Seriously?!
Matthew 5:1-20
Epiphany 3a
January 25, 2015
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
We've been at the gospel of Matthew for some time now and we've slogged through some tough stuff. Any journey through the Bible and even through most of its books will sometimes have us hacking our way through the undergrowth of what seems to be an impenetrable forest. We can hardly see the trees, let alone the forest. It's hard to get our bearings.
How good it is, then, to stumble on a text like this morning's, most all of which is familiar and even beloved: The Beatitudes, parables of salt and light, and the warning about not loosening the Law. We know this stuff. Some of us even memorized some of it. It's known well enough that it can even be spoofed. In the version of the Sermon on the Mount in Monty Python's Life of Brian Brian is preaching to a crowd who can't hear him very well. "What did he say?"
I think it was "Blessed are the cheesemakers".
Aha, what's so special about the cheesemakers?
Well, obviously it's not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.1
So, this morning we'll visit this early part of the Sermon on the Mount and see what it might have to say to us.
One of the things that we run into right away is the phrase the "kingdom of heaven". It pops up five times in these twenty verses, thirty-two times in the whole gospel and nowhere else in the Bible. The phrase belongs to Matthew and no one else. Let's see if we can get a handle on it.
As we know Matthew, Mark, and Luke have many passages in common. In the places where Matthew has "kingdom of heaven", the parallels in Mark and Luke have "kingdom of God". Why does Matthew seem reluctant to use "kingdom of God" very often?
Well, when we read Matthew carefully, we can see that it was probably written for a partly-Jewish readership. Already in Jesus' day, the Jewish people had mostly stopped saying God's name. I suspect it was partly out of reverence and partly out of fear that they might misuse the sacred name. So, instead of saying Yahweh, they said Adonai, which means "Lord". We know that Jesus told people not to swear by heaven, because it is God's throne, or by earth, because it is God's footstool. This gives us a hint that people were substituting heaven or earth for God in their oaths, and that gives us a clue about what Matthew is doing in using the phrase "kingdom of heaven" instead of "kingdom of God". He is either reluctant to speak so directly of God himself or he is respecting the sensibilities of his readers.
That leaves the rest of the phrase, the part that we translate as "kingdom". A number of scholars note that there are many places in Matthew and through the New Testament where the propaganda of the Roman Empire is countered point for point. They also note that in Greek there was no word for "empire" or "emperor". For both of these "kingdom" or "king" were used. The main idea of the phrase "kingdom of heaven" or "kingdom of God" is God's kingdom or empire as opposed to that other empire, the one that has Caesar as its ruler.
But this doesn't mean that God's empire is simply Caesar's empire only with God in Caesar's place. God's empire doesn't work that way. Remember, Jesus told us, "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave..."2. "God's empire" is not simply the Roman Empire with God in charge in place of the emperor.
I think Matthew wrote his gospel so that we could begin to have some idea of what God's empire might look like. It certainly isn't like anything that we would call an empire or a kingdom. I've stumbled onto calling it "God's dream" and I think that will do as well as any translation. Matthew's gospel is about God's dream. It is an invitation to be a part of God's dream. So, as we move through the rest of Matthew between now and Easter, one of the questions we will bring to it each week is, "What is God's dream?" and "What does it mean for us to be a part of it?" Incidentally, if you're interested, this is another version of two different questions, "What is God's vision of the ministry of 1st United Methodist Church?" and "How can we embody that vision in our shared life?" The answers to the first set of questions are the answers to the second.
So what is God's dream like, according to the Beatitudes? What is life like living in God's dream? Well, it's not very much like the life under our current regime.
In the current regime, poverty of any kind is avoided and those who are poor are blamed for their poverty, and exploited. In God's dream the poor in spirit are the owners of that dream.
In the current regime, peacemakers are shouted down and ridiculed. In God's dream they are revered as God's children.
In the current regime, those who are hungry and thirsty for justice are dispised as ignorant of how the real world works. In God's dream, they will feast on justice.
In the current regime, we admire those who are famous for being well-known. We call them celebrities and we follow their love interests and their child-raising adventures. In God's dream, those people disappear into obscurity. Instead, those who are in exile because they love justice more than public opinion come home.
In the current regime, the popular kids are respected and imitated. In God's dream, no one will have ever heard of them. Instead, the ones who discover who God had called them to be and who lived that out, will be admired.
In God's dream, the things that our culture values, the things that we value, are given little thought. Instead values, things, and situations that we avoid are put on a pedestal.
What are we supposed to do with that? Jesus turns our world upside down. Jesus tells us to value what we despise and to despise what we value. I don't think that's putting it too harshly.
You can imagine that Christians over the years have resisted taking this sermon to heart, however much we have claimed to admire its sentiments. We have embroidered samplers with the Beatitudes. We have Precious Moments(r) versions of theme. We are fond of the sentiments of the Beatitudes. But that's the problmem isn't? They are sentimental, but not very realistic, are they? So we look for ways to let ourselves off the hook. Søren Kierkegaard put it best:
...[W]e Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand [the Bible] because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you?3
I know a half a dozen intellectually respectable ways around the Sermon on the Mount and its harsh demand that we "pledge ourselves to act accordingly" and suffer the possibility or even the probability that our whole lives "will be ruined." But let me step around them and see what happens.
If I read the next few verses, the text itself coerces me:
You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.
You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.
"You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste..." How can it do that? Salt tastes salty. If it doesn't taste salty, it's not salt. Salt cannot lose its taste.
Precisely. Salt is what it is. So is light. Salt flavors and light lights. It's what they are. It's they do.
No, says Jesus, it's what we are. We are salt. We are light. It is only with the greatest and most foolish of efforts that we have been able to avoid tasting salty and avoid shedding our light.
This sermon, as most good sermon's do, invites us--or even forces us--into a choice. We can live out the values of the current regime. We can be full, comfortable, and respected. We can be full participants in the great competition for the limited goods that our regime offers. We can hold on to what we have.
Or we can live into God's dream. We can let our light shine. We can flavor the culture around us with the taste of God's dream of a banquet.
It's a simple choice, even if it's not an easy one. It's a costly choice, at least in terms of the things we have been taught to value. But the reward is that we get to be a part of God's dream, get to see it up close, get to see it come true.
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Graham Chapman, John Cleese, et al, Life of Brian (1979), accessed January 24, 2015 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079470/quotes.↩
Matthew 20:25-27, NRSV.↩
Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 201.↩
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