When I was training to be a Social Worker in the 70’s, the current jargon in our ‘aims’ for clients (what a presumption) was to instil in them a sense of ‘deferred gratification’. Naturally it was assumed that we superior beings already had this approach and therefore were ‘all right’. When Jesus taught his rag-bag followers in what we call The Sermon on the Mount or the Beatitudes, (more than a hint of the giving of the Mosaic law on Sinai) this was definitely not his intention, for he aimed at a deeper understanding, one which would fit us all, good and bad and mostly of course bad, for the Kingdom of God. Mosaic law had a lot of Don’ts, pointing to stuff either achievable or doomed to failure, but Jesus’ purpose was to make us all godlike, and it's only when we truly appreciate what this is about that we can find his mission so overwhelmingly attractive. His understanding of each and every human being, made in the image of God, was that the perfecting ability of heavenly grace by which we develop our relationship with God could so come to fruition in all of us that we might one day ‘know the Father’, as Jesus himself does eternally. This is about a developing relationship, in which each human being gradually and with many ups and downs, so enters into this mystery of the divine as to become ‘like his master’.
Wisdom Literature, of which Ecclesiasticus (15:15-20) is a part, was rather more into the ‘deferred gratification’ category, a black and white affair in which good human behaviour was rewarded in this life or where evil was punished. It appears rather that it’s all up to us, and notions of a developing knowing of God with its frequent setbacks does not really appear, all in all it makes for rather grim reading.
Our study of the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:17-37) works to spell out this crucial difference. We continue where we left off from last week’s Reading. Jesus makes clear that he is not out to destroy the Mosaic law, though anyone who enters into the spirit of Matthew and noticing his increasing hostility towards the Pharisees, great upholders of the law, as they launch their ever increasingly vociferous attacks on him, will appreciate just how difficult it must have been for him to cope with this level of absolute rejection. However, in our Reading we find Jesus bent on developing understanding of the law against those with a rather stonewalling box-ticking approach. He does this by insisting that much more than a ‘done that or not done that’ approach is required, for it is precisely in the daily meeting up with the implications of the law that we come unstuck, rather than in its actual letter. So he looks at the Commandment against killing, significantly so ‘bent’ by Jews throughout the ages, and gets us to think of all those occasions when ‘death’ is in our hearts, as we are angry with relations and friends or indeed enemies. He points out that simply abusing a brother was a criminal offence in Jewish law, and indicates that the underlying feelings we so frequently succumb too are equally as damaging as actual murder. He works over incidents which get in the way of our true worship of God, and suggests a way of dealing creatively with them.
Then Jesus gets even tougher, looking at the question of adultery, something the Jewish authorities took very seriously, as it affected family relations at the heart of the faith; but he goes on to remind the men that most of them whilst not quite in the category of adulterers certainly have sexist and pornographic attitudes to women, views which detract from our full humanity as they see us as objects. That must have come as a nasty shock, and how modern too!
When Jesus remarks about the removing of offending limbs, eyes etc, I don’t for a moment think he meant this literally, he wasn’t a Taliban; but was remarking on the seriousness with which we all need to deal with those things which cut us off from the divine, from his purpose in making us godlike. With this in mind he was very critical of Jewish law which allowed men to divorce unsatisfactory partners for quite trivial reasons, leaving a woman cut off from family and destitute. He spells out the implications remorselessly, going beyond the law by suggesting that simply marrying the discarded woman off was simply to compound the problem, again a very modern appreciation of this all too familiar situation. So he clearly could be very critical of the mosaic law, and found it worked against the design of God for all of us. Ancient people were great oath swearers, suggesting as we know from curse tablets, that they not infrequently were also oath breakers. So such a policy was meaningless for Jesus, and he simply recommended a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No. No doubt Jesus’ teaching hit right at the core of the way of life of so many – as it still does for us today - for for him it was never about simply being right or wrong, but about the intricacies of relationships, our relationships with those we interact with daily, and in so doing form and shape our very personalities, the ‘Who we are’ ; and of course this is at the point at which we meet the divine who knows us intimately. So for all those times when we have ground our way through the Beatitudes longing for the end of teaching we think we know so well, clearly it’s time to reconsider. His teaching was and is revolutionary.
Paul, (1 Corinthians 2:6-10) as we have seen comes at things from a different angle in pagan Corinth, that great centre of different philosophies and cults which were all about the here and now; and he reminds the Christians there that faith in Jesus is a preparation for eternal life. ‘The hidden wisdom of God which we teach in our mysteries is the wisdom that God predestined to be for our glory before the ages began.’ It might all appear rather esoteric, but Paul was clear that God’s purpose for each of us has always been for us to become like our creator and sustainer God through the work of his Spirit. This was a staggeringly different understanding of faith and the divine, which for Jews and pagans was always about the infinite superiority of the divine. The whole point of Paul’s theology of the cross however makes clear that God is on a different tack, what Leo the Great described as ‘A bending down in pity, not a failure of power’, in which God the Father sees his equal, the Son stripped of dignity, even humanity by the world he brought into being, precisely that it might know the Father; and whose entire life’s work was to draw his creation into an ever deeper relationship with God, one in which we too might become those willing to throw ourselves away as he had done for others. The cross makes clear that when God really is God, we have gone way beyond petty gifts to humanity, land, wealth etc., and can only and ultimately live with the self-oblation of the Son.
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