Matthew 5: 13-20
Steve Lindsley
March 13, 2011
There is the story of a small church in a small town one fall during election season. In the front lawn of the church, in the grassy area near the edge of the road, were two signs, side by side. One was the church marquee; the other was a cardboard sign stapled to a wooden stick. The marquee was placed there by the church elders to spread the gospel; the cardboard sign placed there by the county’s Board of Elections to let residents know the church’s fellowship hall was a polling place. The marquee read: Our citizenship is in heaven. The cardboard sign read: Vote here. (Lionel Basney, An Earth-Careful Way of Life, Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 1994, pg. 161.)
Two signs that had nothing to do with each other, but two signs that, in a sense, had everything to do with each other; the deeply theological message they jointly and unintentionally conveyed: Our citizenship is in heaven. Vote here. Folks, you couldn’t have planned it better if you tried!
It’s a paradox, of course – heaven and earth, divine and human, being in this world but not of this world. It’s a paradox that you and I will dive head-first into this Lenten season. For the next seven weeks we’ll be looking at what is referred to in some circles as “Kingdom-Living.” And it’s a paradox. It’s a paradox because at its very heart lies an important assertion; one that will serve as a common thread throughout all the Lenten sermons, one that acts as the foundation of Jesus’ entire gospel message. And it is this: when Jesus speaks of the “kingdom of God,” or the “kingdom of heaven,” he is not just talking about the afterlife. In fact, in a much larger sense, Jesus is referring to this life on earth, right here, right now. Remember the prayer Jesus taught? Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, ON EARTH as it is in heaven. Earth is where God’s kingdom comes to fruition; heaven’s just what he’s comparing it to.
Now let that soak in for a minute, because I imagine if you’re like me, that sort of thinking is pretty different from what you were brought up to believe – that God’s kingdom is in heaven and only in heaven, and our goal is to get out of here and get there as quickly as possible. But that’s not the case, is it? And don’t take my word for it – listen to Jesus himself. Nowhere else in scripture does Jesus make the case for the kingdom of God on earth more emphatically than the 5th and 7th chapters of the gospel of Matthew – what we have come to know as the Sermon on the Mount. This will serve as our scriptural home for the next seven weeks, as together we dig deep to find out just what this “kingdom-living” stuff is all about.
In today’s verses we find Jesus telling the crowd – and us – who it is that we are. We are the salt of the earth, he says; we are the light of the world. He then goes on to tell us who he is not. He is not, in fact, a “law-abolisher.” Rather, Jesus says identifies himself as a “law-fulfiller.”
That word “law” has some heavy connotations for us, some of which aren’t really what’s meant here. So it’d probably be good to mention that the Hebrew word for law used throughout the Old Testament is torah. And Torah was much more than a code of conduct – the Ten Commandments and the hundreds of other laws that fill up books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy. See, to speak of torah is to get at the essence of relationship, which plays such a critical role in the Hebrew faith – relationship of the people to God, but also relationship of the people to each other. Torah laws were not simple “do’s” and “don’ts.” They were the foundation of God’s very being and action in the world.
But the problem for these people – for the crowds that were gathered on the hill that day – is that somewhere along the line they got things mixed up. Rather than focusing on who the laws were pointing to, the people became fixated on the laws themselves. In other words, instead of “fulfilling” the laws, as Jesus came to do, the people only worried about “following” the laws. And that is something else entirely.
Just ask the scribes and Pharisees. In Jesus day, they were experts at following the laws – all 613 of them! They devoted their educations, their livelihoods, their entire existence to observing the rituals of the faith in meticulous fashion. They were viewed by everyone as the most pious of them all. And yet Jesus calls for a greater righteousness from the rest of us:
For I tell you,
unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees,
you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
You know, I’ve always thought Jesus’ request here was a bit unfair. More righteous than the scribes and Pharisees? How could God ever expect that of us – we who aren’t special in any holy sort of way, we who haven’t dedicated our lives to knowing the scriptures in and out, we who couldn’t tell the difference between a verse from Leviticus and one from Deuteronomy? How could God ask such a thing of us?
