On the night of February 6, 1996, three young men drove the country roads east of Tampa, Florida, committing acts of vandalism. The three friends pulled about twenty street signs out of the ground and they removed one stop sign at an important intersection.
The next day three eighteen-year-olds, who had just come from a fun evening of bowling, sailed through that intersection where the stop sign had been uprooted. Their vehicle ran directly into the path of an oncoming 8-ton truck. Those three teenagers were instantly killed.
Within a year the original three “pranksters” were brought to justice and convicted of manslaughter. In June 1997, the three young men stood in orange jumpsuits and handcuffs in front of a judge in a Tampa courtroom, crying their eyes out as they were each sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
It is obviously a dangerous act to remove a signpost on a highway. But it also seems as though human beings try to remove the moral signposts that God has placed in this world for us.
In this next section of Matthew’s Gospel, we see Jesus talking about God’s commandments as signposts to a new way of life and he shines the light of his wisdom and understanding on those signposts. Listen for God’s word to you from Matthew 5:21-37. . .
“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire. So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.
“It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
“Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.’ But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.
In this passage, Jesus talks about four moral signposts. The first signpost Jesus comments on is: “You shall not murder.”
The Jewish scribes tried to protect their people from insulting one another by maintaining that anyone who said Ῥακάwould be answerable to the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council. Ῥακά was an Aramaic word of contempt; some scholars even think it may have been a word of contempt directed at homosexuals.[1] Jesus takes a sterner view of such language than the Rabbis did. Jesus maintains that if you even say to someone, “You fool!” then you will be subject to the fires of hell. And we must remember that the word that Jesus uses here for “hell” is γέενναν and it refers to the garbage heap outside the wall of Jerusalem.
I think if I were to ask for a show of hands revealing how many of us have been guilty of what Jesus condemns here, then every one of us who was honest and discerning about ourselves would have our hands up in the air. As N. T. Wright has said, “If part of human maturity is learning how to recognize your anger, and deal with it before it gets out of control, we have to conclude that most of us are not very mature.”
Jesus urges us here to make proper dealing with anger a high priority. He recognizes that we are going to get angry. Jesus recognizes that we will have anger that will cause disruption in relationships and even, in some instances, land us in court. Jesus’ solution to this problem is simple: deal with your anger quickly. Paul offers the same solution in Ephesians 4:26-27, “‘In your anger do not sin’: do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.”
Jesus says, “Look, if you are going to worship and suddenly remember that a brother has something against you, go first and be reconciled to your brother, then come and worship.” Jesus was talking here about worship in the temple and offering a gift on the altar in Jerusalem. His followers were all from Galilee. So, if they imagined themselves in this circumstance, they would get the point that Jesus was telling them to go all the way back home to Galilee and get right with their brother or sister first, then return to Jerusalem. Jesus was telling an exaggerated story to make a point: getting right with others should take priority, even over worship of God. Even if we have to travel a long way to make things right with a brother or sister, it is worth it. For after all, we cannot worship the Lord properly when we are not right with others.
Then Jesus gives another example. Suppose your anger has gotten you into so much trouble with someone else that this other person is taking you to court. Jesus says, “Don’t let it get that far. Settle the matter with your adversary even before you get to court.”
In each of these examples Jesus is urging us to see that the heart of the problem is the problem of the heart. We must deal with anger in our hearts in order to live in a right relationship to God. How can we deal with the problem of the heart? It seems impossible. But Jesus makes it possible. He dealt with anger in the right way. He took the anger of his enemies upon himself and died under the weight of it on the cross. He can take our anger and vanquish its power through that same cross…
Immediately prior to the presidential debate between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in 1980, columnist George Will happened upon Carter’s debate notes and secretly divulged them to the Reagan campaign. Many people felt like Reagan won that debate, and of course he went on to win the presidency, thus driving Carter from office.
Sometime later Carter was teaching about forgiveness in a Sunday school class. In preparation for that class he searched his own mental catalog to see if there was someone he had never forgiven. Carter immediately thought of George Will. In an effort to deal with that resentment, Carter wrote him a note. As he did that, Carter tried to think of something he had in common with George Will. He thought of a book Will had written about baseball. Carter went out and was able to buy the book for a dollar. He read the book and then finished writing the note to George Will. He told George that he had a feeling of resentment toward him, that he found his book delightful, and that he hoped they would become permanently reconciled.
George Will, in turn, wrote Carter a nice, humorous note. He said his only regret was that Carter hadn’t paid full price for his book.
That just goes to show, anyone can get angry, but it takes a person of integrity to pursue reconciliation. I believe Jesus can help us to deal with our anger and resentment in the right way.
The second signpost we see in this passage is: “You shall not commit adultery.”
The context is essential to understand. Jesus is addressing issues within marriage. Adultery is a sin involving at least one married person.
Another key thing we need to understand here is the meaning of the word translated as “lust”. In Greek, the word is ἐπιθυμῆσαι. And ἐπιθυμῆσαι is not always a bad thing.
In Matthew 13:17 Jesus says to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.” The Greek word translated as longed is ἐπιθυμῆσαι and in this context that longing is a good thing.
