were out.
The greater righteousness of
Jesus, however,
is a righteousness that includes those at the margins,
rather than excluding them.
It is a righteousness based
not just on the law,
but also on the prophets.
Because, for Jesus, the law
of Moses could only be understood
as part of a larger picture,
namely the fulfillment of
the entire Torah,
understood in its broader sense to include the prophets,
and not just the books of Moses.
There is a strong voice that
echoes through the prophetic writings of Israel
which bears witness to the conviction that religious
observance is not enough,
however carefully it may be done.
Prophets such as Isaiah,
who we heard from in our second reading,
shouted to anyone who would
listen
that true righteousness was to be found
not in ascetic and rigorous religious
practices such as fasting,
but through paying workers a fair wage, (Isa 58.3)
through loosing the bonds of injustice,
through liberation to those in chains,
through feeding the hungry,
through providing houses for the homeless,
and clothing for the naked.
And it’s this greater
righteousness that Jesus calls his followers to,
it’s a righteousness that brings the kingdom of heaven to
the earth.
The perspective of the
prophets such as Isaiah,
was that this transformative righteousness
which includes the marginalised rather than
excluding them
was actually already inherent in the law of Moses,
for those who have eyes to see it.
But the scribes and the
Pharisees of Jesus’ day,
those bastions of law-based righteousness
had become so obsessed with
the letter of the law,
that they had missed the spirit of the prophets,
and had focussed on
maintaining their righteousness
by excluding those that might contaminate it.
And it was to a generation
that had been brought up
to think that true righteousness
was that of the scribes and the Pharisees,
that Jesus announced that
the true fulfilment of the law and the prophets
was to be found not in the teaching of the religious
leaders
but in the inclusive practices of his own ministry.
In this, Jesus went pitted
himself against the exclusive practices of the ruling elite
in the cause of the greater righteousness of the
prophets.
And the scribes and the
Pharisees didn’t like it one bit,
because it challenged their power, and threatened their
security.
In Jewish society of the
time, upper level priests and religious leaders
functioned as part of what is known as the ‘retainer’
class
a segment of society that made up about 5% of the
population
comprising people who acted as agents of the
ruling elite.
The scribes and the
Pharisees were Jewish officials
who exercised religious roles,
yet were also part of the ruling aristocracy,
along with other groups such as the Sadducees.
In this period, Israel was an
occupied nation,
and the Roman empire’s
hold over it was consolidated
through a series interconnected networks of
power:
political
power, socioeconomic power,
military power, and theological
power;
each one intertwined with the others.
So Jesus’ growing conflict
with the scribes and the Pharisees
was never going to be simply a conflict over religious
issues
because in his world,
religion and politics were inseparable,
and all religious discussions
had social, political and economic dimensions to them.
The social status of the religious
leaders as part of the retainer class,
meant that they were committed to defending
the current social order from which they benefited
and in which they had a vested interest.
The scribes and the
Pharisees had become part
of the power structures of the empire,
and were bound to fulfil the role
of representing and defending its interests.
So Jesus found himself in
conflict with these representatives of the ruling class
precisely because they were those
who wanted to preserve the current social structure.
Jesus’ conflict with an
alliance of religious leaders is central to Matthew’s plot,
and again and again through the gospel
he demonstrates that Jesus is not so much in
conflict
with the scribes and Pharisees
because they are ‘religious’
as because
they have used their ‘religion’
to enter into an alliance of power
with the empire.
Jesus is in conflict with
them precisely because they have not done
what the prophets such as Isaiah would have them do:
they have not used the law
to reach out to the marginalised, to empower the
disempowered.
Rather, they have used the
law to consolidate their social, economic, and political power,
which they have then used to detrimental effect.
They have not sought justice, mercy and faith
(23.23).
And so they resist Jesus’
claim to be the one who,
through his life and ministry,
will offer God’s benefits to all of society,
and especially
to those on the margins.
The scribes and the
Pharisees have turned the wealth
of the temple and the religious cult
to their own advantage,
and in defending the status
quo and the alliance with Rome,
they have hindered people from knowing God’s empire – the
Kingdom of Heaven,
whilst exposing God’s people to hardship and violence.
And it is into this context
that Jesus proclaims his new interpretation of the law.
It is in opposition to the
ruling elite
that Jesus claims to be the true embodiment of the law.
He is very clear: he came
not to abolish, but to fulfil the law.
However, this fulfilment is
not a mere tightening up of the law,
Rather, it is a re-casting of the law around the victims,
a re-focussing of the law in favour of the
marginalised.
According to Jesus, it is
the victimised and marginalised who become the criteria
by which the law is to be understood.
Thus the fulfilment of the
law that Jesus proclaimed
was a subversion from within
of the understanding of the law as taught by the scribes
and the Pharisees,
and it was rightly seen as
subversive
by those who regarded themselves as the guardians of the
law.’[5]
The religious leaders,
committed to the status quo,
regarded Jesus as a revolutionary,
as one
who was seeking nothing less
than the total overthrow of the established power
structures of the land.
And in many ways they were
right
but the revolution of Jesus,
was not an overturning of
the law in such a way as to lead to lawlessness,
and neither was it a revolution which simply replaced one
ruling elite with another.
