Iota
Matthew 5:13-20
February 6, 2011
No sooner than Jesus is finished delivering the Beatitudes in which you are blessed for being poor, mourning, meek, hungry, merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers and being persecuted – he moves on to fulfil the Law, paying attention to detail. Did Jesus know that today is our Annual Meeting? No, he didn’t. I bet, however, he’s glad we are meeting and listening to one another.
Under pressure from all sides, Jesus was saying something different and that immediately earns you enemies. The first thing people charge you with when you say something different is that you are not following the rules, in Jesus’ case that he is pushing for the abandonment of the Law and the Prophets, essentially the commandments around which Jewish society is organized. There could be no greater heresy, religiously or socially, for a Jew under Roman occupation when all the rules of Judaism were being attacked from without and within.
Jesus makes it clear that the Gospel he is proclaiming is not against the rules. He employs a memorable little metaphor, based upon the alphabet, for one of the innovations of Judaism is that faith is based upon the written text. In the Book of Revelation, Jesus declares that he is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. Now not an iota nor a dot, not a jot or a tittle, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Iota in Greek, yodh in Hebrew, are the smallest letters, and the dot or tittle are scratch marks, strokes of the smallest consequence. None of these are going to be ignored or invalidated. Every letter of the Law will be followed. Sounds like some of our church meetings where jots and tittles are of far more interest and substance than the weather.
Jesus, however, is not talking out of both sides of his mouth for he gives several crucial qualifiers to how one should deal with every jot and tittle. I have come not to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfil them. Fulfilling the Law is a lot different than blindly following the rules to the letter. It means bringing about the kind of behaviour and attitudes, the kind of human being, the Law was originally set down to accomplish.
“Do not kill” may be obvious, but its underlying purpose is that one should not hate anyone, despise and tell false stories about another. Do not kill someone: when that commandment is fulfilled and accomplished, when all the cows come home, it means you ought to love another human being, lots of them for that matter, with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.
“Do not commit adultery” deals with a messy kind of human relationship. Jesus goes further and says don’t look at a woman or a man with lust in your heart, because you are only one step away from adultery. Treat one another with respect and dignity as a whole human being, not as an object of partial desire. That’s what these laws are finally after, not the occasion to catch you doing something wrong, as Paul makes so clear, but to encourage you to be the right person God means you to be. Never easy, but if we aren’t trying to be good, then in the end you’re going to be bad.
Going backwards even further, Jesus tells us, challenges us, commissions us to be two common images – we are to be salt and we are to be a light to the world. Salt gets in there and gives food flavour. It doesn’t leave it alone, but excites it to make the particular food particularly good, fulfills it you might say. When you and I are trying to live the good life, we are called, not just asked, to stir things up, to stir people up for the better. A warning label: if you and I are salt for others, salt will get into your system and you will get excited and invigorated and imaginative. When you are salt for others, you end up tasting differently yourself.
You are the light of the world, yet too many of us are embarrassed by that light, for we don’t want to appear overly religious, even in church. We are good at pulling a respectable bushel over our heads; we don’t want to offend people or put them off. So we neither offend nor put them off, we just ignore them, left unsalted in the dark.
Now we are back to those rules and laws, regulations and commandments. When Jesus talked about keeping every last commandment until it is fulfilled, he meant keeping them salty and luminous. The commandments are not set up in the first place to punish and limit you, but to enable you to be loving and giving. Yet, you have to behave and live better than the scribes and Pharisees if you intend to enter the kingdom of heaven, an audacious thought that in every generation a Christian needs to be basically a better person than the clergy. A daunting thought for one standing where I am, but it’s scripture just as much as all those jots and tittles. I must become better than I am.
The persistent and nagging tendency in the United Church to become so immersed in our regulations and procedures has resulted in our becoming deeply confused about our purpose and mode of living. How many times have I heard at meetings of Joint Needs Assessments and Joint Search Committees and conference and executive sessions, “If we just trust the Process (capital letters, for sure), everything will work out.” The Process, that golden path of ecclesiastical method set down in The Manual and a multitude of other handbooks, has replaced the Gospel for many United Church clergy and members. Indeed, the Gospel is viewed with suspicion as something too imprecise and variable, as opposed to the regulations and procedures laid out so clearly, so unambiguously in permanent ink upon specially consecrated pages from Toronto, the New Jerusalem. Am I being sarcastic and cynical? Perhaps a little, really saddened a lot more.
We are not saved by following all the rules, by carrying out all the correct procedures in their timely order. It may keep us orderly, but that never makes us holy. The Gospel, the Good News by God, tells us boldly, scandalously at times, that you who have broken all the rules, who haven’t followed procedures, who have missed deadlines and have committed terribly wrong things are nevertheless – and in the first place before all those who dot their ‘I’s and cross their ‘T’s - loved deeply, infinitely, by God. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. And if God so loves you, takes the risk and initiative to love foolishly such a one like me who has dropped the process, then you and I ought to take the risk to love the rest of us who miss one of those crucial steps in the ecclesiastical process.
Perhaps the most grievous fallacy of trusting the Process is that you cannot do things out of order, that only filling in the forms at the appropriate time in the schedule will vindicate you. Human beings seldom work that way and God certainly doesn’t provide a list of steps to be followed invariably. There is a right time, in New Testament language, a Kairos, to do the right thing, to love someone fully, to be salty Christians, being a light unto our paths, to fulfill every commandment for what it was intended to be. We gather in our Annual Meeting in only a few moments. Now is the Kairos. Now it’s time.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan