February 12 2023
Matthew 5:43, 6:1-8,16-34
It seems as if this winter we have had a lot more springlike days along with an abundance of rain which means that everywhere I walk the ground squishes under my feet. Personally, I don’t mind the mud but what I do mind is a muddy dog named Mazy. This past while she has set a record on how many baths she has had to take in one week. Normally we give her a bath once a week usually in the evening, but with all the rain and the mud, sometimes bath time is simply anytime the dog comes in the house. It really doesn’t take a genius to figure out when a bath is needed, it’s when you see muddy tracks across the carpet, or when there are dirty streaks across the dogs blanket or it could be the smell of putrid, rotten, muck that has soaked some little dogs coat. When such evidence is found, no matter if its morning, noon or night, somebody is going to get a bath. It usually is not too hard to figure out that the bath was a necessity when the water in the tub begins to look like a cesspool. So, this distinction between a dirty dog and a clean one is a pretty easy one to determine.
In life there are all kinds of distinctions that we make that are similar to clean dog or dirty dog. Some are easy to figure out whether we are hot or cold, whether the milk is good or expired, or whether the house is too dark and we need to turn a light on. But just how do we know whether something is common or whether something is holy? This distinction is simply not one that most of us can easily make perhaps because most of us just never have to make such a decision. Yet, as followers of Jesus we eventually will end up having to think about just how we can define what it means to be holy, after all, the prayer that Jesus teaches us has us pleading for the name of our Heavenly Father to be holy. To be honest, most of us probably have never considered just what this weird word,“Hallowed”, even means because, you know, we don’t use this word a lot in our everyday conversations. What we are asking for in this petition is simply that we might be people who make the name of our Heavenly Father, holy. Sounds simple enough doesn’t it? Yet the minute we begin talking about things being holy we then have to define just what does it mean for something to be holy. Perhaps the easiest way to figure out what it means to be holy is to think about what is not holy, kind of like knowing that the opposite of clean is dirty. So, just what would you say is the opposite of holy? Well, if we think about the Temple as being a holy place then all other places could be considered to be not holy, or better, maybe just plain common or ordinary.
This idea of what is common or ordinary then can be thought of as just what we find out in the world. So it should come as no surprise that in our teaching for today from the fifth and sixth chapters of Matthew that we hear Jesus speak about the people of the nations, the common ordinary people of the world. I believe he does so in order to describe that which is not holy so that we can better understand just what is holy. We first hear about the people of the nations at the end of the fifth chapter where Jesus speaks about love how if we love those who only love us, what reward do we expect to get? And if we greet only our brothers and sisters what more are we doing than anyone else? Do not the people of the world do the same? So, what Jesus is getting at is that what is common and ordinary is that people love those who they know will love them in return and they really want to love only those who are like they are, their own kin, or family.
Jesus goes on to explain, in the sixth chapter of Matthew, that when the people of the nations pray they pile on a lot of empty jargon because they think that they need a lot of words in order to be heard. Seems a little odd doesn’t it? Well, the last reference to the people of the nations is found at the end of the sixth chapter, the thirty-second verse, where Jesus tells us that the people of the nations busy themselves seeking after what they are going to eat for dinner, what they will drink with said dinner and just what clothes they will wear when they show up for dinner. I think Jesus has given us three little snippets of the common, ordinary, life in hopes that we will pull them together to see just what exactly is going on. The people of the nations are frantically going about searching for the necessities of life. They live by this maxim that when you love somebody you do so with the expectation that they show a little love in return. So, when they love God they expect that God will do something to show his love for them in return. They pray to him praying a lot of words in order to figure out the formula, the right combination of words that will convince God that they are indeed people who love him but theirs is a love which expects love in return which means that they love God only so that God might bless them with what they desire.
Now that we have some idea of what is common when it comes to loving others, we turn our attention to just what is meant by being holy. It makes sense that we might look to what the Pharisees were doing since they considered themselves, holy. They believed that they were holy because they had incorporated the practices normally found within the Temple into their everyday life. The Temple was naturally a place of prayer, and it was a place where the offerings for the poor were collected. It was at the Temple that the yearly fast associated with the Day of Atonement could be found to be strictly enforced. So it comes as no surprise that Jesus speaks to these three actions, the giving to those in need, what is also called the giving of alms, the practice of prayer and the practice of fasting. In all three of these actions, Jesus points out a similar problem associated with all of them which was that the Pharisees used these practices to draw attention to themselves. At the beginning of the sixth chapter, Jesus tells his followers, in the second verse of this chapter, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before others in order to be seen by them…”, When the followers of Jesus gave to the poor they were to, “sound no trumpet before them as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and the streets, that they may be praised by others.” Further, when Jesus teaches his followers about prayer he first warns them, in the fifth and sixth verses, that they were not to be like the hypocrites who, “…love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others…”. Here again we see a pattern developing when the Pharisees practiced these holy behaviors. We should not be surprised then when Jesus goes on to tell his followers, in the sixteenth verse, that they should, “not look gloomy like the hypocrite, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting might be seen by others.”. We have to wonder just what Jesus is getting at by continually pointing out that the Pharisees loved to draw attention to themselves every time they practiced their holiness. The answer is that far from being holy while doing these actions they were instead being quite common. They felt that by doing these holy practices of giving to the needy, praying and fasting that they were showing love to God and thus they expected that for doing so they could get what they desired which was to be seen as greater and better than everyone else. These Pharisees thought they had worked out the right formula, the doing of holy acts, which would unlock the favor of God so that they could get what they treasured most, an outstanding reputation among their countrymen. In doing so they had taken that which was holy and used it for a common purpose.
So we are left wondering if these actions in and of themselves are not holy then just what is holy? The answer is that God alone is holy. We look to God and ask, just what does God do that is radically different from the common way of doing things? The answer is that God loves with a holy love. Jesus teaches us that it is God who, “makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.”. You see unlike the common understanding that when we love somebody we expect that they love us in return otherwise what is the point, here is God who loves those who seek his justice as well as showing love to those who oppose the work of God at every turn. God is the one who does not discriminate on whose land he blesses with rain. He blesses both those who are good, those who bear the image of our good God as well as those who are evil, those who come against the will of God. By simply looking at the sun and the rain we discover that our God is a God who loves with no expectation of receiving anything in return for this love. What Jesus describes here about our Heavenly Father is yet another universal truth. Just like every person in our world is indebted to God for the life that they have and just like everyone knows the basis for the justice and righteousness that God expects is what they would want done to them, here too is another universal truth, that God loves each and every person, no exceptions.
This then is holiness, this very different love of God, who loves with no expectations in return, a God who loves those who are nothing like him, those who are unjust and evil. So, in order to make so the name or the reputation of God is held to be holy, it is up to us to love others with a holy love. This is how we bear the image of a holy God out to a common, ordinary, world. It is up to us to demonstrate to those around us that there is a radically different way that we are capable of loving and we know this to be true because we have experienced such love ourselves. Jesus tells those who desire to follow him that they are to, “…love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.”.Here, Jesus connects our holy love of all we encounter to the blessing he spoke of in the fifth chapter of Matthew, the ninth verse where he states, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”.Now, it is a curious thing that in both cases what is at stake is our status as sons of God. We often want to expand this blessing by saying that it applies to the children of God so that our sisters in Christ are not excluded however there may be a good reason as to why the blessing is said to be that we are known as the sons of our Father in heaven, regardless if we are male or female. That reason is that it was the sons who received the inheritance from their Fathers. So, what is implied when we love God by upholding his reputation as being holy by loving others with the same holy love which he first loved us is that we stand to receive an inheritance in the age to come.
The difference between what is common and what is holy then begins to become very clear. The way of common love is to love God with the expectation that God will return the favor and give us what we desire. In doing so, what we have done is to make God a means to our ends, in essence holding God to be less to us than that which we desire. When the Pharisees practiced their holy actions they did so in order that through their love of God shown by their care of the needy, their prayers and fasting what they hoped is that they could receive what they treasured most, an outstanding reputation among the people of Judaea.The common love is a love which focuses on earthly treasures, treasures which do not necessarily need to be valuables that can be held in ones hand like money or goods, but instead people might treasure being famous, or wise or athletic. When God is merely loved to get what people treasure most it means that what is treasured most is most certainly not God.
Holy love, on the other hand, concerns itself with the very reputation of God, because to those who love with holy love, they treasure God above all else simply because they are keenly aware that God first treasured them above all else. To love with a holy love is to love God simply for who God is and not for what God does because this is the way that God loves us, loving us because we are his and not for anything we might be able to do. In this way, God speaks to our greatest longing which is that all of us desire to be treasured simply as the people that we find ourselves to be right at this moment. Instead of expecting God to bless us with what we desire in the here and now, we should instead choose to love God for who he is, the God who treasures us. In response to our loving of God in this way, God gives us the promise of an inheritance of glory in the life to come. It is this hope of a future inheritance that marks us out as our being the very sons of God, those found worthy by God to receive future glory all because we shunned earthly treasures in this life. This ties in so well with the way Jesus spoke about us as being blessed people because when he did so in the early verses of the fifth chapter of Matthew, these blessings began when God blessed us with his very self, coming to us in our mourning over the fact that we deserved death because we were too poor in our spirits to accomplish the good that we knew to do. From the start of our life with God then, the blessing has always been God himself who, as Isaiah writes about in the fifty-seventh chapter, the fifteenth verse, “is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy.” He is the God who dwells in, “the high and holy place but also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to give new life to the spirit of the lowly, to give new life to the heart of the contrite.”. This is the true blessing of God, the God who while being holy is yet still to be found with us who know our lowly state. Jesus throughout our teaching for today speaks of the way God blesses us, again and again. In the fourth verse of this sixth chapter of Matthew, Jesus tells us that our, “Father who sees in secret…”, will reward us when we give so that only our Heavenly Father knows about what we do. This is a promise Jesus gives us over and over, a promise that is ours when we pray in secret to our Heavenly Father and when we fast so that only our Heavenly Father knows that we are doing so. Our Heavenly Father blesses us in his watching but also in his searching of our hearts. Jesus teaches us in the eighth verse that our Heavenly Father , “…knows what we need before we even ask him.”. It is our Heavenly Father who knows what food we might need, that which we need to drink when we are thirsty and the clothes necessary to fill our closets with. God, far from being distant, is intimately connected with every person’s life. The reason God involves himself with the mundane, little details of our lives is none other than he treasures us. Just as we know instinctively that what we find most valuable we watch and guard over with our greatest intent, so too this is the way that Jesus describes how our Heavenly Father, watches over us, searching our hearts and providing all that we need. The reason why we find ourselves anxious and worrisome even if we know this about our Heavenly Father is that we simply do not have a great enough faith in what he is able to do.What I believe Jesus is alluding to here is something he taught about earlier in this chapter, found in the twenty-fourth verse where he teaches us, “No one can serve two masters, for he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”. Now, where this speaks about us not being able to serve God or money, the word here translated as, “money”, is mamonas. This is a word with ties to the word, “Amen”, and it means that thing which we trust in. So, it speaks to anything that we might put our trust in whether that thing is money, or whether it is our own smarts. All these things we put our trust in are earthly devices which means that they are all prone to fail at some point. This of course affects our faith because how can we fully trust something when we know that it is at some point going to give out on us. So what happens is that we approach God with that same apprehension, afraid to fully trust our lives with his goodness. What we have forgotten is that God is like nothing else that we might encounter on earth because he is in heaven. God is not common; no, he alone is holy. His love will not fail us for his love for us is eternal. Therefore, we must not trust with a little faith but instead we can give our whole lives to him knowing that in doing so God will call us his sons and daughters. Through faith in our Heavenly Father we can give our whole lives to him just as Jesus, his only begotten Son, first gave his life for us. Knowing this let us despise the things of this world and be fully devoted to our holy God who loves us always! Amen!
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