In chapter 5, much of what Jesus taught had to do with our relationships with one another, how we treat our fellow humans. In chapter 6 the gear shifts to our relationship with money, and he kicks it off with these simple words about how and why we give. I often here in church-world finance committees and church councils talk about the problem of the “left hand not knowing what the right is doing”, and I wonder if when we say that if people realize that this is exactly what Jesus said we should do: “But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (6:3).

That is not to say we should do accounting poorly in our churches, of course, but we should remember that our left hand not knowing what the right is doing in terms of our giving is a good thing. It speaks to giving freely and without attention being drawn to it. Jesus is calling us to give without strings and with a sense of release. And that release will be a huge theme in this chapter.

As we move into these conversations about money, Jesus will be calling us to release, to let go, and to do the hard work of examining how this pesky thing called money may have more of a grip on us than we’d like to admit. So let these few and simple words here be a sort of prologue or preamble to a robust conversation about money. These words are nice, but Jesus is about to take it up a notch!

Here we move into what may be the hardest teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, maybe even in the whole of the Bible. As we read and study these, remember that what Jesus is doing is getting to the heart of the matter and spirit of the law. This is about getting our hearts, minds, souls, and bodies shaped and formed by the Spirit of God. These are not rules meant to be held over us as mechanisms for religious powers to control us. That’s what Jesus was combatting. These are meant to be liberating, not oppressive.

Each one of these could be (and has been at our church!) a sermon on its own. There is no efficient way for me to outline all of them here, except to say this: Read these verses over and over. Wonder about them. Reflect on them. Meditate on them. Get to the heart of it. What is each one calling you to? Or calling out of you? Jesus is dealing with practical stuff here:  Marriage, lust, commitments, revenge, power structures, and hatred. These are things we deal with every day.

With that said, I want to be clear about one thing: Jesus’ words about divorce here are lacking, and they are lacking in a way that can lead to serious problems. There are a great many reasons why a marriage may need to end, chief among them is abuse in its many and varied forms. Verses 31-32 have too often been used to keep women in abusive relationships. This is wrong. Do not let them be used that way. In no way, shape, or form, does God desire that anyone remain in an abusive relationship.

Finally, Jesus closes these teachings with some really scary words: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (5:48). Perfection? Really, Jesus? Two things about this: First of all, this really does kind of sum up all of chapter 5. It is to say “don’t settle for the just the letter of the law. Get to the heart and spirit of it. Get to what God really and fully desires in us.” To which you say, “that’s not helpful Paul, I can’t do that!” And you can’t. And neither can I. None of us can. Which is what leads to point #2:

The word “perfect” here is the Greek word τέλειος (teleios). It can mean “perfect” but it also speaks to “finished”, “complete” or even “mature”. It’s the same word used when Jesus says on the cross, “it is finished.” Furthermore, the verb for “be” here is in the future tense. Jesus is not saying “be perfect now”. He’s saying be on the journey toward it. Be in a process of transformation into Christ-likeness, work toward your completeness. It is, as we say Methodism “moving on to perfection”. It’s about the journey. So get on the journey! It’s not easy, but it’s good, fulfilling, and liberating.

So Jesus has established that he has come to fulfill the law, and now begins to move into explaining the heart of that law, and this one should pierce us. If this passage is literally true, then I am liable to the hell of fire every time I try to park at Trader Joes in St. Louis Park. But Jesus isn’t looking for mere right action here; he’s looking for right hearts. As I was reading this passage I noticed something I wrote at some point in my life in the margin between the previous passage and this one. It says, “a right heart is the righteousness that exceeds the Pharisees” (Matthew 5:20) accompanied by an arrow pointing toward this passage. Get your heart right, not your mere behavior. That’s the work God would have us do (that is not to say that our behavior is moot and that there aren’t times when a mere behavior adjustment is necessary).

