-for the last few weeks here at Fishers UMC we have been taking a look at Jesus’ famous Sermon On The Mount found at the beginning of Matthew. It’s really one of the few times where we have an actual “sermon” from Jesus. Most other teaching came in the form of Him talking with people here and there, looking for teaching opportunities.
-but we’re going to continue where we left off last week in Matthew 5.
**Matt. 5:38-48 -> 38“You have heard the law that says the punishment must match the injury: ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ 39But I say, do not resist an evil person! If someone slaps you on the right cheek, offer the other cheek also. 40If you are sued in court and your shirt is taken from you, give your coat, too. 41If a soldier demands that you carry his gear for a mile, carry it two miles. 42Give to those who ask, and don’t turn away from those who want to borrow. 43You have heard the law that says, ‘Love your neighbor’ and hate your enemy. 44But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! 45In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For He gives His sunlight to both the evil and the good, and He sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. 46If you love only those who love you, what reward is there for that? Even corrupt tax collectors do that much. 47If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that. 48But you are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” (NLT)
-there’s a lot in there. I wonder what it was like to have heard the Sermon On The Mount live, just listening to Jesus rattling these things off, one after another. People must have been so overwhelmed by the end.
-and I think for us to see that, we have to look at what it meant to them, how they think and compare that with how we think.
-like the first phrase:
1. AN EYE FOR AN EYE
-this is one of the oldest ideas there is. Fairness. But it’s even more than that.
-there’s a reason this is such an old idea. This was one of the first ever recorded laws. The first ever set of written law for a body of people, this is in there.
-here it is. [SHOW PICTURE OF HAMMURABI’S STELE]. This statue here was discovered a little over a hundred years ago. It’s a picture of a king (which is more like a mayor, this is long ago there weren’t really countries but rather city states), but it’s a king, King Hammurabi. The picture tells the story of the Babylonian god Shamesh commissioning Hammurabi to be king. The bottom, that big black part, contains the first ever written set of laws, 282 in all. And in those laws is the most famous one, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”.
-and a little side note, to give you an idea when this is, Hammurabi is the Babylonian name for this king, Hebrew people remembered him as Amraphel. He was one of the five mayor-kings that captured Abram’s nephew Lot in Genesis 14 [SHOW GEN.14:1, 12 NLT].
-so this is a law that’s been around a long time. A few hundred years later when Moses is given the set of rules that the people Jesus was talking to knew as The Law, this one was in there, handed down from God. You can find it in there three times, Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:20 and Deuteronomy 19:21 [SHOW LIST OF VERSES].
-so the people listening to Jesus, they knew this law. They knew it by heart. It’s in their Law given to them by God three times. This would be something they readily lived by.
-now for us, we think it’s barbaric. If someone knocks out your tooth in a fight, you don’t get the police, come back, and get a pair of pliers and take out one of their teeth. [PULL OUT PLIERS]. I mean, really, who’s ready for a trade?
-no! Of course not! That’s crazy, we would never do that. We’re more civilized.
-what we do is sue. No, we don’t ask for an eye or a tooth. Instead we take that person to court and get what we call “Fair Compensation.” Because we want everything to be fair. So fair that half of all the world’s lawyers are right here in the U.S. of A. Because as much as we say we’re not like this, we still want fairness. We don't want to rip out someone else’s tooth, but we want to be paid for being put out.
-trust me, the church was closed during the ice storm, just like school, and I got to do something I love to do, watch “The People’s Court” with Judge Marilyn Milian. And what do most of those cases really boil down to? I was wronged in some way, and now I need to be fairly compensated.
-and we as good little Christians all think that’s well and good. Not that we should knock out someone’s tooth, but pay me what you owe me for it and we’re okay.
-Jesus is saying something different. He is going against fair compensation. Take a look at it in today’s context. If someone slides through the intersection in all the ice we’ve had and dings your car, let them ding the other side too. If someone sues you and wins, pay more than was asked of you. If you’re at work and someone tells you you have to work an hour of overtime, rather work two hours. And in none of these situations, ask to be compensated. No extra money will be given to you to cover these problems.
