Epiphany 5, Year A: Matthew 5:13-20
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
February 9, 2020
Jonathan Hanneman
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets;
I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” – Matthew 5:17, 20
I’ve spent my entire life in the Church. I was born on a Tuesday, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my mom and dad had already carried me to a service the following weekend. By the age of three or four, I was in Sunday School each week learning about the Bible. I never spent any time in public schools. Instead, I attended Christian schools throughout my entire education: kindergarten, elementary school, high school, college, and even my first round of grad school—not to mention my last three years in seminary.
The churches I attended until I was in my late twenties had different services both Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings along with yet another service on Wednesday evenings, and I was at all of them. Each of my schools had some form of chapel or Bible class pretty much every day of the week. We memorized individual verses and even entire passages of scripture.
I was a master at “sword drills,” a kind of speed challenge in finding obscure verses in the Bible. Although I wasn’t a religion major in my first round of grad school, nearly all of my friends were studying for their Master of Divinity, so I picked up a substantial amount of even more information about the Bible at every meal. I knew doctrine. I knew systematic theology. I knew Biblical and church history. If it was Protestant church-related—or something involving the errors of the Roman Catholic Church—I probably knew it. I’ve been soaking in the Bible and theology my whole life. While I have some substantial differences in how I understand and apply scripture now compared to then, I’m still very grateful for that deep and thorough education.
However, despite knowing all those things, I had a big problem. When I was 26 or 27, I started to see a Christian counselor. I was stuck emotionally and spiritually, and I was desperately unhappy. But my counselor, Rob, had an insight that started me on a path to change. He pointed out that despite having a huge amount of knowledge about God and the Bible, my heart—my ability to actually practice what I knew—was extremely small.
That gap between knowing and doing was a major source of my discomfort and unhappiness. My light was essentially trapped under a bushel basket, and just like you’d expect from shoving a flame under some wicker, that basket was starting to smoke and burn. I needed to integrate my everyday life with my knowledge in order to have a chance at internal peace. Rob challenged me to start applying what I knew, to begin to realize my inner world though external action. Slowly, and with his continuing encouragement, I started making changes to my life, and I began to feel less stuck. Almost twenty years later, I’ve come a long way, but I’m still working on that internal growth, that integration of knowledge with genuine, loving action.
I wonder if that wasn’t part of the point Jesus was trying to make in the second half of our Gospel reading today, where he says he didn’t come to abolish the Hebrew Scriptures but to fulfill them. I’ve always thought that statement meant that Jesus was lining up with all the promises the various Hebrew prophets had made concerning the coming Messiah, that he was proving himself to be the Son of God. That may be true, but I think I’ve been missing the main point.
What if “fulfilling the law” has less to do with matching up with all the ancient predictions and more to do with simply living. What if Jesus was trying to do for his people what Rob was encouraging me to do?
Sadly, Christians have a long history of denigrating the Law, the Hebrew Scriptures. But here, Jesus obviously supports observing it. In Romans, despite his conversion, Paul still tells us that the Law is good. The New Testament writings support the Law, so despite longstanding theological traditions, the Law is clearly not a problem. The problem is that people were either unable—or in many cases simply unwilling—to fulfill the Law.
The concept behind the word “fulfill” suggests maximizing something’s capacity, like filling up a bag in the bulk section or inflating a balloon. Think about when you have a bulging tire. There may be nothing wrong with the structure of the tire itself, it’s just that the inner tube has lost air pressure for some reason. Maybe it has a puncture, but maybe it’s just a change in the weather. Either way, if you top it off with some air, you can at least find the source of the problem, patch it up, and keep on moving. However, if you decide to drive on that flat tire, allowing it to lose more and more air, eventually you get to the point where the rim of the wheel begins to cut up not just the tube but the tire itself, rendering the whole thing worthless to anyone.
What if Jesus was essentially saying, “Look, we’ve got great tires—I’m just here to pump them up!” God’s law doesn’t fail because people don’t know about it. It fails because we don’t inflate it—we don’t fill out what we know—with the reality of how we live.
