Do
you ever find yourself having those thoughts
which begin with the phrase,
'If I ruled the
world...'?
It's
such a seductive thought, isn't it?
If
I ruled the world, things would be different...
If
I ruled the world, things would be better...
If
I ruled the world, I'd solve this pressing problem,
resolve that nagging issue,
and sort out the other
so it stopped causing such trouble.
I've
got a list, as I'm sure you can imagine, and it grows daily.
From the unequal distribution of
global resources,
to the fact that the doors in public
toilets open the wrong way,
I'm sure it would all be
so much better, so much more efficient,
if I was running the
show.
And
yet, I tell myself, others have tried this before, and they've always failed.
'If
I ruled the world' is the thought behind every bloody revolution,
the idea behind every regime change,
the drive behind every
coup.
It's
the motivation behind every political ideology, every party manifesto,
every general election, every
national referendum.
Sometimes,
of course, it's true.
Sometimes I could do it better than
them.
Sometimes
the revolution is necessary, a good thing, even.
The deposing of dictators, the
overthrow of oppressive regimes,
the rise of democracy, and the
growth in respect for human rights
-
all these are, broadly speaking, changes for the better.
This
was the quandary facing Dietrich Bonhoeffer
when he, the pacifist German pastor,
found himself with the opportunity
to participate in a plot to assassinate Hitler.
And
his conclusion, that it was better to do evil than to allow evil to continue,
cost him his life.
It
is also the quandary, the dilemma,
which lies behind our passage this
morning from the sermon on the mount.
Jesus
was preaching to a people
whose religion required of them a
strict adherence to the Jewish law,
as interpreted and taught to them by
the scribes and the Pharisees.
Now,
I know the Scribes and the Pharisees get a lot of negative press,
but just for a minute I'd like us to
try and see things from their point of view.
They
had a country to run, and not a easy country at the best of times.
The Roman occupation required
careful management;
one wrong move and all
hell would break loose.
The people were anxious, taxed to
within an inch of poverty,
and volatile to the
point of revolution.
The
only thing keeping it all in check was the law,
which was, by and large, obeyed.
Not
the law of Rome, but the law of Moses.
The Jewish religious leaders had
obtained a special dispensation from the emperor
that the traditional
Jewish law could still function within the land of Israel,
so long as it didn't harm the
interests of the empire
or foment rebellion amongst the
population.
It
was a situation not dissimilar to the contemporary debate
around the concessions that may be
granted in the British legal system
to accommodate certain
principles of Islamic law.
It's a fine line, and fraught with
tension, and it always has been.
So
the Jewish people lived, by and large, according to the Mosaic law,
and the Scribes and the Pharisees
needed to keep it that way,
because the alternative didn't bear
thinking about.
The
law of Moses had as it's basis the Ten Commandments,
but these we're overlaid with a vast
quantity of additional legal material
to expand and clarify
the key principles of the commandments.
Some of these were found in the
books of the Hebrew Bible,
what we would call the
Old Testament,
and some were found in the vast
array of other literature
that the Jewish
religious leaders had generated over the centuries.
Our
Old Testament reading this morning, from the book of Leviticus,
is an example of just such material,
as
it takes the command to love your neighbour
and expands it to include care for
the poor and the vulnerable,
setting forth a kind of Jewish
equivalent of the welfare state.
One
notable feature of the law of Moses,
and this was something that the
Romans recognised and respected,
was that it was only ever intended
to apply to the Jewish people.
It
wasn't given as a universal law-code,
applicable and enforceable across
the range of human societies.
It
wasn't some predecessor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Rather,
the Law of Moses was an outworking of the call of God
on the people of Israel to be the
people of God.
The
Jewish law was exactly what it claimed to be
- the law for the Jews.
They
did not seek to impose it on the gentile nations,
and only required obedience to it
from those people
who were inside the
covenant that God had established
with the nation of
Israel, the descendants of Abraham.
