“The Work Has Just Begun”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Text: Matthew 7:1-12
The doctoral student (referred to in last week's sermon) had come to the great realization in her life that she was in need. She had come to the point of no return. She had come face-to-face with the truth about herself and she had no idea where her future lay. The music of Bach had helped convict her. She became aware of the errors of her ways, and how her life had spiralled down. But, she needed something more.
She was aware of what the Apostle Paul wrote in the Book of Romans that we know what sin is because of the law and that we cannot know or understand sin apart from the law. It is the law, the Torah, that is the standard and when we see the standard, we realize we cannot attain it. This woman had come face-to-face with the standard. She had come face-to-face with the law.
She realized that no degree of Torah piety, no degree of righteousness on her part could redeem her. She needed something more. And so, she returned to St. Martins-in-the-Field, this time not only to hear an organ recital, but to hear the choir give a rendition of another piece of music by Johann Sebastian Bach. The music was St. Matthew's Passion.
The first aria of St. Matthew's Passion is titled, “Lord, have mercy” and when this woman heard those words, when she heard the choir repeat the magnificence of the text of St. Matthew's Passion, she realized then, at that very moment, that the thing that she needed more than anything else was there: The mercy and the forgiveness of God. What the law and the knowledge of the law could not do for her, the mercy and the forgiveness of God could do.
From that moment on, she said, “I became a Christian.” From a woman of the night, she became eventually, a Doctor of Theology. From a woman who had been lost and had no sense of where the future would be, realizing that her flesh had brought her nothing but sorrow, she realized the power of God's spirit working within her and the music of Bach and its message had helped save her.
This was a glorious encounter! It was the reminder that no degree of Torah piety, no degree of self-righteousness, no attempt to deal with her sin on its own can redeem or save. That is exactly what Paul was getting at in the passage I read from the Book of Romans (Romans 8:1-3).He is saying that if we live by the law, if we live by the flesh, all we are aware of is our sinfulness. God sent his Son that we might have forgiveness, that we might have mercy and this woman embraced it in all its fullness.
Nowhere do we see this more clearly articulated than in the magnificent Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew. From Chapters 5 to 7 in Matthew's gospel, one sees a picture of the magnificence of God's grace. In Jesus' own words there is this incredible sense of hope and an incredible sense of the uniqueness of his ministry. The Sermon on the Mount is without doubt Jesus' interpretation of the meaning of the law for believers. What Jesus does throughout the Sermon on the Mount in these chapters is to outline the way in which the law teaches about righteousness and truth, and then he gives his own interpretation as to how that law is to apply.
The marvellous thing about the Sermon on the Mount is that it really deals with concrete everyday experiences that we encounter as human beings. It deals with vengeance and how to deal with our enemies. It deals with how to deal with the needy and the poor. It helps us understand the power of prayer and the role of fasting and the dangers of self-righteousness. It deals with matters of judging and self-righteousness. It deals with worry and the anxiety that people feel in their everyday lives.
This is precisely what Jesus does in this most magnificent of sermons, and really in a sense it is a compilation of sayings that might have been said at different times in different places, all put together in one Sermon on the Mount. Matthew has compressed them and put them together in a form that makes them look like a cohesive whole.
In this marvellous sermon that was probably delivered at different times and different places, Jesus wants to show that for believers in him the law is great, the law is good, but he wants to go beyond the law. He wants to go one step further than the law. He wants to go the second mile. “The righteousness of the Pharisees is one thing,” says Jesus, “but your righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees.” The law that is written down and subscribed and printed is but one sense of the law; there is also the spirit of the law, and the law that comes from the heart.