-now it’s a little more personal.
-but Jesus doesn’t stop there! He goes for even more!
2. LOVE YOUR ENEMIES
-Jesus says the people have been told to love their friends and hate their enemies. Really, that’s not far from the truth. The Law didn’t say to hate your enemies, it merely didn’t say anything, so the people implied loving your neighbor was good enough.
-here’s where the law comes from:
**Lev. 19:18 -> 18 “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against a fellow Israelite, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.” (NLT)
-see, it was in the context of your fellow people, of Israelites loving Israelites. So for years the interpretation came to be that love your neighbor was my neighbor, my people, the ones like me. My enemies, don’t worry about them.
-so when Jesus is saying this, it is mind blowing. And I mean completely explosion of the mind.
-take a look at Israel’s history. They have always been at war. They were enslaved under Egypt, fought their way into their land, pushed down by the Philistines, enslaved by the Assyrians, by the Babylonians, by the Phoenicians, the Greeks came through and took over and now the Romans have come in and are in charge.
-and how are the Jews and the Romans getting along? During Jesus’ life the Jews were expelled from the Roman Empire, under Emperor Tiberius (and once again after Jesus by Emperor Claudius). Kicked out of the empire than reluctantly let back in.
-they were considered the armpit of Rome. A desert country in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the empire surrounded by desert and rocks and filled with people who did not worship the Roman gods as they were instructed to, always causing problems.
-that’s why Pilate was sent there. He was a harsh guy who was supposed to get these Jews under control. And he had no respect for their laws or for their God. He set up shields to honor Pilate and Emperor Tiberius. There’s even one story recorded by an ancient historian named Josephus in which Pilate built an aqueduct, got water to run in Jerusalem. That doesn’t sound bad, does it? Yeah, he did it by taking God’s money our of the temple and spending God’s money without asking. When the people came to protest, Pilate had the Roman guards dress up as common people and mingle with them in the mob and on his order, they suddenly came alive and beat everyone around them.
-and of course, no one could fight back because any attack on a Roman guard was seen as an attack on the Emperor, on Rome itself and punishable by death.
-Pilate was eventually brought up on charges for that little way of handling the crowd, sent to Caesar, but Tiberius died before he got there, Claudius didn’t know who he was, banished him to an even worse outpost, Gaul.
-so the people here, there are real enemies. Real fighting. Real soldiers coming in and demanding food, bugging them, and there was nothing they could do in return.
-when you imagine the sermon on the mount, when you close your eyes and try to think of it, what do you see? A nice sunny day, Jesus on the side of a hill covered in nice green grass. People sitting around him listening. What about all the Roman soldiers milling around?
-you don’t think that some Guy from outside Rome speaking to a crowd of hundreds, maybe thousands of these insurgents isn’t going to draw the attention of a few Roman soldiers? If I was a soldier, I’d be checking it out.
-do you imagine soldiers walking through the people, maybe one guy at the back kicking a few people, “Hey, Jew! Did you hear that? You’re supposed to love me. Pray for me. You want to bless me? Remember what He just said about if I ask you to carry my pack for a mile to do it two? See me after the show.”
-I think for too long the church has watered this down. We don’t pray for our enemies. We’ve turned it into, “On the way to work today somebody cut me off, but I didn’t get mad, I prayed for them.”
-okay, that’s a good thing. But a bad driver you’ve never met causing you four seconds of mild annoyance is not an enemy. Someone annoying at Wal-Mart is not your enemy. Still pray for them, but that’s not your enemy.
-let me ask, when was the last time you prayed for the troops in Afghanistan. And I don’t mean ours.
-if you want to have some real fun, tomorrow when you go to work go to the lunchroom when everyone for lunch and pull out your checkbook. When someone asks you what you’re doing, tell them you are writing a check to Al Qaeda because you know, they’re in the desert and it’s hot and you want to bless them with some money so they can buy some supplies like fresh food and water.