A right heart, that is a heart that seeks to reflect the heart of God is deeply concerned about relationships, even those that only go as deep as inner ring suburban parking lots. A right heart isn’t worried about being right, or having the right of way; a right heart sees all humans, ourselves and the one who doesn’t know how to park as God sees them; not as “fools’, not as anonymous, story-less, heartless robots, but as beloved children of God, created in God’s image, just like you and just like me.

So it naturally follows that when there is discord in our relationships, however deep or shallow, if our hearts are indeed in a pursuit of God’s heart, we will want to reconcile that relationship. Sometimes the nature of the relationship may be such that we cannot contact that person, but we are still called to some kind of work of reconciliation, even if that work is merely confessing something or releasing something to God. And we do this not because our actions or our obedience changes God; we do it because it changes us.

Any step my heart takes toward reconciliation of a relationship, however small, changes me. When we take such actions, we are stepping into the way, character, and nature of God. The motivation must be reconciliation. That’s what God does, isn’t it? God moves towards what is broken and reconciles, restores, redeems, reclaims. As followers of Jesus, we must do the same, not because we’re afraid of God and want to make sure we do whatever God says so we don’t get squashed like a bug; but because we love God and with that comes a love for wholeness, for shalom, in all things.

In a climate like ours today where smarmy, quippy, comments on social media designed to belittle and insult are rewarded, we have a daunting task before us; the task of truly examining what’s going on in our hearts. These words from Jesus here should give us great pause. That person “on the other side” may infuriate you. That’s ok. But we all, myself included especially, must be careful with what we do with that anger, and we must deal with the hard truth that our initial instinct may say something about the condition of our hearts. That person is a human. They may be wrong, but they are a human endowed with the belovedness of God. Have the debate, let it get tense even, but never forget that you’re dealing with a human being.

And, as the old adage goes, “two wrongs don’t make a right… but two lefts make a u-turn.”

I was in youth ministry full time for 15 years, and I found that upon trust being built, one can actually get to a point where teenagers will really talk to you. Time and time again I would have teenagers who would sit me down during free time at a retreat or something and essentially ask, “Paul, I just need to know: how far it too far?” They of course were talking about sexual activity, and this question always made me a little crazy. I never knew how to respond until later in life when I began to more fully see what Jesus was doing with the sermon on the mount.

Their question bothered me, but I couldn’t articulate why. It was a fair question. They wanted to do the right thing and not do the wrong thing. The problem is that what they really wanted was to get as close to doing the wrong thing as they could without actually doing it. Or to put it another way, they wanted to do the bare minimum of the right thing. (And by the way, there is also a conversation to be had about the merits of all this religious obsession with sexual activity versus matters of justice and equity that Jesus seemed to care about more, but that’s not the point here).

What I love about the Sermon on the Mount is that Jesus moves us from merely trying to obey the letter of the law to fulfilling the heart of the law. And he goes so far as to proclaim that he is the one who has come to fulfill it: “… I have not come to abolish, but to fulfill” (5:17). Then he calls us into this fulfilling work: “For I tell you, that unless your righteousness exceeds that of that scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (5:18).

This sounds daunting. Very daunting. The scribes and Pharisees were good, very good, at following the law. But were they righteous? Jesus didn’t say, “unless your adherence to the law exceeds the scribes and the Pharisees…”. He said “righteousness”. I believe the biggest hang-up of the scribes and Pharisees is that they felt they deserved and earned their righteousness by virtue of their adherence to the law. But no one can fully adhere to the letter law. What we can do, however, is capture and be captured by the heart of it.

But this is by no means a free pass to go and live however we choose. Jesus didn’t come to abolish but fulfill the law. The law matters to Jesus. He even says, “…not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished” (5:18). So there’s something in here about the “letter of law”, but it is a push toward fulfillment of the heart of the law, not blind obedience to the letter of the law. The letter of the law guides us to the heart of the law, and it is that heart of it that Jesus then moves into giving.

The following teachings of the Sermon on the Mount are not another set of laws laid out for us to perform in order to get a passing grade. They are a way of living that leads to fullness, an abundance of life, just not for ourselves, but for our neighbors, communities and the world. Remember, it was just moments ago in the beatitudes that Jesus said: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled”. It is not the righteous, but those who are hungry for righteousness that are filled. It is an honest cry to live out that heart of the law, not its letter, for which we should strive.

