Faith

Don’t Look, Don’t touch! – Friday, 10th week in ordinary time – Mt 5:27-32

The gospel passage of today will take up the second and third hyper-theses in the Sermon on the Mount. (Refer to http://www.pottypadre.com/heart-of-the-matter/) These are linked to the ninth commandment which deals with the aspect of adultery and divorce.

The mission of Jesus was to bring about a kingdom of righteousness and justice and that is why He wants His disciple’s righteousness to exceed that of the self-righteousness of the Pharisees and scribes. That Jesus has exposed the self-serving interpretation of the Jewish leaders, has been reason enough for them to want to poison the minds of the people and even more to kill Him.

These hyper-theses of Jesus are really the fleshing out of His mandate for the disciples, in the context of living out the law in the kingdom. Jesus wants more from the disciples, more from us. He is not asking; He is demanding it from those who chose freely to be His disciples. Remember He says, “If you wish to be my disciple.”

Jesus wants His disciples to think beyond the ninth commandment.  He wants them to understand that lust kills love. But hang on, lust gets to all of us at some stage in our life and the question you might ask yourself is ‘will I therefore go to hell?’

Jesus’ words here are to be taken strictly in the context of adultery; they do not condemn any and all thinking about ‘sexual matters’ (JBC). A ‘glance’ at a beautiful man or woman does not warrant the severe punishment of hell. However, Jesus does not use the word ‘glance’, but He uses the word ‘look’. Look is a present active participle and is really a lingering look, and here in lies the problem.

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Faith

Give me more! – Thursday, 10th week in ordinary time – Mt 5:20-26

Jesus has clearly taught the disciples that identity comes before behaviour.  The identity of a disciple is to be the salt and light of the world.  Having done that, Jesus now gives His disciples an understanding on behaviour. These are found in the six hyper-theses in the Sermon on the Mount and today’s gospel is the first of them.

What is the point that Jesus wants to make? He wants His disciples to go beyond the law of the Old Testament by deepening and radicalizing it to the original will of God. However, He never moves them in a lax direction; rather Jesus moves us to more, and hence they are called hyper-theses (JBC).

Perhaps it was the mind of Jesus to rectify the inadequate interpretation of the law as interpreted by the Scribes and Pharisees. So His first example is taken from the sixth commandment, “thou shalt not murder” (Exodus 20:13). 

Remember that Jesus did not come to abolish the law but to deepen it and so while He does not diminish the law on homicide He went beyond it. He takes up the more subtle manifestation of the behaviour that leads to homicide; behaviour that we perhaps live out each day.  It is in anger, insult and name calling that Jesus sees the potential seeds of murder.

For Jesus, the essence of murder is when we begin to regard another’s life as useless. The Scribes and Pharisees believed that they were guiltless of such a crime as long as they did not shed the blood of another human. In doing this they missed the spirit of the law. Jesus sends His listeners in a tizzy when He takes the same penalty for murder and applies it to anger and careless words.

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Faith

Revisiting the commandments, stepping away from traditions!  Wednesday- 10th Week in ordinary time-Mt 5:17-19 

In order to constantly understand Jesus as presented in Matthew’s Gospel we need to keep in mind a Judaeo-Christian community that has found itself locked out of the synagogue by the Jewish authority. So while Matthew portrays Jesus as respectful of the Torah, he will not show the same courtesy to the keepers of it who are seen by Jesus as hypocrites.

The Pharisaic halakha with which Jesus was in conflict with, was a collective body of Jewish religious laws derived from the written and oral Torah. It included 613 mitzvot or commandments. The mitzvot were both ethical and ceremonial.

Verse 17 begins with what could only be seen a presupposition. Their religious leaders had already begun to poison the minds of the people against Jesus presenting him as a radical leader. For them He was not really a rabbi for He disregards the law and the prophets. Jesus takes on this slanderous accusation head on. He is clear, He is not here to abolish the law but to fulfil it and fulfil every letter of it.

For four hundred years up to Jesus, the voices of prophecy had been silent. In this void, a group of people know as the Pharisees and scribes become interpreters of the law and in a sense de facto intermediary between God and man.  To the people, these leaders were examples par excellence, men to be followed for their religious piety.

Imagine the challenge that Jesus threw His hearers when He said that the righteousness of an ‘ordinary Jew’ must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees, in order to get into the kingdom of heaven. This would almost seem like an impossible task, yet Jesus came to help people see the law and the prophets the way God wanted it to be and not twisted in ceremonials like the Pharisees had made it out to be. In short, Jesus was here to give them the law as it should be, unadulterated by human tradition.

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Faith

First Description now Prescription – Tuesday, 10th week in ordinary time – Mt 5:13-16

 The intended hearers of Matthew’s first discourse are principally the disciples. So this passage is for you and me, plain and simple. The question being raised by Jesus is this; if we lose our Christian distinctiveness, how can we become Christian again? Jesus does this by giving us two assertions (verses 13 a, 14 a), two examples (13b and 14 b) and one commandment (verse 16). So this is not some suggestion that the Lord is making but a clear commandment (unlike the beatitudes)

Jesus’ instructions in these verses are statements of facts. He does not say you should be the light of the world, he says,” you are”!  In doing so he gives us identity before behaviour. Our identity is that we are salt and light in the world. Knowing who we are, we have clarity of how we should behave.

The metaphors of Jesus have unfortunately to be explained to the modern world. What was once a common sense example is today obscured.  Jesus did not need to give a commentary on the importance of salt or light, the metaphor was clear.  Both these metaphors were both highly valued and important to daily living in the ancient world.

To site an example, the very word ‘salary’ comes from the word salt. Salt was a highly valued commodity and Roman soldiers were paid their salary in salt.  Salt was used for seasoning and used as a preservative in a world that had never imagined a refrigerator.

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Art/ Heritage

‘The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise’ by Benjamin West (1791)

 Benjamin West (1728-1820), an Anglo- American history painter, was hailed the ‘American Raphael’. He lived during the era of the American War of Independence and the Seven Years War. Although born in Pennsylvania in 1728, he settled in London in 1763. Here he received the patronage of King George III and the assurance of the financial support of the Crown.  

In 1779, West intended to execute one of his greatest conceived projects. He desired to rebuild the Royal Chapel at the Windsor Castle. However, sadly, this scheme was abruptly cancelled by the King of England in 1801. Subsequently many of his completed individual paintings, including the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, were lost. After nearly two centuries it resurfaced at an auction in London in 1989.

Unlike popular culture, West in his painting depicts not the Garden of Paradise teeming with natural beauty and peaceful glory but rather draws us to the very heart of this theological, mystical and spiritual subject.

‘Fearfully and wonderfully made’, the first humans are placed into an eternal garden with practically free reign. ‘Eat of all the trees in the garden, save one i.e. ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’’. However in walks the deceiver embodied as a serpent. Confident of the outcome of the snack, he makes no casual conversation. He lures man and woman into a stolen identity, to ‘be like God’ but without God and not in accordance to His will. In this way he shrewdly sets up the humans, or God or both for a confrontation.

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