Second in a series on "The Radical Jesus"

Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

Matthew 5:17-20

March 11, 2007

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

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There's a story I like told by a man named Rolf Zettersten. "A good friend in North Carolina," he says, "bought a new car with a voice-warning system. At first Edwin was amused to hear the soft female voice gently remind him that his seat belt wasn't fastened or that a door was not closed all the way. Edwin affectionately called this voice the 'little women.' He soon discovered his little woman was programmed to warn him about his gasoline. 'Your fuel level is low,' she said one time in her sweet voice. Edwin nodded his head and thanked her. He figured he still had enough gas to go another 50 miles, so he kept on driving. But a few minutes later, her voice interrupted again with the same warning. And so it went over and over. Although he knew it was the same recording, Edwin thought her voice sounded harsher each time. Finally, he stopped his car and crawled under the dashboard. After a quick search, he found the appropriate wires and gave them a good yank. So much for the little woman. He was still smiling to himself a few miles later when he ran out of gas. He pulled off to the side of the road while the engine sputtered and died, and somewhere inside the dashboard, Edwin was sure he could hear the little woman laughing."

This is one of those stories where, if you thought about it for half a second, you probably saw the punch line coming. But isn't it a fitting story for our times. These days, it seems there are petty little voices of authority everywhere we turn. "Please stay on the line, your call is important to us." "Make sure you have your boarding pass and identification ready to present to the security personnel." "Smoking is not permitted anywhere on this flight, or for that matter, anywhere else in the United States." Not that I'm a fan of smoking you understand, but sometimes don't you just wish you could crawl up under the dashboard and rip out the wires?

Authority can be overdone, which is something we may be particularly sensitive to lately, but which did not escape the notice of Jesus in his own day, when life, we imagine, was far less complicated. One thing that should be abundantly clear to anyone who reads the gospels is that you can't get very far into any one of them before you find Jesus challenging the authorities. The Scribes and Pharisees were Jesus' main antagonists in the gospels. There are about a hundred and twenty verses, just in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John that refer to Scribes or Pharisees or both. Often, when they appear, we find them conspiring against Jesus, trying to trap him into doing or saying something for which they could arrest him. In turn, Jesus was pretty confrontational. He called them hypocrites, fools, blind guides, a brood of vipers and whitewashed tombs. He said that they were forever trying to lay a heavy burden of law on other people, while failing to follow it themselves.

For the record, many modern scholars believe that this picture of the Scribes and Pharisees from the New Testament is actually a distortion of who they were in fact. The early church, it seems, had an investment in portraying these people in a negative light, and unfortunately, some of that negativity came to reside in the gospels. From other documents that are available to us, we know that there is every reason to believe the Scribes and Pharisees were simply people who were committed to their understanding of what it meant to be faithful, and not the legalistic, deceitful and evil people the gospels make them out to be.

At any rate, the Jesus that emerges from the gospels had some very real "authority issues." We find him continually challenging the authorities of his day. He breaks the Sabbath; he throws over the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple; he reinterprets the scriptures, and, worst of all, in the minds of some at least, he makes himself out to be the Son of God. Pretty radical I'd say. But I want you to notice something here. At no point do we find Jesus challenging authority simply for the sake of challenging authority.

One of the things I seem to recall about the sixties is that challenging authority often took on a life of its own. It seemed that once we got rolling with the notions of "Question Authority," "Don't trust anyone over thirty," "Give it to the Man," and "Up the Establishment," it was a little hard to know exactly where to stop. Most everyone I knew seemed to think that there was no such thing as legitimate authority. Authority itself was made out to be the world's biggest problem. As naïve as it sounds today, many of us truly believed that all we needed was love. As much as Jesus was wont to bend the rules at times, there is no way I can imagine him ever getting behind this kind of anarchy. This morning's passage, all by itself, should be enough to lay that idea to rest. "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill."