But see, that’s what happens when we view “kingdom-living” as nothing more than simply following rules. Jesus wants us to do more than that: he wants us to fulfill them. Think of it like this: two cars pulled up beside each other at a stop light. In one car is a driver who stops because that’s what you do when the light is red. It’s not like she just learned this or anything, but she’s a bit more sensitive to this particular driving regulation ever since that car wreck last month – a wreck that occured because of the red light she ran. She doesn’t want that experience again, and she can’t afford any more points on her license. And that is why she stops.
The lady in the car next to her also stops, but for a totally different reason. She stops because she knows, intuitively, that this is what she needs to do to protect not herself, but her young infant child strapped in a car seat in the back. Ever since her baby was born she’s been much more aware of her driving and surroundings; to the point where she doesn’t really do it because “it’s the law.” She does it not for herself but for the precious life in the seat behind her.
When we fulfill the law, as Jesus came here to do; when we engage in kingdom-living in the way Jesus describes it, we’re not just doing it for ourselves. We’re doing it for those around us – the community of faith of which we are part. By its very nature, kingdom-living is communal living – realizing that we all are tied to each other, responsible to each other, beholden to each other. Contrary to every TV preacher you’ve ever heard, every religious tract you’ve found in the public restroom, the Christian journey is never a solo excursion. It is a road trip!
And that’s why the Sermon on the Mount is so radically different from any sermon we’ve ever heard before. Because it’s not dealing with the question, “How do I get to heaven when I die?” No, it’s tackling a much more important issue: “What kind of life does God want us living on earth?” For a long time, Christianity has done a pretty good job of emphasizing the heaven part of the equation. And that’s not a bad thing at all, of course. Heaven matters. But so does our life in the here and now! And what Jesus seems to be telling us is that there is plenty of glory going on right here and right now; if we'd only take our eyes off the clouds in the sky to look around us and see it. Living in God’s kingdom and fulfilling the law is not something we have to wait to do when we die. We can start right now!
Jeff Cook, a philosophy teacher at Northern Colorado, recounts a story from his childhood where he accidentally threw a rock through the window of a neighbor’s Buick. He never owned up to his mistake, even when his neighbor confronted him about it. When his family moved a few months later, he said his last memory of his childhood home was driving away and looking out his window at the broken window of that Buick, still parked in his neighbor's driveway.
Years later, he said……
….a photographer friend of mine did an art show featuring some broken items transformed. The first picture was of a bus with a shattered windshield, and the picture brought me back to that alley and my neighbor’s Buick. Looking at the picture, feelings of guilt from my past flared up in me, and then the slide changed. The new photo was not of a bus with a brand new windshield like I expected. Instead, it was a picture of all the broken glass carefully collected, dyed and reassembled in an elaborate and colorful mosaic. The piece was beautiful, far more impressive than a replaced windshield. Someone had removed all those shards of glass in turn and envisioned a future for them all. (http://issuu.com/relevantmagazine/docs/relevant49, visited on 3.8.2011.)
That, my friends, is what the kingdom of God on earth looks like! It is all things made new, laws not simply followed but fulfilled, righteousness that exceeds not just the scribes and Pharisees but our wildest dreams. All our brokenness, all our sin and guilt and shame, picked up like tiny shards of glass, given new color and meaning, and painstakingly, joyfully put back together. It’s just like it was before. And it’s nothing like it was before.
Our citizenship is in Heaven. Vote here. Get used to the paradox that is kingdom-living, my friends. Because it’s not about living so we can one day be with God. It’s living as if we’re already are. Because we are! Thanks be to God! AMEN.
Steve, have you read the book The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard? It really opened my eyes to what kingdom living really means.
Posted by: Bryan Thompson | March 13, 2011 at 12:06 PM