Sermon at Parish Mass, Third Sunday before Lent 2014

Ecclesiasticus 15.15-20
1 Corinthians 3.1-9
Matthew 5.21-37

If you look at a scene through binoculars the wrong way round then you will see it all wrong. Everything will seem impossibly remote and difficult to discern. But look the right way round and everything is clear. Everything is brought near, into focus, the proportions and perspective are right.

The sermon on the mount continues. And as we heard last week, we need to see it the right way round. We need to see that scene on the mountain correctly. If we think that Jesus is setting out a code of conduct that we must follow, so that we can qualify to be his disciples, we will be getting it the wrong way round. The demands will seem impossibly remote and unattainable. Perhaps, even, impossible for ordinary human beings to observe. How can you never be angry? How can you never even look at someone with lust? 

But if we see it the right way round, we see the sermon on the mount describing Jesus. He is the law in person. His life enacts what God is like. And the sermon on the mount describes how his disciples will live, if they reflect the God revealed in Jesus. Those who are drawn to Jesus will start to live as he lives, because they will start to reflect his light.

We heard last week how the disciples of Jesus were drawn to him, attracted to him, as he went up the mountain and began to teach them. In the Old Testament Moses went up Mount Sinai to receive the Law, the ten commandments that he was to pass on to the people of Israel. And now Jesus, on the mountain, is revealed as both the lawgiver and the law in person. In place of stone tablets, there is the living revelation of God.

Today’s extract brings out the parallel between Jesus and Moses even more closely, because Jesus quotes some of the ten commandments to his disciples. But Jesus does so to draw out a deeper meaning. The commandments are not to be understood as a code of conduct imposed on us from outside. They describe the community that Jesus draws to himself, and transforms into his image. This is what a community looks like when it lives from the life of God revealed in Jesus. 

And what Jesus is actually doing is to make us look within, to look into our hearts, where our motivations and our desires arise. The ten commandments are not wrong or out of date. But they are more than a matter of behaving because we’re told to. They are more than external constraints. How we live reveals the desires of our hearts. So the external action of murder begins with anger in our hearts. The external action of adultery begins with lust in our hearts. But if our hearts desire differently we will live differently.

A commandment seen as an external constraint is like a flood bank on a river. It might hold in excessive waters for a while, but will fail in the end. A river bursts its banks because there is too much water at its source. If it is swollen and engorged where it arises, it will break free of its constraints downstream. But if the source changes, if it is not excessive, then the river will keep flowing in the right course all the way.

Well we can’t do much to change the amount of water flowing into the Thames and other rivers at the moment. But the desires of our hearts are different. If we draw near to Jesus, if we are attracted to him as his disciples, then we will find the desires of our hearts beginning to be transformed. Jesus reveals what God is like. Jesus makes it possible to desire as God desires. And in this part of the sermon on the mount he is asking us to look within and ask what it is that we most deeply desire.

Human beings from the beginning have tended to desire in rivalrous and violent ways. Desire is infectious: we learn what is desirable by seeing what other people desire, so we come to desire it too. And that can bring us into conflict with the other person who desires the same thing. This is why the ten commandments include a command against coveting: desiring what your neighbour has. Lust and adultery are just a particular case of the same thing, in the area of sexual desire. And murder begins with the anger we feel when we are prevented from having what we desire, because someone else has it instead.

The same applies to Jesus’ teaching on marriage and divorce. In 1st Century Jewish society men had the right to divorce their wives, but not the other way round. This would often leave the divorced woman in a very precarious situation, with little means of support, while the man was free to find a new wife. Desire which is conditional and dispensable, desire which I can change if I feel like it, does not reflect at heart the love and faithfulness of God.

So also Jesus’ teaching on swearing oaths. Why do we swear oaths, for example in court, or to the bishop? Is it not because there is an assumed mistrust of human speech and integrity? We can’t be assumed to be telling the truth unless we’re constrained. But Jesus says, let your yes be yes and your no no. If your heart is truthful, then your speaking will be also. Nothing more is needed. Get it right at source and everything that flows out from the source will be right too.

Jesus’ teaching on the ten commandments shows us what really needs to happen: our desire needs to be converted at source, in our hearts. We need to imitate, not the rivalrous desires of humanity, but the generous and self-giving desire of God. And it is the attractiveness of God that makes this possible. The disciples drew close to Jesus, just as we do. They gathered to him because they felt the attraction of God’s love and desire revealed in him. 

The disciples in the Gospels are described as though they were in love with Jesus. When he calls them by the lakeside, they leave everything behind and follow him. They gather round him on the mountain, thirsting for his words, and more for his presence. He is like a magnetic force of attraction, a tremendous desire, God’s desire, calling them to him. But God’s desire is all love, all generosity, all self-giving. There is no trace of rivalry or violence or envy in God’s desiring. He loves all humanity and longs for all humanity to come to him, the source. He longs for us to abandon our death-bound desires and be caught up instead in his desire, which is the desire to give and expend himself in love.

If we are in love with Jesus, then he lives within us, and he is changing our hearts. We begin to imitate his desire, his love, in place of all the rivalrous and violent desires that have been driving us up to now. The love of God will change our hearts so that they become a source of love welling up within us like pure clear water. And we will be transformed more and more into the image of Christ which is the Church, the people who live according to his life, and who show forth his love in the world.