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2001
18th March (pm) - Eye for Eye ........ Love your Enemies
Matt.5:38-48

Introductory Illustrations

Neil Lennon, the footballer who plays for Glasgow Celtic has decided that he wants to continue playing for N. Ireland, even though he was the subject of bitter sectarian taunts at the last NI game, and indeed, actual threats of violence against himself / family.

All because he is a Catholic and because he moved from Leicester City to Celtic who are preceived, by so-called Protestants, to be a Catholic club - and as such they see Celtic players and team as 'the enemy' - fair game for bitterness and hatred.

'You have heard (said Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount) that it was said: Love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.' I'm not sure that Jesus would have understood or accepted the treatment Neil Lennon received.

 

Now let me tell you about an entirely different situation:

The NI Fire Service reported this week that on ocasions when they attend an emergency they are both abused and attacked, and attempts have been made to steal equipment from their vehicles - and at least part of the reason is that the young people want to provoke the fire officers to retaliate so that a case may be taken against them for compensation - sometimes with parents or other adults egging on these young people.

You have heard that it was said: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth. But I tell you .....If someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.

Did Jesus mean that the Fire Service was to stand back and let this happen? I doubt it!

Without saying another word, it is surely obvious that we have come to a section of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus is dealing with the most practical and up-to-date of real life situations. They must have been part of everyday life in his day, and they are most certainly part of life in ours!

Even though we aren't very likely to do the sort of things i mentioned in the introduction, his teaching in tonight's section is going to make us face some very hard questions about how our Christian faith should make affect our everyday lives - espec. if we want to be realistic about life, and honest about how we feel when people treat us in ways that seem completely unjustified and unfair. We may not easily find all the answers to our questions tonight - but at least we want to make ourselves open to what Jesus teaches us here.

Perhaps it is helpful to begin by taking a look at the main points Jesus makes in his teaching in this section, as well as the OT teaching to which he refers - before we look at the actual practical matters which he raises.

Misunderstanding and Misapplying what the OT said.

 

 

In giving his own teaching, Jesus, as we've seen him do in earlier parts of the Sermon on the Mount, refers back to the relevant OT teaching - and again we find that he was concerned that the religious teachers didn't seem to have understood it very well or applied it properly to life - maybe we do the same!

vs.38 You have heard that it was said, Eye for eye ......'

And so it was - this is an accurate OT quotation, but the problem that Jesus was raising is that the whole background and proper meaning of this OT principle had been either ignored or misunderstood.

This is a principle of legal justice - of realising that there was a price to be paid for your actions - was set out in OT Law for the Judges in the community to apply - it was intended for a court of law situation. The principle is stated in Ex. 21:24 & Lev.24:20, and the point is made very clear in the 3rd ref., Deut.19 'one witness is not enough to convict a man .....the judges must make a thorough investigation ..... (then it must be)

life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand.'

So Jesus was very aware that this absolutely proper principle of justice, where a wrong had been done to someone, did not give any justification for people to take the law into their own hands and exact their own personal retaliation or revenge. this was for the courts of the land to do! But people had begun to feel that 'eye for eye' allowed them to take personal revenge.

This is a principle of limited punishment - when a wrong had been done to someone, this law about 'eye for eye' was intended to limit the punishment in a way that matched the offence - if it was an eye, the punishment was an eye, not a life! The OT world in which this teaching was given was a very violent one, where personal feuds were often settled with violence ( what has changed?) - this principle was intended to restrict the response to what was appropriate.

Probably in most cases actual eye for eye matters were actually settled in monetary terms. So the background to what Jesus teaches here is that this was a limiting principle of law and justice, not a floodgate opened for personal retaliation and revenge. Jesus clearly felt that the OT principle had been badly misunderstood and misapplied.

vs.43 Something similar is true of the other main OT principle to which Jesus refers: You have heard that it was said, Love your neighbour and hate your enemy ....

In this case Jesus' teaching is given against the background of what had been wrongly subtracted from and added unto the OT teaching.

For a start Lev.19:18 says Love your neighbour as yourself, which makes it decidedly stronger.

