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He Heals the Wellsprings of Our Moral Decision Making

6th Sunday : 16 February 2014  : Matthew 5: 17-37

Quite early on in the Church’s life a man called Marcion came up with a bold scheme for making sense out of the Bible. Chop out the Old Testament completely – all that stuff about the tribal vengeance of Israel and the grumpy God who required it wasn’t helpful. In fact getting the Jewish content of Scripture edited out was a good idea anyway – look at how obtuse they had been about Jesus. And while he was on the job, he drastically edited the New Testament, getting rid of most of the gospels, retaining only a highly edited version of Luke, and giving pride of place to a selection of the letters of Paul, whom he thought had completely and accurately understood Jesus.

Maybe we think this is nuts, but Marcion persuaded quite a few people to follow him in a breakaway Church that lasted for several generations. And from time to time we have outbreaks of Marcionism in the Church today from those who tell us that we would be better off without all that blood and guts stuff in the Old Testament, and the ethnic cleansing of Israel’s wars. However, they often then proceed to stand Marcion on his head by telling us that we can do without Paul, and all his sin and judgement obsessions, and just concentrate on the kind and gentle Jesus of the gospels.

The truth is that any attempt to eliminate the Jewish background of the gospel, or to understand Jesus apart from his deeply Jewish faith assumptions, leads to distorted doctrine, and is doomed to failure. Nowhere is this clearer than in this morning’s gospel reading.

Matthew is writing for a Jewish audience, determined to prove that Jesus is the long expected Messiah who fulfils Jewish prophecy, and what is more, he is a second Moses, greater than Moses in fact, and his teaching on how to live the good life with God is even more complete and fulfilling than the Jewish law. It makes the Jewish law make sense more than it ever has.

So having given his hearers that inspiring message we call the Beatitudes Jesus now proceeds to unpack in rather more detail what needs to go on inside a believer if they want to be a righteous person. The problem for us is that the teaching is so demanding that we are inclined to shrink from it, and wonder if we were ever really a Christian. In an age that values the expression of deep and authentic emotion, and thinks that freedom in intimate relationships should reign supreme, it seems deeply unrealistic to ban lustful looks, angry thoughts, name calling and easy divorce.

One of the most rewarding elements of my Wellington ministry was our annual interfaith dialogue with the Jewish Synagogue up the road. The Jewish people there impressed upon me how ethics and right action is at the heart of their religion. It matters more to them than speculation about the being of God, and it is not just a question of high standards of personal morality. Being liberal Jews they were concerned to put things right with the world, to – as they put it – repair the world.

This is where things have got to as the Jewish religion has evolved away from where it was in the time of Jesus. Even so, back than they were very interested in being right with God, and right with each other. They were clear that the great blessing that God bestows on creatures is his gift of the commandments. The religious ethical law that developed out of them wasn’t irksome; it was God’s wise and loving provision of guiding wisdom in all the foreseeable circumstances of life.

Jesus assumes all that, while questioning some of the laws of ritual purity, and then presses on to the issue of purifying the inner attitudes that give rise to some of the more self-destructive behaviours we are prone to. But here we might want to come back at Jesus on a number of points. You ban anger, but didn’t you do your block, and use force to eject the moneychangers from the Temple? Don’t we read in Mark’s gospel of you repeatedly losing your temper with your slow to understand disciples? Can we honestly believe that you never looked at a woman with desire in the days of your earthly life, especially as you surrounded yourself with them in your entourage? And we now understand, thanks to Freud, that while the rational mind is a kind of luminous apex of our conscious mind, it is fed by a spreading shadowy base, an obscure psychic mass on which it feeds, and over which we have little control. Surely the Christian religion cannot realistically be in the business of taming the sub-conscious?

At the heart of this is the question of our emotions, the currents of feeling that run through us all the time, the force field of repulsion and attraction we instinctively feel for others in our orbit, and the power of imagination and fantasy as an influence on our thinking. It is as though there is an artist with a palate of colours on his easel, which he paints on to our rational choosing and willing when it comes to moral decision-making, and that emotional colouration matters a lot in our attempts to be good people.

When Jesus assumed our human condition he entered into every dimension of it. He united his human and divine natures closely to become one single subject experiencing all that goes on in the human condition. His objective was and is to heal all that goes on inside us. Our emotions, our desiring, our passions, our imagining, our teeming unconscious life is of interest to him, and is incorporated into his healing work.

What Jesus did was to experience and express human emotions divinely. He completes and perfects and puts right the disordered jumble of pushing and pulling emotional forces. This did not neuter him into a toned down, thinned out version of a human being. He is in fact the complete human being we long to be.

In him we see, for instance, the distinction and difference between a righteous anger and run away, out of control anger that turns to hate.

I cannot say what went on inside him when he saw a beautiful woman. What seems likely to me is that he would have experienced a holy desire, in which the needy, greedy aspect of erotic love was overridden by the desire to ardently desire the best interests of the person before him. In fact this is at the heart of the sexuality debates going on in the western church right now. Can we break through to a new depth of intimately relating to one another in which we no longer desire to fuse with and devour the other, but instead bring out the best in one another in a manner both playful and unselfish?

Reading today’s gospel passage in that light I see no longer a daunting mountain top prospect I can never climb but rather the road map to the healing and integrating of my desiring, my moral decision making, and my growth towards becoming one of the pure in heart. Maybe we are a work in progress, maybe we have quite a way to go yet, but as Divine grace gets to work on us, especially in our times of prayer, God slowly changes the underlying pattern of our thinking, and moves us in the direction of the way Jesus expressed the fullness of human emotionality divinely.