So fasten your seatbelt. Jesus is about to take us on a ride through some of his most powerful, beautiful, and difficult teachings. May they breed in us not blind obedience to them, but an authentic hunger for them.

Right on the heels of the Beatitudes Jesus says, “You are the light of the world… you are the salt of the earth”. One of the things struck me about this verse recently was this is what Jesus says we are. So often we refer to Jesus as “The Light of the World”, and he is, but here he says that we are that light and we are that salt. We are the ones who are to shine light into the darkness and who are to preserve and bring flavor to the world. The big question is, again, “so what? What does that mean?”.

A friend and colleague of mine once preached sermon unpacking the many implications of what that means and how a first-century Jewish person might have heard it. One of the things she pointed out was that salt was often used in the soil in order to make it more fertile. Think about it: Here is this land- this soil, this earth- struggling to bring forth any kind of life, and mixing salt into it helps it do just that. In that context, Jesus says, “you are the salt of the earth”. In other words, you, people of God, Body of Christ, are the salt that is mixed into the infertile soil of the world to help it bring forth life

The implications of this fascinate me. I remember when I was in college and in the campus ministry of which I was a part there was great pressure to be “salt and light” wherever we went. I remember feeling not inspired by this, but shamed by it. It felt like a biblically rooted way of pressuring people into not being bold with our faith but obnoxious with it. We were to basically to go out on campus to be “salt and light” by the spreading the “good news” that if you have not “accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior”, you would be headed toward eternal hellfire. And this was all done through a very specific and regimented format and formula. While there may be a credible stream of theology along these lines, I just don’t think this is what Jesus had in mind when he called us, “the salt of the earth”.

What can end up being behind this kind of approach to “being salt” is that we’re not actually being salt at all. We’re not trying to be one of many ingredients in a soil designed to bring forth life. With this approach, we, ourselves, are trying to be the very God that makes that life come forth. That is, while maybe well intended, we try to fabricate some kind of spiritual experience for people that only God can create. And for me, it did not bring forth life anywhere. In fact, it was squashing life out of me.

Our job is merely to be the salt. We are merely to be one part of a vast organic system by which the Spirit of God gets a hold of people and brings forth life. That said, this is not a call to spiritual passivity. I am not advocating silence in and about our faith. We need to be bold in our faith, but we need to be sure that this boldness does not cross over the fine line into obnoxiousness. While salt is good and necessary, and while we are indeed called to be salt for the earth, the reality is that too much salt kills. Too much can ruin the meat, can oversaturate the soil, and can raise one’s blood pressure. We need to be the right amount of salt for the soil into which we are to go.

Jesus knew how to be this right amount of salt. The world was perishing, but the world was a good place, a place God created, a place worth preserving. And just as Jesus called us to be the salt of the earth, so too was he. So he became just that. He went down into the earth to preserve it, to sustain it, to bring it back to life. Jesus went down into the earth to be salt in order for the earth to become an atmosphere where dead and dying things could come to life.

When Jesus calls us “the salt of the earth”, let us remember that he modeled it for us. He became that very salt himself. To be the “salt of the earth” is to lay ourselves down for one another. It is to see one another as God sees us- beloved, beautiful and worthy of preservation. So let us go into the earth and be salt for its soil, trusting that we are among many other ingredients which, by the power of the Spirit, bring dead and dying things to life.

So Jesus opens his famed “Sermon on the Mount” with what we call “The Beatitudes.” I love the Beatitudes. Always have. There is a certain poetry to them in their repetition that woos me into mediation more so than learning. GK Chesterton once wrote “the poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that Splits.” That’s how I feel about the Beatitudes. The more I try to understand them and fully grasp what they are teaching, the more confused I get. But when I simply try to step into them, observe them, and look around in them, as I would the inside of a grand cathedral, peace washes over me like baptism.

