Every
weekday morning I drive my daughter to school before coming to my office. We’re supposed to leave the house at 8
o’clock, but it’s usually closer to 8:10 before we finally get breakfast eaten
and shoes on, and the backpack and the lunches, the laptop (mine, not hers),
the clarinet and the music stand, and whatever else we need for the day ahead
into the car, and pull out of the driveway.
Then we have to make our way through the streets of Petaluma, crowded
with other people in their cars, buses, motorcycles, trucks, and even trains,
all of them in just as much of a hurry as we are to get where they are
going. Finally, we have to find a place
in the crowded drop-off zone in front of Risa’s school, to pull over and safely
let her out onto the sidewalk.
The
thing that makes it possible for us and everyone else to make that journey
every morning is that there are rules.
There are the ones that are codified into state and local ordinance, the
traffic laws and the rules of the road.
And then there are the unwritten rules that each person makes for him or
herself about how far above or below the posted speed limit it is okay to
travel, or how long one should wait at a four-way stop when the driver you
thought had the right-of-way isn’t going ahead.
I wish I could stand here and tell you that I
make that drive every day in a state of perfect composure, and that I have
nothing but patience and respect for those people who don’t interpret the rules
exactly the same way I do. I’d like to
say I have a generous tolerance for drivers who are more cautious and conservative,
or more bold and aggressive, than I would be.
But the truth is that Risa gets to see a side of me on our morning drive
to school that she might never see otherwise.
She gets to hear words come out of my mouth that she might otherwise not
have known were in my vocabulary.
I’m
not proud of this, and Risa likes to point out, when I lose my temper with
another driver, that it is for doing something I might have done myself, and
probably have. As a person who is
supposed to stand for peace, love, and understanding, I’m well aware that my
own morning commute is a daily betrayal those ideals. I can’t really claim that if everyone drove
to work the way I do, we would all find ourselves in the Kingdom of God.
And
this is true even though, on the face of it, I’m not breaking the law. Which brings us to the point I’ve been
getting to, which is that the rules by themselves are not enough. Not if we want more out of life than the bare
minimum standard of getting to school in one piece, and close enough to
on-time. Not breaking the law is not
going to be enough if we want a world where we live together in real harmony
and contentment. That will require
something more, something that goes beyond what we do on the outside to how we are
on the inside.
In
the reading from Deuteronomy this morning, we can see the emergence of this
kind of understanding of the law. It is
not something arbitrary set up by God to test his people’s obedience. The law’s real purpose is to change
them. It is to convert them into a
people who live together in a way that really is worth living. The law is the constitution of a different
kind of nation, where human existence is more than a miserable brutish struggle
that leads directly to the grave.
Keeping the commandments of God, Israel will achieve a kind of greatness
not measured by the extent of her territory, or the wealth of her rulers. Their own little slice of land will be enough
for them, because of the greatness of the life they will live there, in unity,
prosperity, justice, longevity and peace.
Jesus’
proclamation of the Kingdom of heaven is radically new, but is built squarely on
Israel’s vision of the best way to live.
It is a call to conversion, to receive the abundant life envisioned in
Deuteronomy, only present and active now in the person and teaching of
Jesus. Today’s passage from Matthew is
really a commentary on last week’s gospel where Jesus says that he has not come
to abolish the commandments, but to fulfill them.
Now
it might seem from what he says next that this fulfillment means adding new and
even more demanding and restrictive rules to the ones already in force. But I think this reading misses the point. I think what Jesus is really saying is that the
kinds of behavior that cause so much needless suffering in the world, and tear
apart the fabric of community, do not come about because people decide to break
the rules. They are really more
pervasive and insidious than that, and the difference between truly egregious
sins and the seemingly harmless little foibles that we secretly indulge in the
privacy of our hearts, our homes, or our automobiles, is a difference of
degree, but not of kind.
Because
both involve a denial of our real interrelatedness, for all of us are equally,
utterly dependent on God. And God has
made each one of us equally worthy of honor, equally deserving of love. This denial is not something we choose to
do—but it is planted very close to the center of our very sense of self, and
the whole structure of our personality has grown up around it. And as Jesus tells us in the gospel today,
the more power it has over our lives, the closer we get to hell.
But
we can choose to admit this, to stop pretending that we’re better than we
are. We can start to pay more attention
to how it works in our own lives. We can
stop blaming other people for our habitual self-inflicted wounds. And we can stop blaming our bodies. All my life I’ve struggled with this passage
about how if your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away. Clearly it’s rhetorical, but for a long time
I misunderstood what kind of rhetoric it is.
I used to think it was hyperbole—that Jesus was exaggerating to impress
on us the severity of sin, and our responsibility for it. But now I
think it’s also irony. It’s a joke,
pointing out the absurdity of self-mortification. Because who in the world ever really stumbled
because of his eye, or her hand?
No,
what we really need to pluck out and throw away are our thoughts, all that
endless cascade of mean little thoughts we have about ourselves and other
people. The ones that tell us what a raw
deal we’re getting, and how much better off the neighbors are. The ones that are always ready to fasten on
what is less than perfect, and so slow to give thanks for the miracle of
sharing this existence. What we need to
tear off and throw away are our self-pity, and envy, our prejudices and power
trips, and fantasies of domination and revenge.
These are the members that get us thrown into hell.
So
we throw them away, knowing they’ll be back.
But we throw them away again, because repentance is not a one-and-done
catharsis, but a life-long conversion. And the more we pluck them out and throw them
away, the less power they have to define us.
At the same time, we start to find ourselves strangely attracted to
thoughts of an entirely different kind, thoughts like “Blessed are those who
mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will obtain mercy. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be
called children of God.”
And
we start to wonder what it would be like to go through the world with that kind
of trust, that combination of confidence and tenderness. And maybe in time we start to see that at the
very beginning another seed was planted in our hearts, one that’s not off center
at all. The shoot that sprouted from
that seed has been growing in secret all the time, and is completely
intertwined with that anxious, grasping, craven self we thought we really
were. Its roots go down deep into the
goodness of life together on the earth. Its
leaves spread high and wide above, to receive the grace that streams from heaven. And the Christ-life sways and dances in all
of us together, not because we follow the same rules, but because we move to
the breath of the same Spirit of love.
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