If you find yourself wondering what he meant by this, the first thing to understand is that "the law and the prophets" was a shorthand way of talking about what we call the Old Testament. According to Jewish tradition, the scriptures are made up of three parts: Torah, Nebiim, and Kethubim, or in English, the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. When Jesus speaks of fulfilling the law and the prophets, he is referring to the authority of the scriptures, which was understood to be a reflection of the divine authority of God.

But right here we have a paradox that would have been obvious to those who actually heard Jesus deliver this "Sermon on the Mount." The Scribes and the Pharisees were themselves the keepers of the law. The Pharisees, particularly, prided themselves on strict obedience of the law. As I said a few weeks ago, that was their understanding of how to make themselves right with God. To follow the law, in their minds, was the same thing as obeying God's will. So for those who were listening to Jesus at the time, the idea that anyone's righteousness could actually exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees would have seemed ridiculous or impossible. And yet, when Jesus said he had come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, what he was talking about is that the strict adherence to the law demonstrated by the Scribes and the Pharisees was missing something. They were interested in the letter of the law, whereas Jesus was all about the Spirit.

I remember driving along with my father-in-law one time. We passed a car that had a "Question Authority," sticker prominently displayed on its rear bumper. Jim turned to me and said, "I preached a sermon about that once. I said that I wanted to make up another bumper sticker that read, "Obey Authority." Jim could be pretty forceful when it came to authority. There were times it became an issue between us. I can't tell you how many times I heard him tell people, "This is my son-in-law. He's just like a son to me. I know he's just like a son to me because he never does anything I tell him to." He always got a laugh with that line, but believe me, there was an undercurrent of truth to it, which is probably why it was always so funny. Nonetheless, Jim was right. I completely agree that too much "Question Authority" leads to anarchy. On the other hand, too much "Obey Authority" leads to paralysis and totalitarianism. As in most things, when it comes to authority, what we're looking for is a balance.

The challenge, always, is to obey legitimate authority and get out from under or call into question authority that is not legitimate. That can be a challenge because it's often hard to tell the difference and because there are so many things that exercise authority over our lives. Government is probably the most obvious. There are plenty of "figures of authority" around, like police, politicians, security and emergency personnel. But then there are parents, teachers, bosses, doctors, lawyers, talk show hosts and even, on a rare occasion, ministers. But don't forget the authority of church, social conventions, family traditions, fashion and peer pressure. And add to that the authority of false assumptions, moods, habits and the laws of nature. When you think about it, there are so many things exercising authority over our lives we can hardly begin to keep track.

And some of them, many of them, are legitimate. We're not going to get very far breaking the laws of nature. Nature exercises an authority over our lives that we mostly do well to obey. But what about fashion and social convention? I loved the scene in the recent movie "The Devil Wears Prada," were the new young assistant stands before her boss for the first time. Her boss is the fashion queen played by Meryl Streep. Streep looks her over from head to toe, disapproving of every article of clothing she as on, and then simply dismisses her with the raise of an eyebrow. It's terrific. I like to think that fashion doesn't exercise much authority over my life, but truth be told, I wouldn't be caught dead in Tie-Dye Jeans.

Or what about the authority of our false assumptions, things we know absolutely to be true, except that they're not. For centuries people believed that Aristotle was right when he said that a heavier an object would necessarily fall to earth faster than a lighter object. Aristotle was regarded as the greatest thinker of all time, and surely he couldn't be wrong. It became a matter of common sense. Of course, anyone could have taken two objects and dropped them from a great height to see if the heavier object landed first. But no one did until nearly 2,000 years after Aristotle's died. In 1589 Galileo called together a group of learned professors at the base of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He went to the top and pushed off a ten- pound and a one-pound weight. Both landed at precisely the same instant. The power of belief was so strong, however, that the professors denied the evidence of their own eyes. They continued to say Aristotle was right.

Some would say, some have been saying quite a lot recently, that we dare not call the authority of our government into question. That to do so is unpatriotic. But that too is a false assumption. Patriotism is as much about defending the truth, as it is about defending our security. If we always find ourselves sacrificing the truth in pursuit of security, ultimately the country we end up with will cease to be worth defending.