It isn’t hard to see that American Christianity has some serious problems. Some suppose it’s just trouble with our image and try to solve them by shining up and modernizing a few things here and there. Others see it as a structural issue and want to toss the entirety of organized religion out the window. It isn’t that Americans don’t know about God. A majority of our citizens claim to be Christian. Frankly, it’s hard to turn around in popular culture without running into some sort of religious reference. People know that “God is love.” Even if they don’t believe it, most Americans have heard that “Jesus died for our sins.” Knowledge is not our problem.
Our problem is that information never saved anyone.
I knew plenty about God. I knew the Bible inside out. If you even mentioned a chapter in the New Testament, I could have told you its general thematic elements. But that information couldn’t free me from my internal hell (or from the expectation of being condemned to an eternal one). It wasn’t that my tire was bad—my information was sound. The problem was that I’d been driving through life without ever even thinking to inflate the tube. I had never taken action to fill up—to live out—what God was asking me to do.
Knowledge of God and of Christian teachings isn’t the problem in America or in the Church. The problem is that so few of us actually act on what we know. God created us to be physical beings, so it’s only natural that God expects some sort of physical response. (That’s essentially what today’s Isaiah reading[1] was all about!)
I feel like I should pause here to note that our actions don’t “save us” any more than information does. For those of you from a more traditional Protestant background, I am not trying to promote a “works gospel.” Jesus’ Gospel of the Reign of the Heavens is not that if you say the right words, know the right information, or do the right thing, God will like you. The Gospel is that God loves us and we, collectively working, are the Reign of the Heavens.
Just look at the beginning of our Matthew passage. Jesus is addressing a crowd of Galileans. Most were probably Jewish, but Galilee was one of the more culturally and religiously diverse regions of Israel in that day, so we can’t rule out the possibility that there were people from other faith practices and traditions there, too. Despite that, he doesn’t say to them that when you “do this” or “think that” you’ll somehow find favor with God. No, look at his verb tense: “you are the salt of the earth.” “You are the light of the world.” He doesn’t say that you could someday become salt or that you might have a chance at being light. You are—right now, present tense.
If you have the remotest interest in hearing from Jesus, he’s telling you that you already are a child of God. You don’t have to shed your body and fly up to heaven. Nor do you need to burn away your fleshly essence, purifying yourself through the fires of hell or purgatory. You are—sitting here right now, listening right now, just breathing right now—a child of God.
You are a child of God. Jesus is simply encouraging us to imitate our Parent, to act like what we are. Knowledge can be helpful—it never hurts to learn more about God and God’s love. But knowledge without embodied action is utterly useless. Going back to our tire analogy, having more knowledge is like having a larger tire: it requires more work and more air to fill it.
Maybe you think you don’t know anything about God or the Bible. Maybe your “tire” is small, like one on a bicycle. That doesn’t mean you aren’t filling it up on a daily basis. Are you rolling forward? Then there’s air in your tire. Just pump it up if you find you need a little more.
Is your knowledge so vast that you’re more like a tractor tire? Then get to work. Don’t just sit there thinking, “boy, I sure have a nice, big tire.” A tire without air is a waste of rubber. No matter how large or small our tire/knowledge is, we need to “fill it up” with action. “Just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead.”[2] Jesus is asking us to embody the reality of God’s love and goodness.
So how will you “inflate your tire”? Where can you fill up the reality of the Reign of the Heavens? What can you take action on today? Where can you show love? Where can you display kindness? Can you think of a way “to loose the bonds of injustice…undo the thongs of the yoke [and] let the oppressed go free[3]”? How can you “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[4]”? What shadows around you need the light of God to shine in them? Where might your salt need to sting a little bit to close up a wound or aid in healing?
Whatever you find to do, with encouragement from one another and by the power of God’s Spirit, we can all put some air in our wheels and get rolling toward the Reign of the Heavens.
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets;
I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”
[1] Isaiah 58:1-12
[2] James 2:26
[3] Isaiah 58:6
[4] Isaiah 58:7