But,
and here's an important point,
the Jewish law was given to the
Jews,
to be obeyed by them as
the covenant people of God,
so that they might function as a
light to the nations,
as a blessing to the
Gentile nations.
It
wasn't given to the Jews for their own benefit,
so that they could be holy whilst
other nations could go to hell.
Rather,
it was given for the benefit of all,
to show the true way of being human
that was available through
entering into a covenant relationship
with the living God.
The
quandary that Jesus faced,
in the first century world of Roman
occupation,
was
that the law of Moses had become something
that it was never intended to be.
It
had become a tool of nationalist ideology,
a barrier between Jews and Gentiles
which was insurmountable,
a source of pride, and a motivation
for judgment.
So,
the command to love one's neighbour from Deuteronomy,
had become a couplet of judgment:
love your neighbour -
and hate your enemy!
Love your fellow Jew, and hate your
Gentile enemy.
The
lex talionis, the injunction that the
punishment
for maliciously taking
out a person's eye or tooth
should be no more severe
than inflicting the same
injury back on the perpetrator,
had
ceased to be a guard against overkill,
and had instead become a mechanism
for calculating
compensation claims for injuries caused
that would make a
contemporary ambulance-chasing
compensation-lawyer
blush.
The
letter of the law still stood,
but it's spirit had been twisted.
Fairness
and justice had given way
to oppressive and exploitative
practice.
Care
for the vulnerable had given way
to exclusion of the marginalised and
hatred of the other.
Righteousness
had given way to self righteousness.
So
Jesus said, love your enemy,
pray for those who persecute you,
forgive the person who
has wronged you,
give to the
person who has asked for help.
And
in saying this, he wasn't simply articulating
some soft sixties-liberalism woolly-headed
love-philosophy.
Rather,
he was challenging the very basis
on which his society's social and legal
systems were predicated.
And
I have to say that I can see why
the scribes and the Pharisees got so
angry with him.
I mean,
if you take what Jesus is advocating seriously,
you have a recipe for absolute
anarchy on your hands.
The
philosophy of Jesus, if taken as an articulation of a legal framework,
is totally unworkable.
The
wicked will go unpunished,
the wealthy will soon become
impoverished,
the vulnerable will be
exploited at every turn.
You
couldn't run a coffee morning along these lines,
let alone a city, a country, an
empire, or even a church.
So
what did Jesus think he was doing?
Did he have an agenda for anarchy?
Was
he simply inculcating tactics designed to destabilise
the carefully negotiated status quo?
Well,
partly, I think the answer to that is yes,
but not without cause.
Jesus
is very clear in the sermon,
that he has not come to overthrow
the law.
Rather,
he says that he has come to fulfil the law,
to bring it to perfection,
to bring it to
completion.
His
intent in the provocative and challenging words of the sermon
is to take the law back to its
original intent,
away
from being a mechanism for oppression and exclusion,
a tool of the status quo alliance
with Rome,
and
to rediscover it as the God-given challenge
to the forces and powers at work
among the nations
that divide, distort,
and demean humanity.
Jesus
has a vision of the law
as the out working of the love of
God for the whole of creation,
not just one part of it,
not just one
chosen land,
not
just one nation under God.
And
so he challenges those
who had sought to restrict the role
of Israel as a light to the nations
in the cause of national interest
and self-preservation.
He
challenges the status quo
that allows the people of God and
the empire to co-exist,
and
he challenges especially those who have used the law of Moses
to keep the people subjugated,
impoverished, and oppressed,
in order to preserve and
protect the national interest.
It’s
time for a change, it’s time for a revolution.
It’s time to start doing it
differently.
But
this is not Jesus’ moment of revolutionary epiphany,
this is not the moment when he
starts to think ‘If I ruled the world…’
He’s
already faced that temptation,
when Satan offered him all the
empires of the world as a gift,
and Jesus turned down earthly power
as the solution to humanity’s plight.
