January 29 2023
Matthew 5:17-20, 7:1-12
When you consider the symbols of the Christian faith I believe that the table is second only to the symbol of the cross. I mean, don’t you find it interesting that most churches have some kind of place to eat in addition to their place of worship. I was thinking about this the other day because a friend of mine had posted on Facebook an auction notice for a church. The auctioneer said that the church structure had an attached cafeteria. I thought to myself, that’s odd because I would have called such a space a fellowship hall. I guess you could call these places that so many churches have built a cafeteria but I’m not sure such a word captures what is happening when followers of Jesus get together and eat. I mean, cafeteria just conjures up images of high school lunch hour and trust me there wasn’t a whole lot that was holy about that place. So, yes, fellowship hall seems to have a better ring, doesn’t it, yet if any of us were pushed to explain just what it means to fellowship one might end up with a lot of different answers. Perhaps the best way to describe it to say that to fellowship with someone else is to share life with them and what better way to share life than to eat together. It is not hard to make the leap then that fellowship is about communing together which helps us to understand that the fellowship hall is really an extension of our worship where we share in communion at the Lord’s table. We might say that it is because we find our life through what Jesus has done for us that we then can have a life with which we can share together. So, yea, calling it a cafeteria is just not going to cut it!
So, this theme of eating together is kind of a big deal in the church and if you study the scriptures, it always has been. The way our scripture for today connects with eating is through this idea of righteousness. Jesus tells us that unless our righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, we will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Now, if we remember who we are, that we are the people who have been blessed by God, then we might recall that Jesus tells us that, “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be satisfied.” Matthew records this in the sixth verse of the fifth chapter of his gospel account. When we listen to what Jesus is saying here it does seem odd, doesn’t it, that Jesus uses this idea of eating and drinking to describe how we are to long for righteousness to prevail in our world. Even the promise, that we are going to be satisfied, is a term used to describe how we feel after we have wiped out the all-you-can-eat buffet. Today we might say that we are stuffed! So, there is an obvious connection that Jesus is making between eating and drinking on one hand and righteousness on the other.
What causes some confusion on our part when trying to figure out how righteousness and eating might be connected is that we often understand righteousness as an inner moral disposition. While this is true to a point, in Jesus’ day, to state that one was righteous meant that one felt that when the resurrection happened, they would be the ones who would be among the fortunate ones who would be raised to life instead of judgment. This trying and figuring out just who would inherit the age to come was the source of a lot of discussion even before Jesus arrived on the scene. So, it is interesting that the blessing that is coupled with the blessing of the satisfaction of those who hunger and thirst for righteousness is the blessing which states that it is the meek who are blessed for they shall inherit the earth. These two blessings, then, have a very similar focus, with the righteous ones being the very ones who will inherit the earth, living life in the age to come.
It just makes sense then that it was the Pharisees who felt that it was they who were the righteous ones, the ones who would end up in God’s new graces when the age to come arrived. They marked themselves as being the righteous ones through their strict adherence to the Law and they even went further, as they also adopted the holy practices found in the Temple and incorporated these into their everyday life. Their thinking was that if they would be holy if they shaped their life by the holy ways of the Temple. Can you imagine the shock on these Pharisees faces when this one called Jesus, who had to be at least a prophet of God, spurned the likes of them and instead went and ate and drank with not just sinners but tax collectors as well? Jesus was hanging out with people who were obviously going to face the fierce and dreadful judgment of God when the new age arrived. So through the behavior of the Pharisees we begin to understand this connection between eating and righteousness. To hunger and thirst for righteousness is a longing to be found feasting at the table of the righteous. You see, it is not enough to simply have enough to eat or drink because that would be to do so without any certainty of one’s future. No, what a person really wants is to eat and drink knowing that they do so as an enactment of that banquet spoken of by Isaiah, as found in the twenty-fifth chapter, the sixth through the eighth verses where we hear Isaiah prophesy that, “on this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, a rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And the Lord of Hosts will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all the nations. He will swallow up death forever…”.This follows with what Jesus teaches us about being the blessed people of God, that those who mourn will be comforted, meaning that those who realize their own inevitable death will find the Spirit of God there with them, in that moment, being for them their comfort, giving to them new life. How very similar is what Jesus tells us here to what Paul teaches us in the fourth chapter of the book of Romans, the seventeenth verse, that we share the faith of Abraham, the one who believed that it is God, “…who gives life to the dead, and calls into existence those things which do not exist.” So, it is those who are trusting God to give them a new life, a life where all our past debts have been forgiven and forgotten, these are the ones whom Jesus calls the meek who will inherit the earth just as we are told that Abraham did.