Many years ago, early in my pastor days, I had to teach a study on the beatitudes based off of a brief Sermon on the Mount series we were doing at church. I remember sitting in my office immersed in various resources, staring at a blank Word Doc and resenting the blinking cursor before me. Every blink felt like God looking at me saying “so? how d’ya like me now?” I had nothing. How does one teach this? I decided to come before the group of 8-10 parishioners and have us each take one verse to read out loud. Upon reading the passage I simply asked, “what did you hear through these words?” It took an awkward minute to get things going but we had a beautiful 60-minute conversation about hope, peace, trust, and grace. I don’t know that anyone walked out with theological insights, but I think we all walked out with a deeper sense of God’s activity in our lives.

I don’t think the Beatitudes are intended to be understood, studied, and even taught. Every now and then there are words in Scripture that, to me, feel more divine than others. That is not say that the others are any less true or worthwhile. It is only to say that every now and then words creep in that transcend us, that go beyond anything our brains can fathom. If we let those words simply penetrate into us and live and move in us, they can then actually form us more than teach us. The beatitudes are such words.

From here he will launch into his teaching. We’ll see what that brings in the coming days, but as we do, may the heart and spirit of these words weave their way through those teachings for us.

“Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’” (Matthew 4:17,NRSV). If you ask me, here Jesus sounds like his street-preacher cousin, John. My earliest recollection of this kind of talk came when I was young and Superman II came out. I’ll never forget Zod and his two cronies taking over Metropolis, and as cars and taxi cabs flew through the streets, there was this one lone man wearing a sandwich board which read, “The end is nigh”.

I had no idea what that meant, but for some reason whenever I read these passages of Jesus or John the Baptist saying “repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near” I see them wearing such a sandwich board. I’m kinda thinking they weren’t, but that’s what I see. Maybe it’s just me but rhetoric like “repent for the kingdom of heaven is near” sounds like an ending, like it’s all over, like a “what was your favorite life on earth moment”. It’s important to remember that the kingdom of heaven is not an ending but a beginning.

The question is, “what does it all mean? What exactly is Jesus saying here?” Scholars have debated this one forever and will until… the end of time. I think a big piece of understanding this is in the word “near”. The NRSV says “has come near”. The NIV says “is near”. The King James says, “is at hand”, and Eugene Peterson says in The Message, “is here”. I don’t know about you, but depending on what translation you read, there are some important, but subtle, differences in where exactly the “kingdom of heaven” is. “Near” and “here” are not exactly the same thing.

“Near” makes it sound as though it has not quite arrived, whereas “here” and “at hand” make it sound like it is indeed here, within grasp. The Greek word used here is ἤγγικεν (ēggiken). It means “to come near” and is in the perfect-active-indicative” tense, which means it is a completed action. It is to say that the kingdom of heaven “has come near”, that it is has completed the task of “coming near”. Near means, as the King James indicates, within grasp, “at hand”. It is not “near” in the sense of waiting for someone to arrive at your house who is “near”, but still a half mile away. It is “near” in the sense that they are at your door, and it is up to you to answer. It is “near” in the sense that the coffee pot is “near” but I need to get up and walk into the kitchen to get it if I want coffee. Which is why Jesus calls us to “repent”, to turn around and come to it. The kingdom of heaven is as near as it can get on its own. So “repent”, come around to it, wake up to it, shift your gaze toward it and come to it.

And so there are these fishermen, busy at work, and Jesus comes saying, “come follow me” in the context of this “repent” business. The text says, “immediately they left their nets and followed him”. In his book Three Months with Matthew Justo Gonzalez asks the question “how would I change my life if I knew that the reign [kingdom] of God was coming tomorrow?” (p. 21). This is a good question but a dangerous one. It’s good because it reminds us that there is something much bigger than our “nets” in this life. We need to be reminded of that and live more fully into the “kingdom of heaven” rather than any “kingdom of this world”.