He understood then what the great prophet Hosea's dream was that someday the law would reside not in a tablet but in the heart. It wouldn't be sent from above as the way of causing people to fall into line but it would come from within the heart through faith. Jesus reinforces Hosea's vision. He reinforces the belief that the law is not something that simply can be mandated; it is something that needs to be lived by the grace of God. In this marvellous sermon, Jesus outlines this great vision.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian, wrote a book on the Sermon on the Mount. He called it The Cost of Discipleship. In his very first, and one of the most famous books on Christianity in the twentieth century, Bonhoeffer says that at every single point along the way in the sermon you can see the shadow of the Cross: Jesus takes his love and forgiveness and mercy and grace and he applies it to all the laws and all the way that the law interacts with human behaviour.
In a sense then, the Sermon on the Mount is not just a statement about the law, or even the believers' understanding of the law in a new way: it is even more than that. It is to see the power of the Cross transforming the disciples. It is an amazing sermon! But, the sermon has two components to it.
The first is that it is implicit that the entire sermon, particularly at the end, is an invitation. Jesus has those magnificent words, and we sang them in the passage this morning in Seeking First the Kingdom of God. Jesus says near the end of the Sermon on the Mount, “What you have to do now is to seek and to knock and to ask and to find.”
For Jesus then the life of a disciple is the life that is on a journey. It is not just accepting a series of rules and regulations and living by them; it is a dynamic relationship that you are about to enter with Jesus himself. He invites people to ask and to seek and to knock and to find the power of the Kingdom working within them. He asks them to seek and to knock and to find the power of his presence and his spirit to enable us to live according to that very law.
The problem is that throughout the ages this magnificent passage that deals with such high views of Christian discipleship often has been reduced to nothing more than a series of laws again. The magnificent Sermon on the Mount has been reinterpreted as nothing more than the law expanded a bit. It has become a hammer with which to hammer people. It has become a means of actually judging others. It has become like sharia law: A demanding thing that everyone must live to and subscribe to, when what Jesus wanted was something much more than that.
Another problem is that we have also interpreted this magnificent Sermon on the Mount to our human understanding of justice. Even though Jesus upholds the concept of justice, he does so with something much more. Leonard Sweet, in his marvellous book, Jesus Manifesto, writes these words about the relationship between justice and the grace of Jesus:
Having faith is less knowledge of God's justice than a trust in God's mercy. Christians want to live just lives but justified not just by works but by grace. Grace alone saves. The redemption story features the promise that where evil abounds, grace abounds more. God doesn't judge our lives in terms of our performance or success or length of service. All that matters in the end is the free-wheeling generosity and audacious mercy of God. That is why whenever Jesus metes out justice it turns out to be an unjust justice, a bending of the letter of the law to the spirit of the law. That is also why Jesus promises in the Beatitudes, part of the Sermon on the Mount, that they don't come with conditions like 'Blessed are the hungry who follow me' or 'Blessed are the faithful who give generously.' There are no strings. The hungry, the poor, the sorrowing, the sinful all receive God's mercy without conditions and without any strings attached.
What Sweet is saying is that one can have a concept of justice and righteousness and Torah piety but without mercy they are nothing.
I think people have left the churches in droves in the last 50 years because they have not understood or grasped the power of God's mercy. If they understood God's mercy, if they understood God's forgiveness and how incredibly redemptive it is, then I believe they would turn to Jesus and embrace him with their whole heart. The problem is that at times, to use Jesus' own words, “We have given people stones, not bread.”
By stones and bread, he was talking about two things that, in Israel at the time, looked very alike. A loaf of bread was often fairly grey and beige and round, as was a stone. He says, “Would you give somebody a stone when you could really give them bread?” No! Would you give them a serpent like an eel, for example, which he probably had in mind, and which was unclean according to the law? Or, would you give them fish, a wonderful thing? Would you give them something hard like a stone, which would never feed them or nurture them, or would you give them bread that would give them life and sustenance? He says, “The Father wants to give you bread, not stones. He wants to give you fish, not serpents.”
