Monday Morning Mail, 30th June 2014

Good Morning!

Yesterday, we continued with our series on the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus started the sermon by declaring who is living life right – that it's the people who are spiritually bankrupt and who hunger and thirst for righteousness. But that raises the huge question of how it fits in with the Old Testament Law. After all, plenty of people at Jesus' time would think that the people who are living life well are the ones who keep all the rules.

It's still a popular idea in the Church today – lots of people think that living well is about keeping rules. But what Jesus says next blows that idea out of the water.

He doesn't do it by ditching the Law. After all, it had been given by God himself. He does it by showing that the Law itself was never about keeping the rules. When God says "Do not murder", he's not just inventing a rule about murder; the way the OT uses it shows that it's actually about valuing other people and their lives.

When we try to reduce the Christian life to a set of "do"s and "don't"s, we completely miss the point. The Pharisees make it all about rules, and they kept them, but they didn't get close to God by keeping them. The point is that the Law shows us what God is like, and hence what we should really value, and what we should avoid.

This virtue ethics (to use the technical term) is very different from rule-based ethics. If we try to live by rules, we can maybe get there if we set the standards low enough. With virtue ethics, we're never completely there – we can always be more loving, because the standard is perfection (Matt 5v48). It means that we can see that we don't stand a chance of living up to it – we are spiritually bankrupt – and yet we can hunger and thirst after righteousness. We can long for God to transform us and make us more and more into his image, knowing we can improve, but we'll never get there in this life. Our hunger will be satisfied, but only partially at the moment.

Jesus picks on six rules; we just looked at the first three yesterday.

"Do not murder" - the principle here is that we should genuinely value other people. We should not hold them in contempt – even the kind of contempt that calls them an idiot. It means that having right relationships with others is an urgent priority, and we shouldn't bear grudges against others.

"Do not commit adultery" - the principle here is that we shouldn't treat people like objects. Jesus says that "looking at a woman to covet her" is basically the same thing. We should not treat other people as sexual objects, or look at them like that, and should do whatever it takes to avoid it, even if it means quitting a job, giving up internet access, or even physically harming ourselves (Jesus is giving an extreme example to make the point).

"The husband must give the wife a certificate or divorce" - the principle Jesus draws out is that we should be faithful, and we should fight to make marriages work. Divorce is permitted, as is remarriage after divorce, but divorce should only be an absolute last resort.

All of this should bring us back to the cross – to the God who values us so much that even though we are his enemies, he sent his Son to die in our place; to the God who never ever treats us like objects, who is faithful to us and to his promises even when we are unfaithful, who loves us, forgives us, and keeps welcoming us back as his children. To him be the glory forever!

God bless,

John