People
will not be saved by changing the leadership,
they won’t be saved by someone else
ruling the world.
Rather,
the path to salvation, according to Jesus,
lies in a change of heart, in a
change of attitude, in a change of behaviour,
that starts at the grassroots, with
the poor, the vulnerable, and the marginalised.
The
revolution of Jesus is not one where society is transformed from the top down,
it’s one where the world is
transformed from the bottom up.
So
Jesus says to the Jewish peasant,
that if a soldier offers the the
insult of a back-handed blow to their right cheek,
they should turn and look him in the
eye,
and then invite him to
hit them again,
but this time on their
other cheek as an equal.
Jesus
says to the powerless person who is being fleeced for their fleece
by someone who holds all
the cards,
that they should respond by giving
their creditor all their clothes,
leaving the courthouse
naked,
thereby making the creditor
responsible for the shame of their nakedness,
and denying them any
coverup for their oppressive actions.
Jesus
says to the person conscripted by a Roman soldier
to carry his pack for
one mile
that they should walk on for a
further mile,
shaming the power of the
soldier
and causing
him to break the Roman law
that only
allowed him to require one mile of assistance.
Jesus
advocates a policy of what is sometimes called
Revolutionary Subordination, or
Holy Mischief,
or nonviolent resistance.
Jesus
challenges those whom the law has made powerless
to engage their prophetic
imagination in such a way
as to generate
imaginative responses,
where violence and
oppression are disarmed by creativity.
I
find myself drawn at this point
to the recent protest activities of
the Russian punk band Pussy Riot,
who
have sought through provocative but peaceful artistic expression,
to challenge the oppressive and
exclusive practices
of
a dominant ideology that they have identified
as patriarchal,
homophobic, and violent.
So
far they have been arrested and imprisoned,
and just this week manhandled and
whipped
for making a video in front of the
Winter Olympics flag
in protest at the recent legislation
on homosexuality.
And
I think they point us to something important.
This kind of nonviolent provocative
creative protest
is never without cost if
it is to be effective.
Jesus himself paid the ultimate
price
for the path he embarked
on,
and he invites those who follow him
to take up their own
cross.
But
he also invites all who will respond
to enter into a life lived not in
fear of death,
but in the power of resurrection.
The
worst the law can do is take your life,
and Jesus promises new life
to those who join him in his
challenge to the powers that distort creation.
The
fulfilment of the law that Jesus speaks of
isn’t a vision for an alternative
national law,
because it turns out that Jesus
isn’t interested in national boundaries.
If
you want a framework for a national legal system, look elsewhere.
Neither
will it work as a party manifesto,
because it seems Jesus isn’t
interested in party political boundaries.
If
you want a political ideology, look elsewhere.
Neither
will it work as a rule
for any kind of structured,
boundaried, disciplined community,
because
Jesus is interested in crossing boundaries,
in
loving the excluded,
and
in embracing the marginalised.
Any
rule of law that is based on national identity
will find itself radically
challenged
when
the poor, the disadvantaged, and the marginalised
hear the invitation to see themselves
as equals.
The
world of the twenty-first century
has much in common with the world of
Jesus.
We
too have our power blocks, our empires, our nationalistic ideologies.
We too have our legal systems, our
enforcers of the law,
and some are better than others,
make no mistake about it.
In
many ways, the foundation of Jewish ethics as we heard it in Leviticus,
that ‘you shall love your neighbour
as yourself’ (19.18)
remains the foundation
for Western society.
From
nationalism to national interest,
from ethnic identity to strategic
alliances,
from special
relationships to entente cordiale,
we
still structure society in much the same way
as that which Jesus encountered in
the first century.
We
love our neighbours, and we hate our enemies.
But
Jesus invites us, as he invited the scribes and the Pharisees,
to realise that national identity
means nothing
to the God of the whole
earth.