Some authority is legitimate, and some is not. Legitimate authority acts in faithful and honorable ways, and ceases to be legitimate when it doesn't. What was so radical about Jesus was that he knew which was which. He consistently saw through false authority to true authority. He recognized that there were times when human authority came into conflict with divine authority, and when it did, he knew which side he was on. He was obedient to God's authority, even when doing so meant standing up to those in power. He refused to be cowed into submission, even when it cost him his life. He did all this, so that we might know that sometimes God has different priorities than we do.

There are all kinds of things that have authority over our lives. Mostly we take them for granted. Mostly we don't call them into question. But sometimes we should. We should be aware of how the various authorities in our lives are exercising control over what we do, think and say. We should know whether they are enabling us to live healthy, productive and orderly lives, or gradually crushing our spirits. The authority that Jesus obeyed and commended to us is an authority that always expresses itself in harmony with the universe, harmony with our own essential nature, harmony with our brothers and sisters, harmony with the environment in which we all live, and of course, harmony with God. I believe it is tremendously important to live with an open awareness that authority should not always taken for granted. Authority should never be blindly cast aside, but neither should it be blindly obeyed.

I'd like to close with another story that I think makes the same point in a wonderful way.

An unemployed man is desperate to support his wife and three children. He applies for a janitor's job at a large firm and easily passes an aptitude test. The human resources manager tells him, "You will be hired at minimum wage of $5.35 an hour. Let me have your e-mail address so that we can get you into the loop. Our system will automatically e-mail you all the forms and advise you when to start and where to report on your first day." Taken aback, the man protests that he is poor and has neither a computer nor an e-mail address. To this the manager replies, "You must understand that to a company like ours someone like you virtually does not exist. Without an e-mail address you can hardly expect to be employed by a high-tech firm. Good day."

Stunned, the man leaves. Not knowing where to turn and having $10 in his wallet, he walks past a farmers' market and sees a stand selling 25 lb. crates of beautiful red tomatoes. He buys a crate, carries it to a busy corner and displays the tomatoes. In less than 2 hours he sells all the tomatoes and makes 100% profit. Repeating the process several times more that day, he ends up with almost $100 and arrives home that night with several bags of groceries for his family. During the night he decides to repeat the tomato business the next day. By the end of the week he is getting up early every day and working into the night. He multiplies his profits quickly.

Early in the second week he acquires a cart to transport several boxes of tomatoes at a time, but before a month is up he sells the cart to buy a broken-down pickup truck. At the end of a year he owns three old trucks. His two sons have left their neighborhood gangs to help him with the tomato business, his wife is buying the tomatoes, and his daughter is taking night courses at the community college so she can keep books for him. By the end of the second year he has a dozen very nice used trucks and employs fifteen previously unemployed people, all selling tomatoes. He continues to work hard.

Time passes. At the end of the fifth year he owns a fleet of nice trucks and a warehouse that his wife supervises, plus two tomato farms that the boys manage. The tomato company's payroll has put hundreds of homeless and jobless people to work. His daughter reports that the business grossed over one million dollars. Planning for the future, he decides to buy some life insurance. He consults with an insurance adviser and picks a plan to fit his new circumstances. Then the adviser asks him for his e-mail address. When the man replies that he doesn't have time to mess with a computer and has no e-mail address, the insurance man is stunned, "What, you don't have e-mail? No computer? No Internet? Just think where you would be today if you'd had all of that five years ago!" "Ha!" the man snorts. "If I'd had e-mail five years ago I would be sweeping floors at Microsoft at $5.35 an hour."

I invite you to ask yourselves some radical questions. What are the authorities that exercise influence over your life? Which ones of them are helpful, healthy, legitimate and appropriate and which need to be called into question? To some extent, if we are to be faithful followers of Jesus, we should all have authority issues.

Amen