The Kingdom of God and the Anger of Men (Week 23)
Reading
Matthew 5:20–26
Silent Reflection
Remarks
“For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Matthew 5:20 (ESV)
Imagine you’ve lived your whole life in the Kingdom of Dry Land (which shouldn’t be too difficult, because you have). You now stand on the shore of the ocean as a merman with wild hair preaches about the Kingdom of UnderWater. When he proclaims that lungs are of no use and that you must have gills in this new kingdom, he’s not making an arbitrary rule against breathing air. He’s not saying that God won’t let you in if you don’t have gills; he’s saying that someone with lungs can’t enter because their nature won’t permit them to do anything in the Kingdom of UnderWater but suffocate. It’s a statement not about should and shouldn’t, but can and can’t.
“For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
So what is true righteousness, and what does it have to do with entering the Kingdom?
Let’s start with the righteousness of the Pharisees, which was primarily defined by what was avoided.
Ann Spangler and Lois Tverberg describe it beautifully like this:
“Many of the other rabbis tended to focus on defining the minimum requirements of the Law, … defining the least good thing you can do and still stay within the boundaries. Their strategy was to keep tightening the minimums, hoping that doing so would bring people closer and closer to holiness.”
Many Pharisees believed that what ultimately mattered most was strict obedience. And they were so concerned with never breaking a law that they employed a strategy of putting up a “hedge” or “fence” around the Law. Those rulings we talked about last week: What the Pharisees did was put up extra rules (halakhah) like fences around the Law to ensure they never got anywhere close to breaking an actual law. Their main concern was preventing transgression (a negative approach). Whatever happens, don’t do something wrong. The problem is that their growing concern for strict obedience often caused them to pass by the unclean, outcast, and hurting people around them.
But about Jesus, Spanger and Tverberg write:
“Instead of focusing on minimums, he focused on maximums, speaking about the ultimate aims of the Law. Like the other rabbis, Jesus’s goal was to teach his followers how to do God’s will. But he did it by bringing the Torah to its greatest expression.”
“You have heard that it was said… but I say to you…” was the way of Jesus fulfilling Torah, asking not just what the Law wants to nullify and prohibit, but what it wants to bring to fruition. Like God in Genesis, what does the Law want to call forth from nothing? What does it want to create and bless and call good?
This work is creatively, substantially, and abundantly done through love.
The righteousness of the Pharisees shows that you can be right about everything and still be way off. It is entirely possible to do everything right and still ruin relationships. What’s more, sometimes our insistence on doing everything by the book becomes the very thing that ruins those relationships. (Think about the noisy gong from last week.)
True righteousness, what the Bible calls tzedakah—righteousness as God sees it—is always the underlying essential component of “maintaining rightness in relationships.” Not just moral perfection in your own soul, but rightness, equity, goodness, fairness, and grace in your relationships with others.
So when it comes to murder and anger, the Pharisees are concerned with not committing actual violence against someone else. But Jesus knows that there’s a simmering anger underneath those actions that can take over well before anyone pulls a trigger, and he knows what this kind of condemning bitterness leads to. The entitled, resentful anger that causes you to shout at someone, “You fool!”—it’s the same anger that will drive every stupid fool out of your life until you exist in a universe where everything is exactly as you think it should be.
This is the anger we must be careful of, and not because it is a violation of a rule that will cause God to send us to hell when we’ve broken it—but because it is an anger that is entirely incompatible with the nature of the Kingdom of God. In this Kingdom, enemies aren’t dehumanized and wiped out, but instead are forgiven and restored, and grace covers a multitude of sins. The anger that causes us to see someone deep down as less than we are, to use the words of Miroslav Volf, makes us exclude them from the community of humanity even as we exclude ourselves from the community of sinners. And isn’t this exclusion and separation, brought on by putting myself in the judge’s seat, already a hell in itself?
Simply to avoid murder may technically avoid breaking rules, but it certainly doesn’t bring about the ultimate aim of Torah, which is love. To get that, you’ll have to follow what Jesus said and actually be reconciled—not, mind you, to the ones who have made you mad, but to the ones whom you have angered. Because we all get it wrong. Self-righteous indignation simply can’t survive in the Kingdom of God. It’s like trying to breathe with lungs underwater.
Silent Reflection
Response
Are there ways your insistence on keeping the rules is driving other people away from you?
What experiences do you have of righteousness getting in the way of grace?
Do you have relationships that have settled into estrangement or an uneasy peace where you actually need to go and pursue reconciliation (righteousness)?