But I find it a dangerous question as well; it reminds me of Paul’s admonition to the Thessalonians when he said “…But we urge you, beloved, to do so more and more, to aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we directed you…” (1 Thessalonians 4:10–11 NRSV). To behave as though God’s kingdom is coming tomorrow can lead us into irresponsible reckless living rather than radical revolutionary living.

And with that in mind, I counter Gonzalez’s question with a question: Hasn’t the kingdom of God already come? Aren’t we living in it right here and right now? Isn’t the reign of God available to us at all times, in all places and with all people? Are we not strangers implanted in a strange land to be vessels of God’s love, peace, and truth, and in so doing, builders and expanders of God’s kingdom?

The kingdom is here in our very midst, so while we are called to reorient our lives, we must be careful not to “leave our nets” too quickly. The Kingdom of God is in the nets- those nets have a purpose. They are providing food and part of someone’s vocation. And it is in this sense that the kingdom of God is indeed here, all around us. It is in the cube at in the drab non-descript office, it is in the classroom at Aquila Elementary School, it is in the firehouse across the street, in your children’s playroom, on the mattress at the homeless shelter, in the hospital room, on the UPS route, in the movie theater ticket office, and, yes, even in the debate on a special called General Conference of the United Methodist Church.

God’s activity in this world is all around us, everyday, in every breath we breathe. So may we all wake up, open our eyes, turn around and see that kingdom of heaven has come near. The sacred, the holy, the kingdom of God, has come, is coming, and will continue to come on earth as it is in heaven. It’s closer than we think.

So in chapter 3 Jesus gets baptized. John says he’s not worthy to do it, but Jesus insists and he does it. Upon being baptized, Matthew 3 tells us, “suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased’”. Appropriately God names Jesus at his baptism: “My Son, the Beloved”. One of my favorite things about baptizing babies is the moment before I actually baptize them, and I get to look into their eyes and ask, “do you know that your are God’s beloved? And that in you God is well pleased?” And every time the look in their eyes tells me that they know it more than I do about myself. The waters of baptism name us: beloved.

Immediately following this baptism, this naming, Jesus heads out to the wilderness to fast and ultimately to be tempted. I’ve often heard it said that this passage shows us that “Jesus was tempted in every way that we are tempted”, and that from that we are to take great comfort. It never really helped me. Deep down I’ve always asked, “to what degree was he tempted?” How tantalizing were the ways in which Satan tempted him? The deal with the bread is compelling, but to the others I imagine Jesus responding with a resounding “enh”.

What does happen, however, is that in each one of these temptations is (As Justo Gonzalez points out in his book Three Months with Matthew) an attack on Jesus’ identity. That makes sense. I have a hard time imagining Jesus being tempted by kingdoms of the world, but getting him to doubt his identity as God’s “beloved son in whom [God] is well pleased” matches up with the root of all temptation. That is, at the root of all sin is bowing to something other than God, looking to get life, to get our “okay”, our value and worth, from something other than God. We are all starving for life, vitality, worth. And the world is filled with things claiming to be able to give it to us. But the reality is that the only place we can get life is from the creator, giver and sustainer of life. And that creator, giver and sustainer of life calls us “beloved”. Could it be that we choose to bow to things other than God when we forgot that we too, like Jesus, are God’s children in whom God is well pleased? In that is life. Real life. And because that is who I am, I can then freely see all others whom I encounter as such. Because I am a child of God, I need not look to others to be filled, but can begin to see them as God created them. Because I am a child of God, others must be treated by me as God’s beloved. This is who I am, and this is who you are, and there is nothing we can do to make this more or less true.

So we fast forward a lot of years- presumably about 30. The infant Jesus has dodged the massacre of Herod, grown up and is now about to start his work. But before he does he comes to John the Baptizer to be baptized. But that’s only five of the 17 verses in this
story. What about the other 12?

They can sound peculiar. So much so that the temptation is to fast-forward right through them to Jesus’ baptism. Let’s not do that. After all, these are some big words. So let’s look at those, and I’ll let you wonder about the meaning of Jesus’ baptism.

