I was speaking on the
train the other day to someone in corporate finance, thinking through its
ethical implications and how ethical values deriving from a Christian vision
might steer engagement. As a result I’ve been roped into a vision day for his
firm to provide a warning about the love of money.
Reading through
the Sermon on the Mount, preparing this sermon, reminded me how hard it is to engage
the absolute demands of Jesus with the detail of many parishioner’s lives and by
contrast how far from being overall prescriptive our Christian faith is. Jesus
indeed was prescriptive but left us very flexible on how we best respond to his
teaching in daily life, though he instituted his Church to be our guide. That
reading from the Sermon on the Mount is actually pretty demoralising: if you are angry with a brother or
sister, you will be liable to judgement… everyone who looks at a woman
with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right
eye causes you to sin, tear it out… Let your word be “Yes, Yes” or “No, No”;
anything more than this comes from the evil one.
Thinking of my
friends in corporate finance - how will they keep their ‘Yes’ to mean ‘Yes’?
Those Classic FM ad disclaimers that go so fast as they make a Yes mean No. The
fine print, through which many of us are made the poorer, and which damages
commercial life by its undermining of trust.
Thinking of those
in charge of UK foreign policy deciding on the best response to international
crises – how can military action square up with the intrinsic pacifism of
Jesus? How can his teaching on turning the other cheek later on in the Sermon
on the Mount be brought into the international sphere.
Thinking of the
medium of advertising, built on catching the eye – how can it be right to put
sexuality so much to the fore in the process of wealth creation? For consumers,
how do we keep faithful to Jesus deluged as we are hour by hour by ads that use
sexual attraction to sell us things?
I bring you some
thoughts on today’s Gospel of the so-called antitheses, in which Our Lord gives
a new interpretation of Old Testament law – an ‘anti’ thesis. Jesus gets us to
look at the old thesis ‘you have heard that it was said…’ and goes on ‘hear now
what I say unto you’. The prohibition
of murder should be enlarged to embrace anger. The prohibition of adultery
should be enlarged to cover lustful thoughts and the prohibition of false oaths
enlarged to avoiding oaths altogether and making your ‘yes’ always to mean
‘yes’.
We should note in
passing what an extraordinary thing it must have been to the Jewish population
gathered on that Mount by Lake Galilee to hear a teacher quoting words from God
from their Bible and then going on to say but I say unto you. What an authority! They didn’t balk at it,
strangely, seeing before them a quite extraordinary and compelling figure. Yet A man who was merely a man and said the sort
of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. C.S.Lewis wrote. He would either be a lunatic — on the level
with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of
Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or
something worse. Lewis
outlines the so-called trilemma Jesus presents to everyone who engages with
him.
We are here this morning to stand, as we just did, and give
reverence to the words of Jesus as the words of God. The Church bids us sit for the Old Testament
and the writings of the Apostles but to stand for the words of Jesus. As Lewis
continued You can shut him up for a fool,
you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and
call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about
his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not
intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a
fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem,
I have to accept the view that He was and is God.
It is this
reduced understanding of Our Lord as a human teacher that we have to challenge
in our day. The insight Jesus gives penetrates right down to the heart, for he
knew, and we as Christians have come to know, that the heart of the human
problem is the problem of the human heart.
This means he
knew and we know our first reading from Ecclesiasticus gets it wrong. It’s far
too optimistic about human beings’ freedom to choose what’s right without the
help of grace. The author’s main thrust is to exonerate God for evil since he has not given anyone permission to sin. Is
that so? How does that compare with St
Paul, not in the second reading but in Romans 7.19-20 For
I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now
if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells
within me.
We have this
morning the unfounded optimism of Ecclesiasticus and the defeating counsel of
the Son of God in his Sermon on the Mount!
Where does it
leave us? The parishioner in corporate finance concerned for honesty? The
politician acting for us to challenge tyranny with the use of force and our
support or challenge of them? Decision making about commercial transactions
that promotes advertisement failing to tell the truth and exploiting our lower
nature?
A few
observations. The ‘better righteousness’ called for earlier in the Sermon on
the Mount is beyond our unaided powers and points clearly to the need for
grace. I remember being troubled in my teenage years by a lapsing Roman
Catholic friend who, taught that to look with lust was as bad as acting on it
started to sleep with a number of his girl friends. No one had taught him about
Pentecost, about how Christ who taught us the right way died and rose and gave
us his Spirit to keep us in that way.
Could we see
today’s teaching as like setting your alarm clock an hour early to catch the
plane for fear of over sleeping? The Sermon on the Mount keeps you alert, on
your toes ethically, by coming so hard at us! Reading one commentary on today’s
Gospel I picked up this advice. ‘The relation of the absolute demands of God to
the relativities of human life is a tricky business. The preacher will need
some sort of ethical methodology like that of the “middle axioms” – just as the
voltage of a high power line has to be transformed downwards for ordinary
consumption’.
Impressed by that
advice I googled ‘middle axioms’, which are
a mid 20th century attempt to transform today’s Gospel from high
voltage down to ordinary consumption. I quote John Bennett: ‘Middle
axioms’ are an attempt to define the directions in which, in a particular state
of society, Christian faith must express itself. They are not binding for all
time, but are provisional definitions of the type of behaviour required of
Christians at a given period and in given circumstances. Bennett
gives as examples of middle axioms for his time as the need of international collaboration in the United Nations and the
maintenance of balance between free enterprise and government control of
economic power.
Like this sermon
a ‘middle axiom’ sets forth suggested Christian "next steps" and,
hopefully, without watering-down the full implications of the Sermon on the Mount.
We move to a
close with a quote from 4th century Augustine, one of the greatest
Christian minds. Give me the grace to do
what you command and command what you will.
Here at Eucharist
is grace. You have heard the commands – they’re tough this morning – now let’s
together look for the grace to be supplied. At this altar the Son of God, Jesus
Christ is to embrace us and makes of himself our Food and Drink. In this way his
high voltage teaching can inspire and energise us in the right way and not
defeat us.
Jesus knows and
tells what’s best for us. In his compassion he’s expert in not making what’s
best for us the enemy of what’s good for us here and now.
Let us reflect
for a moment on our ‘next steps’, on how his word to us this morning from the
Sermon on the Mount can effect our life today and tomorrow.
There is no Word
of God without power.
