You have heard the responses that come out when there is a public scandal. They are predictable. First there is the denial. “I didn’t have an affair, I didn’t mismanage the funds, I didn’t lie.” Then when it is apparent they did what they did, there is the denial of the denial: “I misspoke myself.” Then finally there is the apology for hurting anyone involved, but they didn’t break any laws, “Everything I did was legal.” Sometimes that part might even be true, but it doesn’t mean that people have acted ethically and morally. Some folks confuse acting ethically with following the law. There are laws of ethics that go beyond written statutes.
Laws are good things. As long as human beings act selfishly, we need laws to regulate our relationships with each other. Unless we want to go back to a system of vigilantes and retribution, we need laws to provide justice for our society. Remember, the concept of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth was a huge advancement in justice, when people killed each other for revenge. A system of laws is necessary for a civilization to advance.
In Deuteronomy, the Lord says if you obey the commandments he has given us, then God will bless us. The law is the difference between blessings and curses, between life and prosperity or death and adversity. Choose life, he says. Choose to follow the law. Indeed, being a nation of laws has brought us in this country to a level of prosperity and blessing that the ancient Israelites could not have imagined. But even they were not able to follow the commandments, decrees, and ordinances consistently. It was said that if everyone were able to follow the law completely even for one day, it would usher in the kingdom of God.
Following the law is not enough. What kind of eulogy would it be if all we could say about someone at the end of their life is that they never broke the law? The commandments, and much of our law, are set up as a series of negatives – don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t murder, don’t steal. We expect good people to do something positive.
And then there is the matter of how laws can be manipulated. Many of our laws in this country have been formulated with the help of lobbyists who influence the laws to favor a particular client. Sometimes it seems certain laws legalize a sort of corporate theft. If you have enough money, it seems you can buy the laws that you want.
In Matthew’s gospel today, Jesus tells us that following the letter of the law is not enough. He offers a law behind the law. He looks to the root of our outward behaviors to our inner orientation. It is there in our innermost being that we become alienated from God, even if we are doing all the right things on the outside. If sin is the seeking of our own will distorting our relationship with God, that sin begins in our inner need for control, in our self-centeredness, in our humanity. If we find it difficult to follow the commandments in our outward behavior, we will find it impossible to follow Jesus’ new law behind the law. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t much to gain in trying.
Jesus says, “You have heard it said ‘You shall not murder… but I say to you if you are angry with your brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.” How many of us have never been angry with someone else? I know I have been. Happily, there are laws against murdering someone, but there is no law, no commandment, that says we cannot be angry. I’m not even sure I can stop myself from getting angry, even if I know I’m doing it. But I think there is a big difference between that sudden thought of anger, that sudden surge of emotional adrenalin, and dwelling on it. When we nurture that grudge, ruminate on how we might get even, then our anger destroys our relationship, and it eats away at our spirit.
I believe that we can cultivate the positive virtue that counteracts our anger, which is reconciliation. That is the antidote to anger and alienation. I think we can also cultivate an attitude or understanding, respect and love for the other person which will reduce the impulse to anger. When we see in each other the image of God, however faint, then we will not be able to harbor hatred and malice to them.
Jesus said, “You have heard it 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 her heart.” Obviously lust is not limited to one gender. Now, in most states, there is not even a law against adultery anymore. There is still plenty of social opprobrium, but no law. There isn’t even a law against most pornography. But Jesus says that to even look at another person with lust is wrong. Again, I’m not sure that we can control our thoughts so rigidly that we might not have a passing appreciation for another. It’s been said somewhere that adolescent males have about 30 sexual thoughts a minute. No wonder they have trouble with homework. But the sin is not in the passing thought, but in the treasuring of those thoughts. Lust is not about healthy sexual relationships, but is about devaluing the other person to merely the object of our desire.
Cultivating an attitude of respect and love for the other person as a whole person, tames our lust and disciplines our sexual desires for the one we love.
Jesus goes on to condemn divorce. In his context, I think that he was also condemning the corruption of the law which made it easy for a man to divorce his wife. It wasn’t so easy the other way round, for a woman to divorce her husband. Here was a law that was patently unfair. Of course we still have laws which make divorce legal, and we have worked hard to make the law more fair. But Jesus suggests we look beyond the law to the commitments we make with each other. Now I know that divorce is sometimes the only solution to a troubled marriage, but it is always a sad and tragic event. All of us who pledged our support at the marriage ceremony have some responsibility in it.
Finally, Jesus tells us that we should not swear at all, by heaven or earth. Let your yes be yes, and your no be no. There are folks in some churches who take this literally and refuse to take an oath at a legal proceeding. But that is just the outward behavior of legalistic thinking. If we have to swear to something it suggests that our answer without such a safeguard might be untrustworthy. Wouldn’t it be better if we were known to be such truth tellers that no one would question our veracity? This too is a capacity that can be cultivated.
The law has been a great gift to humanity. It has ordered our dealings with each other, made them less chaotic. Laws have allowed civilization to exist. But Jesus says that ordering our outward behaviors do not go far enough. We must learn to order our inner lives as well, by cultivating virtues of love and truth. We must learn to discipline our desires so that our every whim need not be satisfied. We practice the disciplines of prayer, of forgiveness and reconciliation, of generosity and compassion, of fasting and examination of conscience in order to cultivate our virtues, not for some external standard, but for the desire to be good people and to respond to the love God has for us.
As the external law has prepared us for civilization, cultivating the internal law will transform us, make us to be good people, and prepare us to be citizens of the kingdom of God.