“Jesus said unto his disciples, Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
At every synod the Bishop has either the priest or the parish delegates tell the gathered synod about their parish’s activities over the last year. I have been thinking about a story I heard the first day. One of our priests told us how his parish had been reaching into their community to bring new people into the church. I don’t remember the whole narrative, but it went something like this: One Sunday morning before the procession the rector noticed several new folk he had never seen before. He was feeling especially good; one might even say he was feeling successful. The organist trumpeted the opening hymn and the procession began. The young crucifier led the way with the Cross of Christ held high for all to see – the choir, the acolytes and ministers following him to the Altar. It was then that the rector noticed that one visitor, a middle-aged country lady, had turned and she was glaring at crucifer as if he was holding a snake and coming right at her. Suddenly she shouted loud enough for all to hear: “Oh Lord, I am in the wrong place,” and with the determination of a man escaping his own execution, she forced her way out the door, got into her car and disappeared down the road!
I don’t think the rector telling this story meant for it to be an illustration, and I don’t think he was feeling especially successful after that event, but I turned to the priest sitting next to me and I said: “Now that is exactly what our liturgy is meant to do!” And I will stand by that. If our liturgy – and by that I mean all of it including the prayers, the gestures, the reading of the Epistle and the Gospel and the preaching and our receiving the Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood – if people are comfy and relaxed with all that then something is wrong. Flannery O’Connor once said that the task of the artist is to discover the truth in the object of his attention. His job is to craft the truth in what he beholds. She went on to say, “It is (for the artist) to intrude upon the timeless, and that is only done by the violence of a single-minded respect for the truth.” I would like to reverse that and to say that our liturgy, our worship of Christ crucified is the timeless intruding upon us, shaking us from our slumber, and violently forcing us to see that the world around us is turned upside down. In the procession we bow to a pretty and shrunken down replica of pure horror. The Cross of Christ was an instrument of unimaginable torture. And yet the liturgy makes it the center of our common devotional life. We claim to hear the Word of God spoken out loud. We rejoice to eat the flesh and drink the blood of Jesus Christ, God incarnate, who in fact is not all eaten up, but seated upon the throne of the universe. He is our whole life. If we took our liturgy as seriously as that country lady took our liturgy we might at least occasionally say to ourselves concerning our inward disposition: “Oh Lord, I’m in the wrong place!”
But we are too good at domesticating and taming wild things; or at least we think we are. T.S. Eliot wrote:
“In the juvenescence of the year came Christ the tiger.”
And well before Eliot, William Blake presented the tiger as the flip side of the lamb:
“Tiger, tiger burning bright
In the forest of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”
And many years ago a young author named Tom Howard wrote a book he titled “Christ the Tiger” by which he meant there was more to Jesus than being a gentle lamb led to the slaughter. Jesus is also a Tiger: A tiger stalks its prey, a tiger devours its prey, a tiger roars, and the sight of a tiger burning bright is a fearful and dreadful thing to behold. Christ the Tiger is wild and untamable and life threatening. That’s right, life threatening. If you find yourself confronted by a tiger the most appropriate words have already been spoken: “Oh Lord, I am in the wrong place!”
Well if there has ever been a place where we have sought to domesticate Christ the Tiger it is with our never-ending deconstruction of the Sermon on the Mount.
“Jesus said unto his disciples, Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
“The Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew’s Gospel spans three chapters: five, six and seven. It corresponds to what is sometimes called “The Sermon on the Plain” in the Gospel of Luke. One scholar has catalogued thirty-six discrete views of the Sermon and most of them are, in effect, attempts to de-claw the Tiger. For example, the most popular medieval view was that the Sermon presented a higher ethic for the clergy of the Church. Martin Luther’s view was that the Sermon presents the impossible demands of the Law in order to make room for grace. The Anabaptists want to apply it to state, the traditional liberals want to reduce it to the social gospel, and dispensationalists want to say it is meant for the future millennial kingdom. No, I am not going to name all thirty-six positions, but here is enough to show how people have pushed back against the Sermon to escape what most of them call Jesus’ “impossible ideal.” But here is one last example: The more creative Protestants, following Luther, go on to say that the Sermon on the Mount was never mean to instruct the disciples regarding their behavior, but to drive them to despair and thus to grace. Most American Protestant Evangelicals today want a Jesus who proclaims a kingdom of “work-less grace” – the idea being that I am called to trust in Jesus, to trust in “grace” and keep some of his commandments to show my good faith and that is enough. After all, it is an “impossible ideal.” That is what they mean by grace. Not so, according to Jesus! That is not grace. Listen to me: “work-less grace is worth-less grace.” Somebody is being led down the prim rose path!
In the Gospels the message of the Kingdom of God transforms those who meekly embrace it and it crushes the arrogant that are self-satisfied. The central point of the Sermon on the Mount is that Jesus is the supreme expositor of the Torah. He is the New Moses who is greater than Moses, who was before Moses, and whose authority is not derivative as was Moses’ authority. Jesus speaks the Word of God and declares an ethic not to humanity, not to the nation-state, but to his own disciples alone who are the citizens of his present and future Kingdom.
“Jesus said unto his disciples, Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
Only those who are submitted to God’s reign now, will be prepared when the Kingdom descends in all its shimmering glory. Only those who are submitted to God’s reign now will be prepared when Jesus descends from heaven to judge the world and reign without any challenge because all his enemies will have been made lower than his footstool.
We live in an interim period. Christ has come. Christ has died for us. Christ has ascended to heaven. Christ will return to us. The Sermon on the Mount is the way the children of the Kingdom of Christ will live right now – but this ethic of Christ is not only interim. The Sermon on the Mount is also the way of life in the world to come. The Sermon on the Mount is not an impossible ideal meant to drive us to grace, it the way we must live now according to Jesus. All early Christian writers, all the Church Fathers insist that Christians live obediently to Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount.
Here are a few examples that I will open up a little more over the next few weeks: We live in a world that thrives on anger and insults. Email and chat rooms have only made it worse. We live amongst a people who believe that you must be running from some deep dark truth about yourself unless you unleash your anger. And some things never change: insults and anger seem to go together. But according to Jesus giving into anger is equivalent to murder. Another example: we live amongst a people who look upon lust as merely an expression of healthy sexual desire. Lust is not bad; it is the absence of lust is bad, according to the received wisdom of our age. But according to Jesus lust is equivalent to adultery. Jesus, the gentle Lamb, offers the most violent and graphic cure for lust I have every heard of. Pull out the offending eye and cut off the offending member and throw them away. In other words: By whatever means necessary get this sin out of your life! Maybe one could begin by crying out: “Oh Lord, I am in the wrong place!”
Jesus himself expects us to live in accordance with his teaching, not motivated like the Pharisees to wear our personal righteousness as a public badge superiority. The Scribes and the Pharisees paraded their so-called righteousness like peacocks spreading their feathers in order to dazzle others and one another with their personal righteousness. This is one way the disciple’s “righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the Pharisee.” His disciple will do no such thing, Jesus said. Our obedience is not a badge of personal righteousness. Rather the disciple of Christ will live according to his teaching in the Sermon selflessly because our obedience to Jesus’ Sermon is itself a “sign of the Kingdom of God.” That is a burning and fearful thing in itself: our lives are meant to be “signs of the Kingdom of God.” Our obedience to the Sermon is evidence to an unbelieving world of the saving Presence of God in Jesus Christ in this place.