Secondly it says nothing about hating your enemy - in fact the introduction to that very verse says Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people - some of the teachers had said that this allowed you to do whatever you liked to someone who was not 'one of your people' - C.H. Spurgeon therefore referred to this as 'a parasitical growth upon God's Law' - and I think he was right, espcially when you consider that other parts of the same OT teaching encourage God's people to treat the stranger and the foreigner as they would themselves. (Ex.12:49)

So Jesus pushes his hearers to go right back and think about what the OT actually said -if they would just go back tothat, rather than what some of the religious leaders and traditional teaching wanted it to say, they would know in their heart of hearts that God's way allowed no room for attitudes of bitter enemity nor actions of harsh personal revenge.

 

Remembering and Imitating how God treated them. Not only does Jesus refer them back to the OT teaching, he also reinforces his point in another way. He reminds them that if they want to be people of godly faith - if they want to believe, honestly, in God as their heavenly Father, then they must take their example from the way in which God treats people, and not from the way people generally treat each other in everyday life. how do people generally treat each other - you treat me well, I'll treat you well,; you treat me badly, I'll do the same - that's how the dodgy tax collectors and the untaught pagans of the world approach life, says Jesus. If you live life that way, you will be no different from them.

how does God treat people - well he treats everybody the same - he makes no differences -he always treats them better than they deserve - that's the point he's making when he talks about God causing his sun to rise on the evil and the good, sending rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

 

And so, says Jesus, if you want to be the people of your heavenly Father, that must be your attitude and approach to life as well - that you may be the sons of your father in heaven - like Father, like son! Perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect, even though we will never truthfully be so.

So here is the vitally important background to the hard, practical teaching which Jesus gives in these verses.

- if we would only go back to what the OT tells us, says Jesus, these principles would be clear enough.

- if we would think about how God treats us, and everybody else, we would see thes principles at work - and that is surely reinforced for us when we think about the Gospel itself - that while we were still sinners, ignoring God's love and offending against God's justice, Christ died for us and for our forgiveness and eternal life - here is our greatest reason for listening to Jesus' teaching and trying to take it into our lives with seriousness - he treats us with the greatest possible love and understanding, even though we don't merit it.

So what we have done so far with this passage is like the steel frame that supports our new building - we've picked out the framework of this passage - now we can spend the remaining time trying to putbricks on the frame, flesh on the bones.

Jesus gives us a number of practical examples - probably not an exhaustive list, nor examples that we are to take absolutely literally - but rather illustrations to get us thinking about how we live and behave.

 

I want to suggest 2 broad headings that give us plenty to think about as we try to take Jesus' teaching to heart.

One is the Compensation mentality.

The second is the Confrontation mentality.

 

1. The compensation mentality.

When we hear Jesus talking about the whole business of people suing each other, we can immediately recognise the kind of world we live in - a society where people are very 'claim conscious', where there is litigation about almost everything.

It needs to be said that there are often situations where claims and compensation are entirely justified in community life it is important that people respect one another's dignity, rights, property etc; it is important to discourage people from treating each other negligently or unfairly and thinking that they can get away with it - that 'might is right' e.g. in situations of injuries done, slanderous things said, accidents caused, employment conditions breached; it is right that people receive compensation which will help to alleviate injuries caused by accidents etc, loss of earnings etc ....... in all these of areas of everyday life there must be means and methods of dealing with these issues, and I don't think that Jesus is advocating anything different.

As in the OT world, there are legal procedures by which these matters can and should be addressed. Life just would not function if this were not the case - indeed it would probably lead to far more personal disputes and feuds if it were not so.

However Jesus is perhaps forcing us to consider the motives and the real reasons why we are sometimes in dispute with other people, and what really motivates us to take cases and claims against them, and why it sometimes becomes very bitter and unpleasant.

Could it be that it sometimes it has to do with an unhealthy emphasis upon my rights and other people's blame, rather than my own responsibilities; or a very manipulating selfishness which grips most of us; my argumentative tendancies rather than my true concerns about simple justice; my deep down desire to take my revenge on the other person ..... even though I can dress all of these up in fine sounding reasons and fancy legal arguments!

I suspect that is the case - we are part of a very materialistic society - we rate money and possessions very, very highly - we are never really satisfied with what we have got ourselves and we may be jealously covetousness of what others have - and therefore if we see a chance of getting more by legal means, then we tend to go for it - even though some of the situations might be resolved through a reasonable and frank discussion with the other party, and even if the compensation mentality is going to lead to all kinds of unpleasantness, harsh words and maybe even exaggerated claims.