Rather, the revolution of
Jesus,
was one which radically re-interpreted the law
It was a revolution which
transformed righteous legalism into merciful law
it was the revolution of the law of love.
The problem with most
revolutions, from the ancient to the modern,
is that they become revolutions of inversion.
Most revolutions simply
result in the switching places of the main characters:
with the good guys becoming the bad guys, and vice versa.
Revolutions of inversion may
see themselves as overthrowing oppressive structures,
but they always leave the deeper anthropological
structures intact.
Even after the revolution,
the social structures of division between good guys and
bad guys remains,
it’s just that they have changed places.
However, the revolution of
Jesus isn’t a straightforward revolution of inversion.
Rather, it is a revolution of subversion from within,
it’s a revolution which
undermines the very mechanism of division
which makes some people good guys and some people bad
guys.
But its not even a simple
overthrowing of the mechanism;
it’s not a manifesto for godly anarchy.
Rather, it is a transforming
of society into something else althogether:
The revolution of Jesus is a revolution of transformation
which is very different to a revolution of destruction.
Most "revolutions"
think they are overthrowing the structures-that-be,
and in a sense this is what they do;
but they don’t overthrow the
deeper structures of division,
where some are deemed ‘good’ or ‘righteous’,
while some are deemed ‘bad’ and ‘unrighteous’.
Neither do revolutions solve
the problem of scapegoating
– the mechanism whereby a person or group of people
are expelled or executed in the interest of
bring the new order into being.
Most revolutions retain the
mechanism and structures of division,
and simply invert the characters within the mechanism.
Take Marxism as a fairly un-threatening,
almost dead, example.
Marxism thinks it’s overturning the capitalist
structures;
and it is, of course.
But it doesn’t touch the
anthropological structures
of sacrifice, scapegoating, and division.
It simply inverts the
characters:
so that the capitalists, who were the good guys in the
capitalist system,
are now the bad guys;
and the proletariat become the good guys.
And along the way, of
course,
some people, sometimes a lot of people, die
Marxism may be correct in
its analysis
that says the proletariat are sacrificed in the
capitalist system.
But when the capitalists become
those who are sacrificed in the socialist system,
in the end, all that is achieved is inversion.
The other revolutionaries
from around Jesus’ time,
the zealots and the Maccabees and so on,
had all sought to overthrow
the empire,
but their agenda had simply been one of inversion.
They had wanted the Romans,
or the Seleucids, or whoever, out of their land,
and then they wanted themselves ruling in their place.
This was certainly how the
scribes and the Pharisees
would have interpreted Jesus’ revolutionary talk
– just another revolutionary bent on the
overthrow of the system
and the installation of his own ideology in
its place.
And so they said to themselves,
‘That way lies death and disaster,
we’ve seen it before.
‘Better to keep the compromise as it is, surely?’
But in this they
misunderstood Jesus’ challenge,
because Jesus was not seeking to overthrow the system.
He was rather seeking to
subvert the injustice that had taken root in the land,
and to join his voice definitively to the voice of the
prophets
in calling the people of God back to their vocation as a
light to the world
and as the place where the healing of the
nations begins.
And yes, sure enough,
someone was going to die.
Someone was going to be scapegoated.
But the path of sacrifice
that Jesus embarked on
wasn’t the well-trodden path of a bloody revolution of
inversion.
Rather, it was the lesser
known path
of a revolution that challenged the fundamental
structures
of division and exclusion,
calling people to find a new and different way to be
human.
The calling to be salt and
light
was as old as the covenant itself,
but this message and calling
had been lost,
obscured by the legalistic righteousness of the scribes
and the Pharisees.
The law had ceased to
function as it should,
as the letter had come to obscure the spirit.
And so I’d like to bring us
back to the question that I started with,
that of whether it is ever right for a Christian to break
the law.
Those of us who are
followers of Jesus,
are followers of a revolutionary leader.
We are followers of one who
took an uncompromising stand
against the powers of oppression in the world,
and who sought nothing less
than their total transformation.
And there are times, and
places,
where our standing alongside Christ
may well place us outside
the law,
as the powers that be understand it.
But the revolution of Christ
come not through the exercising of violence:
this is no bloody revolution,
unless you count the blood
of the martyrs
whose commitment to the path of Christ-like revolution
brought them into conflict with the powers that be
in ways that reflected the sacrificial death
of Christ himself.
Rather, this is a revolution
of subversion,
where the law is taken back
from those who have made it exclusive in the
name of righteousness,
it is a revolution of
subversion,
where the greater righteousness of the kingdom of heaven
replaces the petty power politics of the
kingdoms of the earth.
And if we are to take our
place alongside Christ,
in speaking up for the marginalised,
and including the excluded,
and in seeing righteousness for all and not just for
some,
then we also take our place
alongside Christ,
in seeing the fulfilment of the law in him,
and not in the structures of the governing
powers.
If there’s a choice to be
made,
and sometimes there is,
the righteousness of Christ
will always trump
the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees.
And if they’re the ones
writing the law,
then, I suggest, we know where we stand.
