You Have Heard It Said…
…but I say…
He reached back to what human ears heard for centuries and still hear from ethical reformers – all those rules and codes and precepts which were half-measures between instinct and reason, between local customs and the highest ideals.
The Life of Christ, Fulton Sheen
Sheen next turns to this section in the Sermon on the Mount. Lloyd-Jones introduced this section as follows:
Our Lord’s chief desire was to show the true meaning and intent of the law, and to correct the erroneous conclusions which had been drawn from it by the Pharisees and scribes and all the false notions which they had founded upon it.
Sheen introduces many such people who have “said” – in many cases, people whom the world considers as good ethical teachers: Confucious, Aristotle, etc. From such as these, we have heard said – but their teaching, as “good” as it might be, falls short because it is not grounded in God. Sheen calls these, therefore, “compromises.”
Jesus, using several examples, teaches that it isn’t just the doing that is the sin, it is the thought, it is the desire. Yes, adultery is a sin, but looking lustfully at a woman who is not your wife is also a sin. It isn’t just murder that is the sin, it is the inner anger the precedes it that is sin.
It isn’t just the fruit of the tree that is evil, it is the source of the fruit – the thought, the desire.
Get rid of them at their sources. Repent! Purge! Evil that can be put into statistics, or that can be locked in jails, is too late to remedy.
Repentance is the first step on the road to salvation. Repentance does not mean that you are free from sin; it is that you have changed your mind about your sin – I have changed my mind about my sin. Repentance means that I have removed those things that tempt me to sin.
Matthew 5: 29 If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.
If your computer tempts you to pornography, pull the plug; if you are tempted to sex outside of marriage, stay away from the red-light district; if watching football on Sunday morning is more important than attending church, kill your NFL package. These are the kinds of things which we must pluck out and cut off when we consider Jesus’s teaching and the need for repentance.
Men will cut off their legs and arms to save the body from gangrene poisoning.
How much more important to cut the desire of sin from our heart. And to cut the desire, we must remove the temptation, whatever the cost.
Matthew 5: 38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ 39 But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.
Why turn the other check? As Sheen says, hate multiplies like a seed. Unless one is will to break the chain, the hate will continue to grow and spread.
Absorb violence for the sake of your Savior, Who absorbs your sins and dies for them. The Christian law is that the innocent shall suffer for the guilty.
That last bit is really tough to swallow. But this is what Jesus did. One sees in the innocent Jesus dying for the guilty Barabbas a type of His dying for us all.
Conclusion
The Sermon on the Mount is so much at variance with all that our world holds dear, that the world will crucify anyone who tries to live up to its values; because Christ preached them, He had to die.
Those who call black, black and white, white, are sentenced for intolerance. Only the grays live.
Jesus left no room for gray.
It’s funny-tragic that in the churches and schools that I attended as a youth, I heard very few sermons on the Gospels. (Our meat and potatoes were the Pauline epistles.) Frankly, our framework didn’t know how to apply the radical demands of Jesus. Now, I see the reality quite clearly: our faith is radical! If applied consistently, it would end the mother’s milk of the nation-state (warfare) as well as remedy the income disparity that is the hallmark of dying civilizations.
"The fact that Christ comes and is present was far more significant than the places where He had been. The historical reality of Christ was of course the undisputed ground of the early Christian's faith: yet they did not so much remember Him as now He was with them. And "in Him" was the end of all "religion", because He Himself was the Answer to all "religion", to all human hunger for God, because in Him, the life that was lost by man - and which could only be symbolized, signified, asked for in religion - was restored to man." [Ezra Ham]