Are you beginning to see how very different is the understanding that Jesus had about righteousness than the Pharisees? The Pharisees focused on the outward appearances much to the neglect to what was lurking about on the inside of who they were. Yet lest we get the impression that just because we are claimed to be righteous through faith that there is nothing more for us to do we need to take heed of what Jesus warns that he did not, “come to abolish the Law and the Prophets”, and further Jesus tells us in no uncertain terms that, “until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.”. So, to all those who want to state that they live by faith and not works, Jesus says, think again. The same Law that was strictly adhered to by the Pharisees is the same Law that Jesus tells us cannot be ignored. If we just take these words of Jesus by themselves we may be rather discouraged at the thought of having to try and live by the some six-hundred different regulations found within the Law and this is why we must see this teaching found in the fifth chapter in Matthew to be one set of bookends with the other being found in the seventh chapter. I believe that these two teachings belong together because both speak of the Law and the Prophets. Here in the seventh chapter we discover that the Law and the Prophets can be summed up as being, “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.” Once again, just like when Jesus spoke about the forgiveness of our debts and this use of debts was something that could be universally understood, so too, here we have this command of Jesus which can also be universally understood. The standard which the Law and the Prophets is built on is whatever we wish others to do to us. What this is saying is that all of us quite instinctively know how we want to be treated; this is what unifies us as people. This manner of how we desire others to interact with us is something which I believe we treasure in our hearts. It is not a leap then to understand that the Law really is written upon our hearts because the very foundation of the Law is what we treasure within our hearts, this way that we desire others would treat us. This is where the whole basis for justice and righteousness is to be found, right here within all of us, this desire we have of being treated appropriately by others.
When we begin to grasp that the basis of the Law resides within every human heart then we can also begin to unravel what Jesus meant by stating that,
“unless our righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, we will never enter the kingdom of God.”. The Pharisees thought that only their small little group of Law lovers would be the only ones left standing when the Day of the Lord rolled around. But if the foundation of what the Law and the Prophets speaks about is found right there within each person’s heart, then I believe that we are really going to need a bigger table. The exceeding righteousness is the exceeding number who will be accounted righteous when they treat others in the same manner that they themselves wish to be treated. I believe that Jesus captures the essence of this golden rule in his use of the word, “meek”, for those who will inherit the earth. This word we translate as being meek is a Greek word which is to convey a person who is kind, gentle and forgiving. Isn’t this the way that most people desire to be treated? I mean I enjoy when people are kind to me. This word kind is the root of the word kindred, an old word which speaks of family. So when we are kind with each other we treat others as if they were one of our own. And, yes, I am all for people being gentle with me because I need people to go easy with me. And it goes without saying that we all hope that the people we deal with are willing to forgive us because all of us mess up and most of us rarely get it right all of the time. So, yes, forgiveness is another aspect of our relationships that we all desire. Another aspect of this word we translate as being, “meek”, is this sense of strength under control. This is an acknowledgement that all of us are capable of doing something but because of our being transformed by God we have decided to only do those things which we would want done to us. In this way, our strength, what we are capable and able to do is guided and controlled by what we would want done to us.
