Untitled Sermon (2)
McKnight
Where to begin? With justice. Justice is the core of the world’s system of appropriate and justifiable relations among people. Behind every attempt to define justice is a standard
Exodus 21:23–25:
But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.
This lex talionis is expressed more theoretically in Leviticus 24:19–20:
Anyone who injures their neighbor is to be injured in the same manner: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. The one who has inflicted the injury must suffer the same injury.
A third expression in Deuteronomy 19:21 is much like Exodus 21 but a bit more succinct:
Show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.
The lex talionis was not just about curbing violence; it was an emphatic requirement of justice
one could infer from his Ethic from Beyond that the entire legal apparatus was only a permission from God rather than the intent of God for his true people
“Evil will become powerless when it finds no opposing object, no resistance, but, instead, is willingly borne and suffered. Evil meets an opponent for which it is not a match.”
Jesus advocates grace beyond retribution and expectation. He does not advocate passivity but active generosity that deconstructs the system because of the presence of the kingdom
The backhanded slap is a gross insult to the dignity of a person.
“if he smacked him, he pays him two hundred zuz.” But, the text continues, “if it is with the back of the hand, he pays him four hundred zuz”
This is how Jesus did respond (Matt 26:67).
This would deprive the person of standard comforts and provision. What Jesus says, at face value, is to strip in front of the person as a means of exhibiting radical distance from social custom. Jesus experienced this too (cf. Matt 27:35)
This approach to a Roman demand, so unlike the violent-minded Zealots, subverts the powerful. This may all have been parodied later by Jesus when he entered Jerusalem on a mule with his followers throwing down their robes—all of this mocking the Roman victory march.
The question every reader of the Sermon must ask is this: Does that world begin now, or does it begin now in private but not in public, or does it begin now for his followers in both private and to the degree possible in the public realm as well?
Away from conflict, toward empathy;
Away from confrontation, toward cooperation;
Away from dogmatic monologue, toward a dialogue of equals.
The present passage cites an explicit Old Testament text (Lev 19:18) and then adds something implied by some (not all) of Jesus’ contemporaries: “and hate your enemy.”
N.T. Wright writes of “a character formed by overflowing generous love.”
It begins when we confess who is our enemy and it ends when we learn to love them as our neighbor
The shocking thing about this passage in the Sermon on the Mount is that we are told to watch what our heavenly father is doing and then do the same ourselves.
Don’t fret and fume and plot revenge. Copy your generous God! Go a second mile, and astonish the soldier (and perhaps alarm him—what if his commanding officer found out?) with the news that there is a different way to be human, a way which doesn’t plot revenge, which doesn’t join the armed resistance movement (that’s what verse 39 means), but which wins God’s kind of victory over violence and injustice.
The Sermon on the Mount isn’t just about how to behave. It’s about discovering the living God in the loving, and dying, Jesus, and learning to reflect that love ourselves into the world that needs it so badly.
He well knew how ready our unbelief would be to cry out, this is impossible! And therefore stakes upon it all the power, truth, and faithfulness of him to whom all things are possible.