“All or Nothing”
“All or Nothing”
Matthew 5:13-20
Matthew 5:13-20
I’m curious: were many of you overachievers when you were in school? More A & B students? Today’s Gospel caused me to reflect on a time in my life I had not contemplated for over fifty years: my elementary school education. I grew up in a small town of 650 people, a predominantly German community about 40 miles south of here. Thinking about those early years, I gained a new appreciation for my grade-school teachers. Many of them were older, 50s and 60s, and dedicated in teaching us the basics – reading, writing, and arithmetic. Indeed, this was evidenced in 7th and 8th grade when we took the nation-wide standard achievement tests and I found myself at a junior or senior level in high school on some of the subjects. Frankly, I got some real strokes out of that. Hot stuff! I’m an overachiever. But then came high school where I started out mediocre. However, for some reason I desired to get on the honor roll and did! Yet I was certainly not an overachiever – 51 out of 210 not quite in the top quarter. There were a lot of smarter kids. It was in college that my overachiever mindset got a huge setback. My GPA was 2.1 – just fortunate to get through. Those real college overachievers – the cum laude and magnum cum laude – were in another stratosphere. Then, finally, when I was at seminary, I regained that overachievement mindset. I worked hard, but again as in high school and in college I fell short – a 3.2. There were many ahead of me, and I remember a few guys – Mark Schulz and Joel Lehenbauer who got the perfect 4.0 – never anything short of an A. Sickening! Magnum Cum Laudes!
Why do I share this with you? I’ll bet there are a number of overachievers among us, but more importantly it highlights a group of people. If you come to church enough, you’ll hear them over and over referred to in the Scripture readings – the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. But who really were these fellows? They were the 4.0 guys back then – overachievers – and sickeningly so. These men wore special garments with tassels and if it was today they’d have jerseys with magnum cum laude imprinted. They got A+’s and no B’s in the category of righteousness and competed with one another in the area of extreme strictness. They had broken down God’s law into 613 rules – 248 commands and 365 prohibitions. But that was not nearly enough. They found ways to clarify the fine points. God said to honor the Sabbath and not work, but what constitutes work? So, they outlawed 39 activities that might be construed as work – like, you could not walk more than 7/10 of a mile, if you got off your donkey, you weren’t allowed to take off the saddle – that would be working, if a hen laid an egg on the Sabbath, you were not allowed to eat the egg because the hen had worked on the Sabbath. They were zany! To avoid breaking the 2nd commandment, “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord,” they refused to pronounce God’s name at all. Then, to avoid sexual temptation, they had a practice of lowering their heads and not even looking at a woman so that some of them were called “bleeding Pharisees” because of frequent collisions with walls and other obstacles.
I’m sure you’ve all heard about enough concerning these overachievers, but picture what it must have been like in that oppressive society. The majority of the people didn’t have the time to keep up with all of those practices, and the Pharisees had a name for them – sinners. Can you see how such an approach could be burdensome? They created a list of rules and rituals, then they kept track of the GPA. They probably published weekly standards for holiness, and turned holiness into a religious weightlifting competition. But the regular people were getting crushed with demands. These religious leaders were supposed to be shepherds who keep the flock safe, but they had become neighborhood bullies, picking on the wounded and piling on the weak.
You wonder how this could be, but religion can be great for those who are the overachievers. It offers a pecking order, a set standard. There’s something very appealing about a system that lets you measure how good you are. Religion gives you a sense of superiority like having the high GPA or like a guy at the gym who keeps adding more weight to the bar and grunts loud enough that everyone in the gym can see how much he can lift. But even for us who are overachievers, isn’t there a point when we recognize that our best is not good enough when it comes to our besetting sins? Those areas of weakness — be it anger, greed, pride, addictive negative thinking, unforgiveness, lust, lovelessness. Then each rule broken is an extra weight on our back in terms of failed expectations. It’s a high bar and you’re too weighed down to even try to get over.
Do you ever get to that point from time to time? If so, there’s great news for you in today’s Gospel. Jesus came to take the weight of religion off us, and in today’s lesson He does it in a stunning way! Many of His listeners were worried: was He a revolutionary or an authentic Jewish prophet Who revered the Torah – God’s law – and He addresses it head-on in our text:
Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them… For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Don’t you know that last statement surely made the crowd sit up and take notice! He was calling out the Magnum Cum Laude fellows and telling them they had a flunking grade. They weren’t qualified for the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus gives no leeway as He adds that the law is valid in every detail – to the crossing of the t’s and the dotting of the i’s. What must the crowd be thinking? How could an ordinary person’s righteousness every surpass that of the professional holy men – the Magna Cum Laudes? This is crazy!