ἐπιθυμῆσαι is used again in Luke 15:16, Luke 16:21, Luke 17:22, Luke 22:15, 1 Timothy 3:1, Hebrews 6:11, and 1 Peter 1:12, all in a positive sense.
So, longing is not always a bad thing. The problem is not with desire; our problem is not even with sexual desire. God created us with sexual desires; those desires are a good thing. The problem comes in when our desires are directed to the wrong person at the wrong time in the wrong place for the wrong reason.
ἐπιθυμῆσαι is sometimes translated as covet. The word is used in the Greek translation of the Ten Commandments when it says in Exodus 20:17, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
So, what Jesus is telling us in Matthew 5:28 is not to give into an overwhelming desire for our neighbor’s wife that leads us to commit adultery. What does one do when one is tempted in this way? When Jesus talks about removing an eye or a hand, is he really recommending dismemberment? No. Jesus is using hyperbole. He is, once again, using an exaggerated image to make a point. The point is: we need to deal radically with temptations to sin.
The most helpful guidance I have ever read on this subject comes from Henri Nouwen. He once wrote…
We need silence in our lives. We even desire it. But when we enter into silence we encounter a lot of inner noises, often so disturbing that a busy and distracting life seems preferable to a time of silence. Two disturbing “noises” present themselves quickly in our silence: the noise of lust and the noise of anger. Lust reveals our many unsatisfied needs, anger our many unresolved relationships. But lust and anger are very hard to face.
What are we to do? Jesus says, “Go and learn the meaning of the words: Mercy is what pleases me, not sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13). Sacrifice here means “offering up,” “cutting out,” “burning away,” or “killing.” We shouldn’t do that with our lust and anger. It simply won’t work. But we can be merciful toward our own noisy selves and turn these enemies into friends.
How do we befriend our inner enemies lust and anger? By listening to what they are saying. They say, “I have some unfulfilled needs” and “Who really loves me?” Instead of pushing our lust and anger away as unwelcome guests, we can recognize that our anxious, driven hearts need some healing. Our restlessness calls us to look for the true inner rest where lust and anger can be converted into a deeper way of loving.
There is a lot of unruly energy in lust and anger! When that energy can be directed toward loving well, we can transform not only ourselves but even those who might otherwise become the victims of our anger and lust. This takes patience, but it is possible.[2]
A third signpost we see in this passage is this: “Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.”
Divorce was a hot issue in the first century just as it is in the twenty-first. Divorce was rampant in the Graeco-Roman world. The first century poet Martial wrote about women who had been divorced as many as ten times; and he wrote as though it was commonplace.
In the Jewish world there was a battle raging between two schools of thought. According to Deuteronomy 24:1, divorce could only take place if the husband found “something indecent” in his wife and then he would have to issue a certificate of divorce.
There were two schools of thought as to what “something indecent” meant. The school of Rabbi Shammai restricted it to marital unfaithfulness. The school of Rabbi Hillel allowed divorce for many more reasons, literally “any cause”, including the burning of toast at breakfast. Jesus clearly sided with the school of Shammai against the Hillel school’s “any cause” divorce. But Jesus didn’t rule out Exodus 21:10-11 which allowed divorce for neglect. On another occasion when questioned about divorce (Matthew 19) Jesus took his listeners back to God’s original purpose, that two people should become one in marriage and that what God has joined together, human beings should not separate.
It is important to note that Jesus is not laying down a new law. Rather, he is expressing an ideal we should strive toward. Furthermore, Jesus is not saying that failure in marriage cannot be forgiven. It can, through the cross.
The fourth and final signpost we see in this passage is: “You shall not swear falsely but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.”
Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures God insists that oaths are to be kept; in Scripture, even God swears an oath to his people. However, the Jewish scribes had come up with ingenious ways for people to get out of keeping their oaths. The scribes taught that any oath which avoided using the name of God was not absolutely binding. Thus, people ended up swearing by all sorts of different things: their heads, Jerusalem, heaven, earth, and so on.
Jesus exposes the sinful evasion of truth under this scribal tactic. His thinking was that oaths shouldn’t be required among his disciples. Jesus’ followers ought to be able to trust one another. The bottom line is this: Jesus wants us to keep our promises. Our word should be our bond. Now, isn’t it interesting that what Jesus says about divorce falls between what he says about oaths and what he says about lust? Lies and lust can both lead to adultery and divorce. But to avoid giving into both lust and lies we need a change of heart, something only Jesus can give us.
Allow me to close with one more story… When I was in college, my parents bought a second home in Big Bear, California. In preparation for my first visit to the new house, my father gave me some directions he had typed up. The only problem was the uncertainty expressed throughout the directions. At the very end of his note, my father wrote, “Good luck…. Hope you find us.” I did find the house, despite the somewhat questionable directions. And I saved the directions through the years because I found them so laughable.
But here’s the thing… God our Father has given us perfect directions. He has given us what I have called moral signposts. Do we follow them perfectly? No. Does he forgive us when we fail? Yes. And he even helps us get back on the road when we get off track, and he guides us along the way, using the signposts and the inner nudging of his Spirit. Moreover, God gives us the strength, through his Son Jesus Christ, to see the journey through to the end…
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