07.01 | It’s Not About the Lines

Matthew 5:17-48

“You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Matthew 5:48

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It’s not about the lines.

We often think it is, but it isn’t.

The people at the time of Jesus thought it was too.

But, Jesus speaks to His disciples in today’s reading, and really wants them to know this:

It’s not about the lines.

Jesus was speaking into one of the most religious cultures of all time. The ways of this people had been shaped, for over a thousand years, around the Jewish law. The Torah. It was a code to righteousness, rooted in the Ten Commandments, and unpacked in a total of 613 commandments that are found in the first five books of the Old Testament. These rules were understood to describe the will and way of God. They defined what was good and what was bad. They gave a code of conduct that enabled the people to separate both activities and people into two categories: righteous and unrighteous. Clean and unclean. Good and evil.

In other words, they drew lines.

But there’s a problem with drawing lines. Because very quickly, we start to focus on the line, rather than the reason the line was put their in the first place.

I know I shouldn’t lie. But maybe I can bend the truth, or be a little misleading.

I know I shouldn’t actually murder that colleague, but I can sure as anything criticise her behind her back.

I know I shouldn’t sleep with that person, but maybe I can soak my mind in fantasies about them.

That person hurt me; surely it is only fair to hurt them back the same amount?

Jesus is getting to the heart of dead, human, religion. Religion is always fussy about the lines.

How far can we go before it’s too far? What can I get away with? What is the minimum standard required to pass the God test?

But Jesus wants to go somewhere so different.

He wants to annihilate this obsession with human rules and religious regulations. He wants to restore His followers to a yearning for that which lies beyond the rules—for hearts that become whole and good and pure and free. He wants to take His followers into a kind of living that is no longer counting Do’s and Don’t’s, but that learn to live in freedom and goodness. Academic and storyteller C.S. Lewis put it this way: “Morality exists to be transcended. We act from duty in the hope that someday we shall do the same acts freely and delightfully.”

Freely and delightfully. That is the kind of renewal that Jesus is inviting His followers towards.

The Law was good. But it was incomplete. Jesus takes all these words and 613 commandments, and points beyond them into the very kind of fullness for which we were created. He smashes the arbitrary lines of religion, with its fiddly regulations and judgemental exclusivism, and invites us into a journey of increasing wholeness, where all that we are becomes gradually perfected into the beautiful simplicity of holy love.

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Reflect:

What lines are shaping how I live? Where is the Spirit inviting me beyond these into a kind of wholeness that is about freedom and delight?

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Pray:

Father,

I get so tangled up with the idea of rules

Of counting and measuring and drawing up lines.

But this only brings me shame,

And it makes me a bitter critic of others.

I’m so sorry.

I’m sorry because this way of thinking misses your heart for me,

And it misses your heart for those I spend my days among.

It aims too low.

Your heart is so much bigger and your aim is so much greater.

Today, would you renew my heart, a little at a time,

To holy, simple, rightly-directed love.

Love of you, and love for my neighbour.

And, Father, would you teach me to love those who think they are outside the lines of your love,

Like you do.

Inviting them towards how you made them to be,

Through me being to them an environment of healing love.

In Jesus’ Name,

For this is His Way,

Amen.

Old Testament:

For those doing the whole Bible in a year, your additional readings are here:

Genesis 16-18 | Psalm 4