John is out in the wilderness baptizing, calling people to “repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near”, and we get this note that what he’s doing is fulfilling a Hebrew Bible prophecy that one is to come and prepare the way for this. Immediately after this note, we get a description of John: He “wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist…” Stop right there.

Let’s go back to 2 Kings 1. Here we meet a prophet called Elijah. Elijah is the one who “never died”, but was swopped up into Heaven (2 Kings 2:11), and is said in Malachi to be the one to come back to call the people to repent (Malachi 4:5). Well in 2 Kings 1 someone asks about Elijah and the people describe him in this way: “A hairy man, with a leather belt around his waist” (2 Kings 1:7-8). Matthew is making John the Baptizer an Elijah. And what Elijah will do, among other things, is speak truth to power. He will call out of the sin of the people and of the religious system to prepare the way for the coming kingdom of God.

And that’s exactly what John does in verses 7-12. The people are out in the wilderness with John being baptized because the system has excluded and marginalized them. They are shamed in the temple (if they’re even let in), and so they head out, away from it all to repent, and they do so under the leadership of this wild but captivating character named John. When the authorities get wind of this, they head out there too.

As they approach, John goes off on them. There’s is a lot going on here, but one of the reasons these words are important is that all of them will be echoed later by Jesus. Matthew is doing two things in this passage: One, he is (as he will do throughout the Gospel) point out ways that Jesus is the Messiah. We see this in the naming of prophecies. Calling out John as an Elijah is to also call out Jesus as the Messiah. But, two, he’s also setting us up for the kinds of things the Messiah will say and do, almost like a prologue. Jesus will continually go after the religious powers of the day. Watch for these same kinds of words from Jesus later in the Gospel.

But before we get too haughty: As we see Jesus (and John) going after the religious powers of the day, may we remember that as protestant American Christians, our churches and their broader systems are the religious powers of today. What might John and Jesus have to say to us?

This is a horrific passage. It speaks to the absolute horrors that can come with absolute power. Upon hearing of the birth of the “King of the Jews” (a description of Jesus which will frame his life, mind you), Herod feels his power is threatened and orders all children two years old and younger to be slaughtered, instituting what we call today, “the slaughter of the innocents”. It’s awful, and before we dismiss it as 1st-century “culture”, we should remember that the same kind of maniacal, paranoid leadership can exist anywhere at any time, no matter how overt or subtle the manifestations of it may be.

I have to admit, though, that in this case, I too often read this story selfishly. I read it through the eyes of someone who needs Jesus rather than through the eyes of Jesus himself. What I mean by this is that I read it and breathe a sigh of relief that at its end, Jesus is ok. Jesus survives. As one who needs Jesus, I finish the story feeling good that he survived.

But how would Jesus hear this story? Yes, he escaped, but untold thousands of children did not. Jesus was the child Herod was after, yet he survives and thousands of others don’t. I think this story must have crushed the heart of Christ. In Matthew 19 he will warn us, “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs”. Jesus loved children and for untold thousands of them to die in pursuit of his life must have crushed him. How precious they must be to him. It also presents a curious paradox in the Gospel story: Thousands of children’s lives were lost in the pursuit of the one who will lay down his life for our sake.

As we read this story, it’s okay to feel a sense of relief that Jesus survives. We need him to. But let us never forget the lives that were taken. We must remember that the Gospel comes to us not just at the cost of the life of Christ, but at the price of untold thousands of innocent children as well. It’s a horrific thought, but it’s there, and it crushes the heart of God.

As thousands of children still die every day at the hands of oppressive and disordered systems of power, may we redeem whatever we can out of this story to do what we can, by the power of the Spirit, to dismantle those systems. May we Methodists fulfill our baptismal vows to “resist evil and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.”

The reality that many want to turn away from today because of its immediate political implications is that the Holy Family found sanctuary in Egypt. Later in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus will say those famous, guiding, and piercing words: “…Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40, NRSV).

May we work with God in defending, protecting and drawing in the world’s most vulnerable, innocent and marginalized, rather than putting up barriers for them. Let us never forget that the Gospel is not about us, but about all of us.