If we live it, God will come
Wonderings:
I wonder when you have broken the law?
… this one was ad libbed, and I don’t remember what it was.
Reflection based on these wonderings + the readings assigned for the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany.
Isaiah 58:1-12; Psalm 112:1-9; Matthew 5:13-20
Let us speak, and listen, held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God. Amen.
Jesus just told us how important it is to follow the law. And Jesus seems to really mean it, that we should be rigorous in our obedience to the law.
I understand Jesus to be speaking paradoxically—in a way that he knows will make people scratch their heads.
And when we sit with this passage, I think we can see Jesus is also saying that obedience is not enough. Box-checking is not enough. Staying on the right side of the law is not enough. Because God doesn’t delight in rule-following. God delights in justice.
In our Wednesday evening Bible Study, we’ve been developing our practice of reading the Bible in community, reading in context. And we’ve also been practicing reading the Bible for conflict. As in—Jesus is rarely offering wisdom off of the top of his head, as fancy strikes him. He’s usually arguing with somebody. Maybe not directly; maybe the argument isn’t apparent in the snippet of scripture that we read together. But Jesus, in his life and teachings, brings people good news of healing and liberation—good news that is in direct conflict with the dominant political and religious narratives of his time, and of our time.
And I don’t think we can understand the wisdom this passage is offering us unless we talk about who Jesus is arguing with. There’s a clue there in the last line, where Jesus gets a jab in at his opponents. “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” We’ll come back to this, but I invite you to imagine Jesus saying that with a little smirk. With a wink.
The scribes and Pharisees—they’re not bad people. They’re not monsters. But they are people who understand themselves to be righteous, to be holy, to be worthy of God’s blessing because they follow the rules.
Because what Jesus is pointing to is the ancient tension between self-righteousness and the righteousness that shows up in our relationships—in our accountability to the dignity and flourishing of others.
Jesus is inviting us to reflect on the ancient, perennial distinction between a life spent obeying the rules, and a life given in the discerning pursuit of justice.
I have come not to abolish the law, Jesus says, but to fulfil it: to show people what it would mean to follow the law, not for the sake of obedience, but in reverence for the law as an expression of God’s desire for justice to roll down like mighty waters.
We are living in a time when there is a painful gap between the operation of the law and the flourishing of justice. Justice rolls down as but a trickle. We see the law used to punish political enemies: the law as a weapon in a culture war. We see law enforcement agents and agencies doing violence to our communities. In social justice movements we often see people excluded because they don’t check all the boxes, they fail some internal purity test. They’re not righteous enough to be part of the movement towards justice.
We live in a fallen world, by which I mean here that there has never been a time or a place where the operation of the law was adequate to justice, where justice was fully served by legal codes. It was entirely within the law for human beings to be enslaved in this city until 1827—really until 1841, if you include all the loopholes. It’s possible, even likely, that enslaved people worked the land under our feet before Sunnyside was divided into lots, and built up into this neighborhood we love. Some laws do need to be abolished.
We live in a fallen world, by which I mean that whenever people have had the courage to say that the law is inadequate to justice, and the law must be changed so that justice might be done, they have been met with resistance, outrage, and often violence. In 1834, seven years after enslavement was formally abolished here in New York State, there was a gathering of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Lower Manhattan. These were people, white and Black together, who wanted to end the brutality and inhumanity of enslavement everywhere.
And their meeting was disrupted by a mob of several thousand angry white men who were enraged by the call for abolition. The mob came to crack skulls. And this mob then proceeded, over the next 10 days, to burn the homes of the white organizers and to terrorize Black families who had the misfortune to live nearby, in the Five Points district, the area between City Hall and what is now Chinatown. In the words of one historian, the mob “literally tore apart the homes and businesses of African-Americans in the vicinity…shattering windows, destroying furniture, and ripping apart roofs and walls.” (Craig D. Townsend)
The mob did the same at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, the first congregation of Black Episcopalians in New York, and only the second in the country. Around 11pm on July 11, the mob of good Christian men “broke into the church and went berserk. They shattered the stained glass windows…destroyed the candlesticks and curtains, and broke the altar into pieces; they then hauled the pews into the street and set them on fire.”
And where were the forces of law and order? Eventually the state militia was called in to quell the violence, and the police arrested six people: six Black men who had been sitting peacefully in the pews during the Anti-Slavery Society meeting whose call for justice had provoked the mob.
We live in a fallen world, by which I mean that the law has never been adequate to justice, and has often been an instrument of vile injustice.
The Bible occupies a fascinating place in all this. Because the Bible is full of laws given by God—and there are many places where the Bible says outright: all you gotta do is obey, and you’ll be blessed.
And the Bible also includes prophetic voices like Isaiah who give voice to God’s own frustration that these laws have been made into instruments of injustice. The Law commands God’s people to fast at appointed times, and wealthy, powerful people do fast—they even put on sackcloth and ashes, and bow down like a bulrush, so that their piety can be appreciated by all. And they expect to be blessed.
But prophetic voices proclaim God’s distaste for such performative self-righteousness. You’re reading the letter of the law against the spirit of these laws! No matter how diligently you fast, you can’t be whole or holy if you charge predatory interest in your loans, or if you enslave people!
“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” What does justice require? Isaiah asks. The righteousness that shows up in our relationships. “...to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin.”
Jesus lived 500 years after Isaiah likely wrote those words, but he finds himself in a similar situation. There are powerful people who self-righteously follow the law, but who are indifferent to the injustice all around them. And we can imagine the way they responded to Jesus’ teaching and the movement around him. “This guy is a radical! He harbors criminals! He wants to abolish the police. He has no respect for law and order!”
But Jesus says, “no, actually, I don’t want to abolish anything. I’m actually suggesting that we need to be much more observant of the Law. I’m actually a conservative, you see. We all need to be more obedient to God’s commandments—you know, to “share our bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin.” With a wink, with a little smirk on his face.
I want to end with the promise that Isaiah makes, which I always find so moving:
If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.
I don’t think Isaiah is saying that if we orient our lives toward justice, toward the flourishing of our neighbors, that God will make everything ok. “Your light shall rise in the darkness.” There will still be darkness. But if we orient our lives toward justice, toward the flourishing of our neighbors, Isaiah says “the Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places,” will make you “like a watered garden” in the midst of those parched places, “like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.” God will go with you. God will sustain you.
When Jesus says “You are the salt of the earth,” I hear him saying show the world what Isaiah was talking about. Show them the righteousness that brings savor to our life together. If you live it, you find yourself filled to overflowing, like a spring of water whose waters never fail.
When Jesus says “You are the light of the world,” I hear him saying show the world, in the midst of this darkness, in the midst of injustice under the cover of law—show them what justice looks like. Show them. Show them. And your gloom will be like the noonday, because the light of God will shine in you and through you.
Amen.
How we might approach the Nicene Creed, coming out of this…
How many of you have seen the Kevin Costner movie, Field of Dreams?
It’s about a man who has a vision to plow under a cornfield on his heavily-mortgaged farm, and build a baseball diamond. In the vision, he hears a voice: “If you build it, they will come.”
I invite you to say the creed today, trusting in the spirit of Isaish’s promise. That if we live it, God will come. That if we live for justice, the God we talk about in this creed will show up for us and go with us, and give Godself for us.
