A
couple of weeks ago, I was walking to the local supermarket to get something
for my lunch. And I’d just left the
sidewalk and was crossing in front of the vehicle entrance to the parking lot,
when a large white diesel pickup pulled in from the street behind me and to my
left, and came to a stop. I was already
halfway across its path, so I just kept walking. But a moment or two later, I heard a voice, now
over my right shoulder, calling out “Hey, buddy!--“ Now you tell me—has anyone, anywhere, ever
really benefited from a conversation that began “Hey, buddy--”? Anyway, I stopped and turned to face the
stocky man with a mustache and short gray hair peering at me through the window
of the white truck. I guess I was
supposed to have altered my course or pace of walking in some way, because he proceeded
to give a lecture in the most condescended tone, on the importance of
“situational awareness” and of working together and using our common sense to
insure that everyone gets where they’re going in the swiftest and safest
possible way.
And I
stood there and listened, feeling the fury that began to boil in my chest and the
steam-pressure building in my head. But
somehow, by the skin of my teeth, I managed not to explode. When he had finished, I simply said, “Indeed.” And we looked at each other for a second or
two, and when it was clear that nothing more was forthcoming, he drove on to
look for a parking spot and I walked into the store.
But I
was angry and humiliated, and still unsure what exactly I’d done to provoke
him. I told myself he was probably just having
a bad day, or maybe was someone who goes through life with the experience that
others are holding him back and getting in his way. And I wish I could say that I softened toward
him, and let the whole thing go. But just
last Thursday I was walking again through the same parking lot and it all
flooded back again. And I had a moment
of vivid fantasy in which I told that man, “My ‘situational awareness’ tells me
I’m minding my own business, and I’m being hassled by an arrogant [insert your
own church-inappropriate epithet here].”
Of
course I’m still glad that didn’t happen.
It would not have accomplished anything, and Jesus, in the Gospel of
Matthew tells us that saying to someone, “you fool!” is comparable to murder. Because anger, when it comes out as personal
insult, and verbal aggression, only breeds more anger, and the escalating spiral
of reaction can easily end in violence.
Now, I don’t think that Jesus is saying
here that we shouldn’t have feelings, such as anger, or lust, or that we must
feel guilty because we do. But he is
asking us to be responsible for those feelings, and to handle them with care,
because they are powerful forces that can lead to disastrous consequences.
Jesus
isn’t thinking here mainly in legal terms. He is not adding a draconian new section to
the religious penal code. His main
point is not that losing your temper or ogling somebody will land you in hell,
but that mental, and verbal, and physical violence are all on the same
continuum. Murder is not radically different
from calling the guy in the parking lot a jerk; but just a further step along
the same road. So it is not enough
simply not to kill people, and then to imagine that we have satisfied God’s
minimum requirements, and therefore everything is all is right with our
souls. We need to attend to the
seemingly insignificant “lapses” and minor misdemeanors in our thoughts and
conduct toward others, because they partake of the same attitudes that produce
adultery and murder.
And
while I recognize that the exaggerated rhetorical style of first-century moral
exhortation can sound harsh to our tender modern ears, I want to emphasize that
the point is not so much to make us fear punishment after we die, as to
confront us with the real practical consequences of the things we think and say
and do here and now. To illustrate what
I mean, I’d like to focus in on one little of piece of today’s long Gospel
lesson, for closer study, the verse that says: “if you insult a brother or
sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will
be liable to the hell of fire.” Not there
are words in the Greek text of this passage that are there for a reason, and
have been lost in this translation, so let me tell what it literally says:
“whoever calls his brother, ‘Raká’, (which is a Semitic word, meaning ‘dummy,
fool,’ will be answerable to the Sanhedrin.
And whoever says to his brother ‘you Moré’ which is a Greek word that
means ‘dummy, fool,” will be liable to the Gehenna of fire.”
So
the first obvious question is, why the redundancy? Why use two different insults in different
languages that mean the same thing? And
why talk about two different punishments for the same, relatively minor, insult? Here I think it helps us to know that most
scholars agree that the Gospel of Matthew was written in a congregation of
Jewish Christians which had also begun to incorporate Gentiles. It was, in other words, a bilingual and
bicultural community of faith. And you
could say that for someone who was culturally Jewish, who might be inclined to shout
“Raká” when he got angry, the worst imaginable consequence of bad behavior
would be to be called before the Sanhedrin, the supreme council and court of
the Jewish nation. Which is,
incidentally, what the Gospels say happened to Jesus at the end of his life.
But
in the Greek cultural and religious world, where you would call someone you
thought was stupid “Moré,” there was a well-established belief in the
afterlife, and in places of reward and punishment awaiting the human soul. By the way, there is a Greek word for such a
place, “Hades,” that shows up elsewhere in the New Testament. But Matthew’s outlook is still predominantly
Jewish, and the image he comes up for such a place of torment is on earth, a
spot called Gehenna, which was a ravine outside Jerusalem where they took the
city’s garbage to be burned. So, if you
put these two parallel statements together, they seem to being saying, “Whatever
background you come from doesn’t matter—just think of the worst place you could
end up: that’s the direction you’re heading in when you start to call your
brother or your sister a dummy, or a fool.”
And
I think there’s another reason for this redundancy in the Gospel. Because trying to live in a bilingual,
bicultural community is not easy. It is
not hard to imagine that there were frequent occasions when the attitudes and
behaviors of the Gentiles in Matthew’s congregation seemed idiotic to the
Jews. And vice versa. The words “Raká” and “Moré” might have been
on the tips of people’s tongues fairly often.
Which is why Jesus does not stop at instructing us to be careful what we
say, lest we all end up together in a hot, smoky place that smells like
garbage. He continues to urge on us the
paramount importance of reconciliation.
This
is the true meaning of the righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and
Pharisees—that we do not merely stop short of killing each other, or even of
insulting one another, but that we learn how to make peace. Because we are going to have anger and lust
and all kinds of other perfectly natural human impulses, but our task in
community is to learn how to deal with those impulses without them erupting
into road rage, or ethnic slurs, or sexual harassment. And it is to learn how to repair the damage,
as far as we are able, when our impulses get out of hand. Which requires God’s help, the kind of help that
Jesus came to bring us, when he took a stand for the inherent worth, in the
eyes of God, of every human being, no matter how despised and marginal in the
eyes of disdainful human beings. Because
when we can prevent our aggressive, instinctual passions from blinding us to
each other’s essential dignity, there is still hope for our own.
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