God
is not an Englishman, or a Welshman, or a Scot, or an American,
or indeed the property of any group
that might lay claim to him.
He
is not a Baptist, or an Anglican, or a Moslem, or a Jew.
He is not even a ‘he’, come to think
of it.
What
God is, is love,
and he calls the people of God to
live differently,
not
for their own benefit, but for the benefit of the whole world.
Take,
for example, Jesus’ rather troubling injunction to,
give
to everyone who begs from you,
and
not to refuse anyone who wants to borrow
from you (5.42).
Does
he intend all his followers
to give everything away whenever
they are asked?
If
so, we’re not very good at it, are we?
I mean, as a church we do indeed
give, and give generously, to those who ask,
but we have limits, and we
have structures,
and policies, and programmes…
And rightly so, I might add!
But
what was Jesus getting at, then?
I
think he has in mind the social welfare system outlined in Leviticus,
that we heard about in our second
reading.
This
system, of leaving a portion of the harvest for the poor to gather,
and of paying people on time, and of
being a good employer,
was
intended to build into the Jewish society
a basic orientation to the poor and
the vulnerable.
It
was a recognition that it was the responsibility of the haves,
to provide care for the have-nots,
and to use their wealth in
non-exploitative ways.
But,
by Jesus’ time, the scribes and the Pharisees
had taken the principle of
structural care for the poor,
as
enshrined in the Jewish law,
and
made it into a legalistic framework
where benefits to the poor were only
given
according
to an ever-tightening framework of entitlement.
It strikes
me that this is a situation not dissimilar
to our own contemporary reduction of
the benefits system.
The
Scribes and the Pharisees proclaimed their commitment to upholding
a system which cared for the
vulnerable and the poor,
but
which actually, under their leadership,
created poverty among an ever-widening
underclass of the needy.
To
a society in legalistic retreat
from its ideological underpinning of
compassion for the poor,
whether in the first or
the twenty-first century,
Jesus utters his challenge to give
to all who beg,
and
to lend to all who request it.
It
seems to me that our world of cuts to crisis loans,
our world of reduced benefits for
the vulnerable
and diminished social care for the disadvantaged
could
do well to hear the provocative and politicised challenge of Jesus.
But
it’s not just about calling the authorities to account:
we who live as the covenant people
of God in our time
are still called to be a light to
the nations.
We
are called to be those who embody the transformation we believe in,
and to live it from the bottom of
society to the top.
Because
unless it is true for us,
it will not be true for others.
At
one level, this will involve strategic choices
about the way we use our own wealth,
both individually and as a church.
But
it also calls us to consider the deeper divisions and rifts
that lie within our own souls.
As
Richard Rohr puts it:
Until there is
love for enemies, there is no real transformation,
because the enemy always carries the
dark side of your own soul.
Normally those
people who threaten us
carry our own faults in a different
form.
The people who
really turn you off
are very much like you.
Jesus offers
not just a suggestion;
you’ve got to love your enemy to
grow up.
[Rather] Jesus
rightly puts it in the imperative form: Do it!
He
goes on to observe that often,
what we don’t
like about ourselves is our inner enemy,
in a certain sense.
[So] we must
learn to love and forgive that enemy, too.
Sometimes that
takes great humility and great compassion,
but if we learn it internally,
we will be prepared for the outer
enemies.[3]
The
reason the world would not be better if I ruled it,
is that I, like all of us, need to
learn to forgive the enemy within.
And
without crossing the boundaries within our souls,
without facing the enemy we present
to our own integration,
we perpetuate the divisions within
the world around us.
But,
in Christ, we receive the gift of wholeness and healing,
as we join ourselves to him in
suffering, death, and new life.
And
as we learn what it is to find completion in our inner world,
we become those who bring salt and
light to a hurting, divided world.
This
is what it means to be the people of God,
this is what it means to join the
revolution of Jesus.
