A Matter of the Heart
Purity is a word that few would consider
pejorative; it sits alongside other
words we associate with virtue such as honesty, courage, etc. It is even
more effective as a marketing tool to entice the consumer that you are getting
100% of what you are expecting. The other word associated with this one
is perfection. In a sense, purity is a type of perfection, and when you begin
an endeavor, it is common to hope for perfection.
It is this struggle to be perfect before God that the
Jews turned to the Torah (the first five
books of the Bible). These books contain a little over six hundred laws
that were composed
between 600 and 400 BCE. These laws were extended
to interpretive texts that were designed to help people apply these laws to
everyday life to
keep better
the original six-hundred or so laws in the Torah.
By Jesus' time, some of these laws became impediments to the spirit that
informed them. Like so many good ideas, when people who have lost sight
of why the law exists simply follow the law "because it is the law",
the spirit suffers the ignorance of the law-abiding.
In today's gospel, those whose job it was to
interpret and admonish adherence to the Law (Pharisees and scribes) were
incensed that Jesus seemed oblivious to the demands of the Law. He did
not seem to chastise those among his disciples that did not wash before meals
in violation, not of the law, per se (Leviticus 15:11), but explicitly from the
Talmud, a group of interpretive statements to apply the Law. When
questioned as to why Jesus seemed such a scoff-law we get a two-part answer: You are like the
hypocrites of whom Isaiah speaks "They honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me",
and the spiritual insight that "Nothing that enters one from outside can
defile that person, but the things that
come out from within are what defile."
Jesus' statement in the fifth
chapter of Matthew intends not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, and now he
seems clear as to how the Law is fulfilled:
intention.
The
other day, I had a rather distressing conversation with a man who insisted that
undocumented immigrants should not be allowed to receive any public services
such as education and a driver's license. He said this about the poor entering
our southern border.
He felt quite confident that his
view wasn't obstructed by racism, but that "it was the law". He insisted that acting unlawfully was the fundamental transgression that could only be
remedied
by these people returning to their native country and following the procedure for
properly
entering the United States. He was so focused on the violation of the law that
the broader question of justice seemed to him as a distraction from the core
issue of these folks breaking the law.
The law serves justice, but so many today have it
reversed thinking that if it is a law it
presupposes being just. Needless to say, in recent memory laws that kept blacks
segregated from society, women from voting, and prohibiting consenting adults
who are gay from marrying are examples of laws most would find difficult to
reconcile with concepts of justice.
Jesus understood this insidious tendency to focus on law rather
than justice. This focus provides a false
sense of comfort to those who don't want to deal with the messiness of justice
and opt for the simplistic purity of law. For many Christians, the Bible has become the modern equivalent
to the religious law--studied to discover transgression rather than compassion
in the false promise that by doing so one may become perfect. But
perfection does not lie in the observance of the law, but in its fulfillment as
Christ fulfilled it: love of God and love of neighbor--the two most important commandments
according to Jesus.
The standard of civil justice for us as Americans is
the Constitution, and the standard for Christian justice is love. The
Good News must be received and dispensed from the heart. Reading the
scripture to discover "what to do" is ignorant. We read scripture to
become more like Christ. It isn't so much searching the Scriptures to see
"what would Jesus do" as much as it is searching scripture to see
"what Jesus did". Holy Scripture doesn't interpret itself but
only comes to life in the circumcised heart of
someone who loves aided by the Spirit.
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