-if you do that, you probably will never be looked at the same way at work. But really, is that not what Jesus is asking here? Bless your enemies, not strangers that upset you, your enemies. The person at work that’s trying to get you fired, have you prayed for them, loved them, blessed them? I think most of us have no idea what a real enemy is, and I’m kind of happy about that.
-but that doesn’t mean we water it down and lower the bar. If anything Jesus is asking for more. Look at how He ends this section:
3. BE PERFECT
-be perfect. Not be good. Not try your best. Be perfect.
-and I personally don’t see this as Jesus being judgmental or trying to put people down saying they aren’t perfect, I think it’s just what He’s been doing this entire sermon, raising the bar. Trying to get us to aim higher, so much higher than we have been.
-if you remember reading newspapers, Ann Landers once said this: “The true measure of an individual is how he treats a person who can do him absolutely no good.” (Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader #21, p. 39)
-because let’s be honest, it’s human nature that people generally want to do the bare minimum. We don’t care what the speed limit is, we care how fast we can drive without getting a ticket. We don’t care how much we can do at work, what’s the bare minimum we can do and keep our job, maybe a little more for a promotion.
-I had a buddy in high school, at the end of every year he would sit down and look at his grade, look at the percentage the final exam was worth, and figure out what we the bare minimum he needed to pass. I remember he was doing well in one class and only needed 38% to pass. Man, if he used all that effort on actually studying what kind of grade could he get?
-Jesus here is raising the bar, and not just a little. “Be perfect.” And it’s not condemning, He just wants us to aim so much higher. After all, He’ll help us.
**Phil. 4:13 -> I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. (NKJV)
-here’s the big question. What does that mean? What does it mean to be perfect?
-in looking at what Jesus has been saying in this section, how He’s leading up to this, I can see one answer. Love others.
-no one who thinks only of themselves is ever seen as perfect. The richest man in the world is not seen as perfect, but the rich people who start giving away all their money, we see them as better. As closer.
-on the night Jesus was taken after the Last Supper we have this whole section where Jesus tells us the best thing is to love one another, there’s no greater love than someone laying down his life for his friends.
-this Man, our God, who a few hours later is hanging on a cross for who? Us. Dying for us. And at the same time asking God to forgive the people who are doing it because they don’t know what they’re doing.
-that’s what we see as perfection. That’s perfect. Complete and utter selfless love. Look at our section, don’t ask for compensation, but love. People that hurt you, love them just as much as those who haven’t.
-for too long the people of God had been living not thinking of others, they were thinking of fairness. The bare minimum. Making us all equal. Fair.
-God wants more. He wants us to go beyond, put what we think is fair to the side and aim for perfect love, for perfection.
-think about it, what would your family look like if instead of everyone looking for what’s fair they all started looking for perfection, not from each other but from themselves? Perfect love for each other. Instead of complaining about chores because so-and-so didn’t have to do it, just doing it?
-we all know which one we would rather work with. What if our entire church started acting like that? What if when we came to church on Sunday morning we didn’t think about what we wanted to do or what we could get out of church, but what we could do to make this a wonderful, amazing, magical worship experience for someone else? What do you think our church would look like then?
-what do you think our town would look like, our places of business look like if we started this revolution, this movement to show perfect love as often as we could, never thinking of ourselves but seeing this as true worship, actively living out God’s love to others?
-what could it look like?
-be perfect. I think it’s something we can aim for. We may not always “be perfect”, but what if that’s what we strived for, perfect love? Be perfect.
-I don’t know where you are with God, but that’s what He wants for you. He wants you to be perfect. He wants to take your life and make it perfect, forgiving you for what’s gone wrong, forgiving our acts of rebellion against God and making us perfect. And He wants to do that not to be fair, but so we can then live out our perfection, we can get to know Him and be like Him and we can be the people He wants us to be and together we can be perfect.
