Presented May 22, 2022 by Rev. Judy Davis
Based on Mathew 5:38-48
The scripture today from Matthew is part of what is known as “the Sermon on the Mount,” which is found in chapters 5-7 of the Gospel of Matthew. It contains the moral teachings of Jesus and is often considered to contain the central tenets of Christian discipleship. This sermon comes early in Jesus’s ministry, but sometime after his baptism by John and after Jesus went to the wilderness and fast and pray, and after calling some of his disciples to follow him as he traveled around preaching. This sermon is believed to have taken place on a hillside near the Sea of Galilee.
A couple of weeks ago eight of us from Bethany attended a conference at Zephyr Point on “justice.” Justice for creation. All creation. The main speaker was Dr. Cláudio Carvalhaes, a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
During one of the evening sessions, he spoke about what it means for us to be in a “wilderness time of our lives.” These are the times most likely to be when we have suffered some trauma or loss. Times when we might feel confused about just who we are. Or probably, just who God is. Everything we believe about God might have taken a severe hit. We might feel the God who we believed to be our protector might seemed to suddenly have disappeared. During this wilderness time we find ourselves searching for our true selves. Asking “who am I?” Asking “who does God think I am?” Asking “what does God expect me to be? Out in the wilderness of our life confused about the path ahead.
I’ve had those wilderness times in my own life, especially in the midst of illness and deaths of people I loved. But I want to begin with the Bible’s story of Jesus being in the wilderness, and his search for who he was and who he was to be.
Jesus had gone down to the Jordan River to ask his cousin John to baptize him. And the Bible says: ‘just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness.”
Most of us are familiar with this story. A story where three times Jesus is tempted by the devil. Tempted out there in the wilderness while he is asking those questions we ask: Who am I? Who does God think I am? What does God expect me to be?
After fasting 40 days and nights Jesus is tempted by the devil with these words: “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”
Most of my life I was taught that the temptation for Jesus was to turn those stones to bread. But I don’t see it that way anymore. I think the temptation was in the first part of that sentence: “If you are the Son of God,” you should be able to do exactly that: turn stone to bread.
But of what we know about Jesus, turning stones to bread was not among his God-given gifts. Jesus was in the wilderness examining who he was, and what that could possibly mean if he was the beloved Son of God. I think Jesus knew himself well enough to know he had a gentle, compassionate heart for everyone. He loved people. Lepers, prostitutes, tax collectors, the mentally ill, fishermen, children, women and men. That’s who he was. He loved to listen to people’s stories of their lives. He wanted to teach about what he believed the Hebrew scripture said about God’s Kingdom on earth. Jesus believed in mercy and forgiveness for sin.
Maybe out there in the wilderness Jesus was tempted to doubt the Spirit’s voice he had heard at his baptism about being God’s Son. Maybe he was tempted to believe that who he was—a healer and a reconciler—wasn’t really what God wanted. Maybe God cared about acts like stone turned into bread. That kind of flashy power. Not the power of forgiving and gentle love. For everyone.
Jesus came out of the wilderness and began his ministry. He began teaching what it meant to be a child of God:
“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
“If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”
“If someone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well.”
and “If someone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.”
This isn’t hyperbole. This is what Jesus came to believe during those forty days out in the wilderness, struggling with that question of “Who is God? and what does it mean that I am God’s beloved Son.”
A man named Stanley Hauerwas, an American theologian and ethicist, wrote this:
“The basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works but rather the way God is. Cheek-turning is not advocated as what works (it usually does not), but advocated because this is the way God is—God is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. This is not a stratagem for getting what we want but the only manner of life available, now that, in Jesus, we have seen what God wants. We seek reconciliation with the neighbor, not because we feel so much better afterward, but because reconciliation is what God is doing in the world through Christ.”
It’s hard not to hit back when we’ve been hit. Every child knows how it feels to want to retaliate. But the way of Jesus is not retaliation. It’s feeling that pain ourselves, to be still and stop the escalation of hate.
Is it really possible, as such weak human beings, to live the way of forgiveness?
Gandhi is famous for saying: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” At the end of his life, Gandhi claimed he no longer hated anybody.
Nelson Mandela walked out of the South African prison where he was confined 27 years, and when he came to power he initiated a process of reconciliation rather than seeking revenge.
The Dalai Lama, who was exiled from Tibet by the Chinese as a young man, saw his monasteries destroyed and his monks executed, and yet he persistently refused to condemn the Chinese.
Martin Luther King believed that the highest point of Jesus’ life was the moment when he forgave his executioners. King believed that “only goodness can drive out evil and only love can overcome hate.” King insisted that we must win the friendship and understanding of the enemy.
We know that compassion involves risk. We become vulnerable. And even though Dr. King was a victim of hatred, his commitment to compassion changed the world.
The well-respected religion scholar Karen Armstrong has written a book about becoming compassionate. She writes that the attempt to become a compassionate human being is a life-long project. It is a struggle that will last until our dying hour. She says that compassion though is possible. Some people have achieved heroic levels of empathy, forgiveness, and concern for others.
She says that we must not get depressed by our repeated failures, but to keep practicing and persevere. We can become a force for good in the world. We can become a refuge for people in pain if we remain gentle and calm, and openhearted in this chaotic world. We can become a haven of peace.
Armstrong says that this is the ideal to strive for, that we can leave the world better because we have lived in it.
This is the Kingdom of God that Jesus preached. That Jesus lived. That Gandhi, and Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others strived to live out. To be that person of “compassion.”
Amen.