But it doesn’t even stop there, as Jesus then brings to bear the ethical demands of the law. Taking the Torah as the starting point, Jesus pushed the law further than any Pharisee dared push it, further than any monk dared live it. Case in point – the fifth commandment – “Thou shalt not kill.” Every society has laws against murder, but no society has ever come up with anything like Jesus enlarged definition of murder:
“I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment… anyone who says “You fool” will be in danger of the fire of hell.”
Growing up with a typical brother did you ever have a problem with this? Or can two sisters weather the storms of adolescence without relying on words such as “stupid” and “fool?”
One other case in point: every society also has taboos against sexual promiscuity. Inappropriate touching or subtle over-stepping can result in the loss of a job and efforts are being made to connect pornography with crimes against women. But no society has ever proposed a rule as strict as Jesus’:
“I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for you to be thrown in hell.”
How are we to understand this? Jesus made the law impossible for anyone to keep and charged us to keep it. Why? Why, why, why? What’s the way out of this tension? There’s only one acceptable alternative for us overachievers. We have to default and throw away our overachiever badges. The righteousness required is like us with our righteousness standing at the foot of the Empire State Building. We can reach only a few feet up and we need a righteousness that gets us to the top. God says, “Be ye perfect as I am perfect.” What do we need? It’s what God promised through the prophet Jeremiah – the coming of the Lord our Righteousness. We will never measure up, but we don’t have to. It’s all about Christ’s perfect righteousness! At the cross every claim of the law was satisfied by Christ; every condemnation executed on Him our substitute. We are judged by the righteousness of Christ Who lives within, not our own. I believe that all of us at one time or in one way or another have tried to live up to the ideals of our faith and felt unworthy because we missed the vital notion of grace.
It's so easy for cultures to go the way of ungrace. That’s why they call it a dog-eat-dog world. But to my mind, grace was made known to our society in a powerful way over 25 years ago. When we moved out to New Jersey in 1995 the first play we saw on Broadway was Les Misérables, the story of the hardened convict who felt the crushing demand of the law – Jean Valjean. But then came his encounter with the priest, and Valjean made the agonizing default. He switched to grace – the love of God in Christ transformed His life. But then there was detective Javert, the Magnum Cum Laude Pharisee who was all about the law, the law, the law. And perhaps you remember at the end when Valjean saves him, Javert could not default to grace as he takes his own life by jumping off a bridge.
Les Misérables powerfully portrayed the Gospel to millions of people who had never before encountered it. However, when it comes to each of our lives, I don’t see it as clear cut. Yes, we believe in grace, but the way of the law with its performance-based acceptance is so alluring for us overachievers. Who of us has not been prone to the pecking order which lets us measure how good we are by comparing ourselves to others? Such pride is so ingrained in our fallen human natures. For this reason, Jesus got a mixed reaction from the people of His day who were used to the hierarchal ladder of achievement. It’s so easy for us to default from grace to the law – to trade freedom for the weight of religion. It can become very burdensome as you start getting hard on yourself due to your own failed expectations. You become judgmental – hard on yourself and hard on others. For my part, when I default to the law sooner or later, I become overwhelmed by failed demands and expectations. I’m like Javert ready to jump off the bridge. But then comes that wonderful moment when I default to grace and Jesus takes the burden form me.
Isn’t that what He promised? “Come unto Me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest? Take My yoke upon you.” That’s when I quit being a “law man” and default to grace, to the righteousness and freedom that is mine in Christ. Then I say to myself, “I’m the most blessed man in the world.” “My life is a piece of cake.” It’s a night to day change in my outlook and disposition as I slip into the default mode. In this marvelous way, Jesus came to free us from the weight of trying hard enough to be good enough. Fallen in our quest to be overachievers, God has provided us with the very best alternative: we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of His absolute grace. Amidst all the impossible demands of the Sermon on the Mount, there are these wonderful breezes of grace to sustain and empower our burdened souls. They’re always there for you and all who are willing to take that precious leap of faith.