A Sermon By: The Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany
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Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany
February 12, 2017
Trinity Church, Hartford
The Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Matthew 5:21-37
We’ve heard a great deal recently about laws, their interpretation, and our obligation to observe them. And yet our readings this morning are among the most confusing and challenging in all of Scripture because they put our understanding of law into question. Recall the words of Moses from Deuteronomy:
“If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess.” In other words obey the divine commands and be blessed; disobey them and perish.
Imagine our surprise when, in the gospel of Matthew a rather different tone is struck by Jesus who seems to take an oppositional stance to the laws alluded to in Deuteronomy. Jesus says “you have heard that it was said,” and then adds, “but I say to you”. “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.
And perhaps most startling in light of our contemporary sentiments, Jesus says about divorce: “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.”
It is certainly clear that whenever we read the words of Jesus: ‘but I say to you’, we know are in the midst of some kind of subversion or at least reinterpretation of previous understandings. At one level of course we find here the basis for the theological proclamation that given the sinfulness of our human nature perfect obedience to the divine law is impossible and cannot be the basis of our salvation.
But I think there is something else going on here beyond the necessity of grace to redeem us from sinfulness. This something else is the invitation to consider the intention of the law and the ways that sometimes open up to us the opportunity to realize the deeper intent of the law in the spaces between, within, and even beyond the technical application of the laws. Laws are essential in any fair and just society. But, as important as they are, they do not exhaust the possibilities for genuine and meaningful human relationships. Jesus refers to someone going to court to settle a matter of legal rights. But instead of settling the dispute in the court, Jesus says “Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison.” Jesus seems to be suggesting that if our relationship with our accuser is defined only in legal terms of plaintiff or defendant, then we have lost the possibility of a relationship that ought to be grounded in something deeper than the law: in something touching the more fundamental parts of our being: in love, compassion, forgiveness, sensitivity, empathy, or even a simple awareness that legal restitution cannot overcome the inevitable, unresolvable, and uncontrollable contingencies of life. Not all of human life, from its joys as well as tragedies, can be summed up within the framework of legal commandments.
I was reminded of this recently when I was being interviewed (in a process known as voir dire) for possible inclusion in a jury trial regarding a case of medical malpractice. When I said that my daughter and son-in-law were both physicians I knew I would be excused from service by the plaintiff’s counsel because it could be assumed I would be sympathetic to the doctors against whom the plaintiff had brought her charges. But before they kicked me off the jury one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, noting I had been a professor of religious ethics, asked me whether I had any moral issues with malpractice cases in general. Perhaps not surprising to some of you, I eagerly used the opportunity the lawyer’s question gave me to get into a philosophical and ethical discussion about whether what is called pain and suffering can be compensated for monetarily. I said I had no problem compensating someone for all medical expenses and for wages lost over a lifetime of diminished opportunities because of the injury, but I couldn’t see how money can compensate for subjective pain and suffering since there is no objective correlation between money and pain. It struck me that this is an area of life in which the strict standards of legal justice are not very useful. Even though the law allows payments for pain and suffering, ultimately I don’t think we can put a monetary value on subjective experiences. To do so is to turn our lives into commodities that the market can value by financial measurements. And that is a complete denigration of our lives as spiritual and communal human beings.
This experience of the jury system should remind us that obedience to the law, while indispensable for a just society, doesn’t always get to the heart of what we might be called to do to repair personal relationships and deepen the non-legal bonds that alone can make us more fully human. It’s important to remember, of course, that not all human laws reflect divine law, especially when they repudiate the ties of a common humanity that transcends national borders and ethnicities and which lead to an inhumane treatment of refugees and immigrants. When there are such laws or orders that threaten our freedom to welcome the refugee they cannot claim divine sanction and ought to be resisted legally and by peaceful protest. But there are also laws which seem to have a divine sanction behind them and which reflect a deeper understanding of our fullness as human persons. Such a law seems to have been the one sanctioning divorce in the time of Jesus. What Jesus says about divorce is a subversion of that law even though, at first glance, he seems to be establishing a harsh and unforgiving stand on divorce. The law in his time permitted a husband to divorce his wife for almost any reason if she displeased him in some way. To subvert this legal reason for divorce can be seen as Jesus speaking up for the often legally powerless woman in what was, by today’s standards, a thoroughly male patriarchal understanding of marriage. In rejecting the legal recourse to divorce Jesus seems to be calling for a new way of viewing marriage: not as the ownership of a woman by a man, but as a mutual loving and self-sacrificing relationship. Jesus is offering his listeners the opportunity to go beyond the legal definitions of marriage and divorce and to consider the non-legal or extra-legal dimensions of marital relationships. Unfortunately, the Church historically turned this opportunity to go deeper into the nature of marital relationships and instead subjected them to a new form of punitive legality that wounds more than it heals. Forbidding divorce, as some churches do, and punishing it by allowing no new marriage and no acceptance at the Eucharistic meal is simply a perpetuation of a primarily legal or, in church terms, a canonical, definition of what constitutes a human relationship. What Jesus may be suggesting, however, is that if we can look beyond the strictly legal or canonical meaning of divorce and marriage and perhaps see an opening through which we might exercise one more attempt at reconciliation based on empathy or a recovery of the love that was presumably there at the start of the marriage, then possibly, just possibly, the relationship might be restored. But this is a non-legal possibility, it is not required by the law, and in many cases it will not work. At that point, divorce may be the only viable option left that will do justice to the parties and bring some healing to their individual lives after they have ended their legal marriage. This option should never be rejected or made the basis for how divorced people are treated by the Church but it should not be the first and only option tried. Recourse to the law of divorce must be preserved but it should not define the relationship from beginning to end. Human relationships are often messy, complex, and complicated. What Jesus seems to be asking us is to recognize the complexities of human lives and to at least try to find ways to bring the power of love, grace, forgiveness, and mutual understanding into the relationship before abandoning hope entirely for its restoration or accepting its ending with mutual respect and dignity for all involved. Seeing divorce only in legal terms shuts off this call to go beyond what the law offers. We need to think beyond the law to what it ought to serve: the well-being, the mutuality, the love, and the compassion that alone can make us fully human. These things are as true of our secular laws regarding the inclusion of the migrant and the stranger as they are of those with whom our relationships of deepest intimacy are at risk. The law will not redeem us but we, with God’s help, might redeem the law by recapturing its true and essential intention if we keep the deeper meaning of human relationship beyond the law at the forefront of our understanding.