Of course it is important and right to sort out matters when it is someone else's fault that your car has been damaged in an accident or you have received an injury; when you feel that you have been unfairly treated by your employer; when someone has not met their obligations to pay for services received from your business, when someone seems to want to sponge off your goodwill ....... but maybe we need to allow Jesus to probe and test our true motives and real reasons - it will certainly affect our attitudes in sorting out the matter, maybe help us to find more reasonable ways of doing so - it should help to guard against unnecessary personal bitterness in the dispute ....... and it may very well have an important contribution to make in terms of validating and commending faith in Christ to others.

So as we listen to jesus in this section, I think he has something to say to us about the Compensation Mentality.

2. The Confrontation Mentality Even where compensation doesn't come into it, confrontation seems to be a serious part of the way we tend to deal with the situations and encounters of daily life - harsh words uttered to someone at home or in work in response to something that they have said or done to us; vindictive attitudes that we retain under a veneer of civility; a 'them and us' kind of approach when we can't have everything our own way; attributing very unfair motives and reasoning to other people because they don't see things the way we see them ...... and sometimes it all coming out into the open in very unpleasant confrontations that cause a lot of pain on all sides.

We know that these things are true at the level of personal relationships ......and we know all to well that they are true at the level of community relationships.

At both levels it often seems much more comfortable to stick to our own view of things, to personalise the areas of dispute, and to get into opposing camps which shout across the walls of disagreement at each other. In a way it is easier to do that than to do some hard thinking about why the other person or the other group of people see things the way they do - it's more attractive to attribute all the blame to others than to give any serious thought to our own attitudes or behaviour - it's the phenomenon of everybody being out of step except for me; the age old game of the gang who look after their own and hate everybody else.

Somehow or other, we seem to find it desirable to get all of life divided up into who is on our side and who is on the opposition.

And yet that is often a very unhelpful way of approaching life.

I think that Jesus encourages us, expects us, to take a different approach: Love your neighbour ...... Love your enemies.

That's not easy to do, is it - especially if they treat us with real insult and antagonism, like someone who goes out of their way to slap us on the right cheek! Of course there will be times when we have to defend ourselves with carefully thought about responses - but let's be very careful about the 'road-rage' response which simply retaliates, then thinks about it - we need to learn to recognise the situations and the people that cause us problems, learn how to avoid them and learn how to deal with them.

Pray for those who persecute you -very difficult to do, but maybe it will force us to bring our concerns to God and as we do so, he will make us examine our own attitudes and actions, as well as those of the person/people that we are in confrontation with.

It is so easy to be confrontational in our approach to life - often because we want to get our own way or we want to get our own back. Jesus really does challenge us to face that part of our sinful, fallen nature - and he wants to help us change and be changed by his grace.

Confrontations in life do not always, or often, take the form of stone throwing and violence - often the confrontations of life are much more civilised and subtle - but they can be just as destructive if we don't recognise it and, by God's grace, start trying to deal with the bit that is our fault - recognising that there are most certainly confrontations in life that are not of our choosing or making, and about which it is very difficult to do anything - some confrontations where redress to breaking contact with the other party is necessary and maybe even legal steps involved. John Stott quotes the example of Martin Luther's 'crazy saint' who let the lice nibble at him and refused to kill any of them on account of this text, maintaining that he had to suffer and could not resist evil - that's not what these verses are about!

However maybe as we start to allow Jesus to push and probe at our own temperament, our ways of reacting, our attitudes and priorities and motives, then maybe at least some of the confrontational situations of life may be improved and changed.

Maybe that is even true of the confrontations that arise regularly in NI e.g. marching confrontations - if people would begin to consider what it is that makes them take such hard and fast positions, they might find that there is a lot of selfishness and a great deal of hatred at the heart of it all on all sides - selfishness and hatred which no follower of Jesus could ever justify - situations which those who profess faith in Jesus cannot justify or support, and might even be able to change.

Are there any difficult confrontations in your life at present? Maybe we must let Jesus remind us that God's way is a way of very great generosity of spirit even towards those who have offended against us - and he can help us to gain something of that generosity of spirit as we come to trust in Christ.

So in a world with compensation and confrontation mentalities, we need to let Jesus not only tell us that this is not God's way, but by definite yielding of our hearts to him by faith, and daily depending on his grace trust him to help us take a different and better way - for ourselves and for all the people and situations around us.