When we understand that the standard of our behavior is what we would desire others would do to us, does it not just make sense that passing judgment on people is something that we simply should not do? I mean, does anyone ever say, man, I hope these people I’m meeting up with will criticize me and make me feel totally inadequate. No, no one wants to have somebody else go over their life with a magnifying glass pointing out every fault and miscue. Doesn’t it just make sense that the judgment that we pronounce upon another person’s life is going to be the very same standard that we will have to live up to? Honestly, if we want to do something actually constructive we should just take a self-assessment of our own lives and be honest about the ways that we have failed to treat others like we would want to be treated. You see, if we want to share with someone something that is holy and good it is going to be really impossible if we have judged them to be nothing more than a dog. And if we try and offer our little pearls of wisdom to somebody that we have judged to be not worth more than a pig to you really think they are going to be thrilled at what we have to give to them? The Pharisees thought of themselves as being holy people but who really wanted their lifestyle when they were always looking down on everybody they had contact with.
Instead of judging the lives of others we should instead be all about doing what the Law is all about, treating others as we would want to be treated. Jesus teaches us that the one who, “does the commandment to love others and teaches others to do the same will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”. You see, we don’t become greater by belittling others. No, we become great in God’s kingdom by loving others and then and only then teaching others to do the same.
If we stand back and look at our passage of scripture from Matthew for today what we see is a vision of what life is supposed to look like for those who have placed their faith in God, the God who can bring those of us who were dead in our sins into a new life with him. It is a vision which realizes that faith alone is not enough. We must be about fulfilling the Law through our understanding that to do to others as we would want done to us is the entirety of the Law and the Prophets. This means that what we want others to do to us, this is what controls how we use our strength, our power, restraining ourselves from doing anything which we ourselves would not want done to us. So, the image we have is of people who are kind toward one another, always seeking to be gentle in their encounters with every person they meet, people who know just how important it is to be forgiven and to not expect others to always get it right.What we also see is that those who have encountered God in their lowest moment will keep their eyes open toward those around them who are longing for better days, wishing that the world might be at last be set right, and when these searching souls are found they are invited to a meal where their hungering and thirsting for righteousness can be satisfied around the table. Here it can be discovered that the life that seeks the best for others is a life which shares that life with others. This is why this group who has been set right through their faith in God is a fellowship which is ever growing. This group gathered around the table is so unlike the Pharisees who had their small little gathering of people who had judged that only they were the ones who were right with God, the only ones who knew just what was necessary to be holy as their God was holy yet they were also so unaware of who God was that they refused to sit at table with him when he showed up as one of us.
You see, we have to first understand just what is the vision of what God is bringing about before we can figure out the petition of the Lord’s Prayer which is often spoken, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Now, there are several reasons why this petition is not the right translation of the Greek from which it is translated. The first problem is that this prayer is in the middle of a section which ends with Jesus telling his followers that they were not to worry about what they were going to eat because our Heavenly Father already knows that we need food. So, there is no reason for us to pray about food when we are assured that he already knows that we need it. Yes, Jesus does teach us that we are to, “Ask and it will be given to us; seek, and you will find, knock and it will be opened to us.” If Jesus is not speaking here about what we need for our everyday life then what is he talking about? The answer is found in the thirty-third verse of the sixth chapter of Matthew where Jesus teaches us that instead of searching for food we should instead be searching,“for the kingdom of God and his righteousness.” With the kingdom of God and his righteousness in mind then, let us look once again at this petition in the Lord’s Prayer. What we discover is that what is normally translated as being, “daily”, is actually a strange word which is only found here in the Lord’s Prayer. The actual translation is something like the appropriate substance. I think then that what is being asked for is that God take the substance of what we have and make it appropriate to the people who will sit at our table today. In such a request is a subtle acknowledgment that God is going to always be inviting more and more people to our table. We can never be sure how many so we ask God to take what we have and make so that all who cone to eat will have enough. Only in this way can those who hunger and thirst for righteousness be satisfied in a real and concrete way, this is the very reason why we pray this prayer. Only as people experience the abundance of the table which gives us this life will they be willing to yield this life to the one called Jesus whose abundant grace is seen upon the cross. So, yes, the table and the cross they are our symbols not just of this life but the life everlasting. Amen.
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