I think that at times we have given people stones. We have given people serpents. We have once again imposed the law on people when people are desperately in need of mercy and forgiveness and hope. What we have given them is Torah; what we haven't given them is Christ. So many people misunderstand Jesus and his message, even his sermons, because we have tried to make the universal ethic out of the Sermon on the Mount rather than an invitation to follow the living Christ.
There is also implicit in this marvellous Sermon on the Mount a desire for response. What Jesus wants for those who hear the Sermon on the Mount is to respond. “It is a call to discipleship” to quote Bonhoeffer. But, part of the problem has been that instead of having grace as the response, we once again have the law imposed. Self-righteous people have imposed the law on others, looking at the mistakes they have made in this life rather than offering them mercy and grace.
I mean, we all love to see mistakes, don't we? Let's just be honest about it. There is something rather nice about seeing someone fail and fall according to a certain standard. Sometimes, one can get away with that. I read a marvellous piece about the New Yorker magazine and about something that was added to this magazine by the editor at the foot of a page a number of years ago. It was a recognition that many professions can cover up their weakness. I mean, a bad doctor can cover up his weakness by simply burying his patient. A lawyer can do it by having his client incarcerated. A dentist can do it by removing a tooth. A carpenter can do it by turning what he had made into sawdust.
You can cover up mistakes but the editor of the New Yorker decided not to do that at all, but included the following paragraph at the bottom of a page. I love this:
Just in case you find any mistakes in this magazine, please remember that they were put there for a purpose. We try to offer something for everyone, and some people are always looking for mistakes and we didn't want to disappoint you.
We love mistakes! Jesus saw the Pharisees roaming around pointing the finger at ordinary people and saying, “Look, you are not living up to the law! You are not living up to the law! And, you are not living up to the law!” Jesus says, “Just be careful that you are not judged in judgement you yourself give!”
All Jesus is talking about is mercy. What he is saying is do not judge according to the standard that you set but by the standard that God sets. And the standard that God sets is high, yes, but it is merciful. The response then must not be stones but bread - the bread of life. The real way that one lives up to the law is through the righteousness that comes from Christ and comes from God. We don't have to do it alone. It is not just dependent on us. God is there both as the giver of the law to set limits but also as the source of freedom and forgiveness.
There are some who will say one can create a just society and a righteous society without any reference to God or the divine. There has even been a minister recently who wrote a book titled, With or Without God, in which she questions whether the idea of God is even needed at all, when all we need to do is to establish a just society according to the law. I say in response to that, that there is no righteousness apart from that which comes from Christ himself. The Apostle Paul understood that for all our striving for justice, for all our desire for righteousness, for all our attempts to live by the law, we cannot, unless is it in the heart.
One of the most inspiring things that I have read over the last few years is a passage from Lord Denning. For the lawyers in the congregation today, I know you are all nodding now, you know why I am referring to Lord Denning. It is fitting that a lawyer read our text from Matthew this morning as well. Lord Denning was really the greatest jurist in Britain in the 20thcentury for the High Court in London. Lord Denning wrote the following at the end of a little book titled Religion and the Law. I think it was brilliant! He said:
This brings me to the end. And what does it all come to? Surely this: That if we seek truth and justice, we cannot find it by argument and debate, nor by reading and thinking, but only as our forebearers said, by the maintenance of true religion and true virtue. Religion concerns the spirit in man whereby he is able to recognize what is truth and what is justice. Law is only the application, however imperfectly, of truth and justice in our everyday affairs. But if religion, if the faith of Christ perishes in the land, truth and justice will also perish. We have already strayed too far from the faith of our forebears. Let us return to it, for it is the only thing that can save us.
When that woman, before she became a doctoral student, walked into that great church in London, she went in with a heavy and a broken heart. She went in with a contrite heart. She was aware of her sin and mortality. But when she heard St. Matthew's Passion, she came out as a new person. Why? It was because she had come face-to-face with mercy and with forgiveness and there she found her life again. Now, that is a sermon! Amen.