Matthew 5:21-27
Epiphany 6 - Year A
To choose or not to choose: that is the question.
On the one hand, everything depends upon this moment. What we decide will echo on forever. What we decide against is stillborn. All of life hangs in the balance - all of heaven holds it breath. What will they decide?
Here it might be good to listen again to that old hymn, "Once to Every Man and Nation" [written by James Russell Lowell in the Boston Courier, December 11, 1845. Lowell wrote these words as a poem protesting America’s war with Mexico]. What decision is now needed regarding America's preemptive war against Iraq and impending one with Iran? Will you choose to choose it? What else has changed within and around us, leading to new choices.
Will you throw a first stone or a last stone or no stone at all? Does it make any difference whether the issue is personal or communal, spiritual or political (not that these pairs can be separated very well)?
On the other hand, a choice doesn't make the slightest difference. We are simply G*D's servants whether we find ourselves with Apollos or Paul or Amy or Janet or performing one function or another. As a simple servant of G*D, just how much choice does a milk-sucking child have?
Now, when to choose to choose or to choose not to choose, aye - that is a good question. When to say Yes! or No! is both imponderably confusing and intuitionally clear.
= = = = = = =
happy those
who are able to decide
after the fact
Monday-morning quarterback
after the fact
but happier still those
who decide
with an eye to the future
before the fact
that will become an after fact
to move toward a preferred tomorrow
before its factness
is highly satisfying here
decisions take on deep meaning
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html
Ah, the literalist approach to salvation - trying to get into heaven by narrowly defining rules to one's own advantage. Picking and choosing and narrowly defining statements just enough to always be just on the inside side of the cut. Knowing you don't deserve heaven because of your wretchedness, what else can be done but to do everything in your power to redefine the rules to their letter and excusing behavior because of intent.
The "But I say to you . . ." lines from Jesus are critical to what it means to be a person on a journey to wholeness. Here murder is no longer limited to the physical but the emotional and the relational. Adultery is not just a final act but a desire, culminated or not. It is this same desire that makes one unchaste and open for divorce.
Jesus is not a letter-of-the-law partner with G*D. This relationship is also not one of good G*D, bad G*D.
How are we going to keep following a "Yes, but I say to you . . ." leader? If our intent isn't simply a desire to learn the latest, revisionist ropes in order to game the system and advance, what is it? Are we those literalists mentioned above, just over different pasages?
Which is why this pericope ends with an examined life and ability to trust a Jesus Spirit to prompt us to say "No" to bad stuff and "Yes" to good stuff without such being part of a programmatic approach to living or a blowing in the wind. Want to keep your saltiness, continuing to add flavor to the world? Want to send a shining ray far down the future's broadening way? Learn how to listen to "But I say to you" and, in turn, to say it and live it.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2011/02/matthew-521-27.html
rats
rats
I thought the rules
were settled
and I had them figured out
Jesus
thought the rules
were lax
and I am unsettled
Jesus
"You have heard it said . . . ."
oh-oh
"But I say to you . . . ."
rats
a choice has been set
forever
and I'm off again
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2011/02/rats.html
“But I say to you . . . .” are words of great relief.
We know the human propensity to tangle itself up with accreted rules and regulations. These are like a lid on a pressure cooker with a clogged vent pipe. Eventually there will be an explosion.
It turns out that these five words are not license for taking all limits off behavior or even constraining such further (don’t forget this formula can make things even more difficult—moving from overt murder to implicit murder through gossip). These words are an antidote to violent revolution.
To hear “But I say to you . . . .” is to be able to reflect on our current state-of-affairs, how we got to the current impasse, and back off enough to reconsider where the common good comes into play again with all we have learned since the introduction of particular creedal controls.
An obvious next step is to move this from the realm of external authority, “Jesus says . . . .” to participatory prophecy, “I say our rules are causing us self-harm. It is time to look at our relationships again in light of what it means to be created in G*D’s image, singular and plural.”
Without this phrase we serially recognize how much we have bought into what J. B. Phillips once described as Your God Is Too Small.
“But I say to you . . . .” is relief; it gives more elbow room.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2014/02/matthew-521-37.html