Eye of the Beholder

Propers: The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Let’s talk about Law and Gospel.

Our readings this morning certainly seem heavy on Law, and so it would be all-too-easy to fall into the homiletic trap of moralism. “Be good and good things will happen to you. Be bad and bad things will happen to you. Thus says the Lord!” But of course we all know there’s more to it than that, don’t we? It is true that wise and moral conduct often reaps a just reward. Yet we also know that sometimes—oftentimes—bad things do happen to good people. And it isn’t just. It isn’t fair.

Moreover we know—don’t we?—that we ourselves are sinners, that we regularly fail and fall short of the mark. If the Bible’s all about simply doing the right thing, then I’m afraid people like you and I simply will not get very far. We are all too human for that. So what do we do with this moral Law, other than shift uncomfortably in our pews, and wait for Jesus to say something less convicting?

Perhaps the greatest contribution of Lutheranism to the Christian faith as a whole is our insistence that the Word of God must always be understood as both Law and Gospel. And here’s what we mean by that. The Word of God is God’s self-revelation to us, His children. He reveals Himself in many ways: in nature, yes, in reason; but also in Scripture, in the story of God’s promises to His perverse and petulant people.

The ultimate Word of God, however, the Living Word of God, is not a book or an idea, but a person: it is Jesus Christ, God made flesh, who is the truest and fullest Word of God because He is God Himself, God come down, God-With-Us. So yes, the Bible is the Word of God, but only in that it reveals to us Jesus. And this is the work of the Holy Spirit, that we open a book to meet a Man.

Now this Word, this Truth, affects us in two ways. We call them Law and Gospel. Law is the truth about us: the truth of our sins, of our failings; the truth that we cannot save ourselves, cannot earn salvation, cannot claw our way back up into Heaven. And the Gospel is the truth about God: the truth of His mercy, His grace, His infinite, self-sacrificing love for us. The Law tells us that we cannot earn the love of God; the Gospel tells us that we do not have to, that God already loves us.

And these two work beautifully together. The Law breaks down our arrogance, our haughtiness, our disdain for our fellow man. It prepares us to receive grace, to receive God, by showing us our need for Him. And then the Gospel lifts us up, exalting us to Heaven, washing us in Baptismal waters and raising us to everlasting life. The Law kills us, and the Gospel makes us alive.

Thus is our every encounter with God’s Word, in Scripture and in Sacrament, a process of death and Resurrection. We meet Christ in the Cross, and we rise with Him from the open tomb. And this happens over and again, every week, every day. We come here each Sunday to be forgiven, taught, fed, and sent back out. Each night of the week we die to our sins, and each morning we rise anew by grace. We are Resurrection people, children of the God who never ceases to give and to forgive.

The purpose of the Law is to drive us to the Gospel. It shows us the standard that God intends for His people, and it shows us that only Christ attains it. We are freely forgiven—freely given the Spirit and Body and Blood of Christ, the Life of Christ—so that we may then go out to love and serve and forgive them all.

Keep in mind that one cannot simply dissect Scripture into clear-cut passages of Law or Gospel, as though this verse were one, and this verse another. The same Word is often both to different people. “Blessed are the poor,” sayeth the Lord: a convicting Law to the rich, but life-giving Gospel to the destitute. And so one must always keep in mind the audience to whom Jesus is speaking.

Take the words of Christ this morning: “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.” Now that makes a lot of us uncomfortable, doesn’t it? We shift uneasily in our pews, because divorce and remarriage are a reality for many of us, for many of our families. I myself am the product of divorce: my mother was my father’s second marriage. This Law would convict me as well. But keep in mind His audience.

2000 years ago, only men could initiate divorce. And they often did so for the most ridiculous of reasons. The school of Hillel, one of the two most respected rabbinical authorities of Jesus’ day, asserted that a man could divorce his wife for burning a meal. And let’s be clear on what that meant for her. A divorced woman didn’t have much in the way of options back then. If she were lucky, she could return to her father’s house for provision and protection. But beyond that, well—a single woman on the outskirts of the Roman Empire only had one or two avenues available to her, and they weren’t good ones.

A man had the right to disown his wife, disown his children, at a whim. And this often meant casting his family out in the street. Jesus isn’t talking about modern marriage with its blessings and its pitfalls; he’s talking about deadbeat dads.

So what we hear as a Word of Law, the women and the children in Jesus’ audience would have heard as blessed Gospel. “I see you,” He says. “I see how you are mistreated, and I will not let it stand. No man has the right to abuse his power over the very people whom he is called to shelter and protect and love. And don’t you dare use the Scriptures as an excuse, or as a justification, for your own abominable behavior.” Law for the oppressor is Gospel for the oppressed.

Or what about what Jesus says regarding lust? “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 Gehenna. 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 Gehenna.”

Well, that’s some powerful Law right there, isn’t it? Very convicting stuff. Who here would have any eyes left? But let’s unpack this a bit. First off, looking at a woman with lust does not mean that it’s a sin to find someone attractive. It’s a sin to objectify someone, yes, to view them, and especially to treat them, as something less than a person, as a piece of meat to be used and consumed. But Jesus is speaking in the context of a man plotting to take his neighbor’s wife.

As for plucking out eyes and cutting off hands—clearly this isn’t to be taken literally. The Apostles and the Church Fathers and the early Christians didn’t go around with eye-patches and hooks for hands because they’d lopped off their body parts. What Jesus is telling us is to take responsibility for our own sins and not to blame someone else for the darkness festering in our own hearts. Your sin is yours.

I read recently in the news that there’s a man suing the NFL because the Super Bowl halftime show caused him to feel such lust in his heart that he claimed it endangered his immortal soul. Imagine getting so worked up over Shakira and J Lo’s performance that you have to call your lawyer. Now, the appropriateness of that performance is not anything I’m going to get into here. But for those of us who take Jesus at His Word, it’s clear what our response ought to be. If we see someone do something, wear something, say something that we feel causes us to sin—we don’t badmouth them.

We don’t cut off whatever part of them offends us. We pluck the eye of the beholder; we cut off our own grabby little hand. First take the beam out of your own eye, Jesus says, then maybe you’ll see clearly enough to help your neighbor get a speck out of his. This is the same Jesus, after all, who when presented with a woman caught in flagrante delicto, in the very act of adultery, says, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” He’s the only guy without sin. And He ain’t casting any stones.

We are called to speak the truth, especially truth to power. But Christianity can never accept coercing, denigrating, or shaming anyone else. Real religion, healthy religion, must ever focus on changing ourselves, changing who we are. The Word of God, as Law and Gospel, is never about moral hierarchy, “I’m better than you,” but about humble service and indiscriminate forgiveness—the kind of grace that ticks off the world so much that they want to nail you to a Cross.

That’s the kind of religion that will raise this world up from the dead.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.