A message from the Lord

I wonder if the parents here remember that moment when a child first says 'I hate you'... It hurts and it shocks but most parents keep loving anyway, we move on, we recognise that children are overwhelmed by feelings of the moment and that it takes time to develop stability of character, and recognising the harm that comes from hurtful words... and there's the rub – for how many adults do we know who actually have developed that stability of character? For sure, most adults that are outside of a prison have managed to control the public expression of their anger, but often the heart still seethes on the inside.

This is what Jesus is trying to address. The sermon on the mount is quite possibly the most radical spiritual manifesto ever proclaimed, and we are blessed to be spending a few weeks looking at it, before Lent begins. The sermon starts with the beatitudes, the blessings – blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth and so on. Then it immediately goes on, with the material we looked at last week, about how we are to be different, we are to be salt and light in the world, and Jesus says that he hasn't come to abolish the law but to fulfil it. Now Jesus is starting to spell out just what that means. Jesus' appeal is not about an external observance and conformity with what society wants and expects. It is about a change of heart, it is about repentance.

I'm going to concentrate on his teaching about murder here, but the same applies to what he says about sexuality and oaths. What Jesus is doing is at one and the same time radicalising the accepted teaching, and spiritualising it. 'Thou shalt do no murder' – and notice, just in passing, that the law is 'do no murder' not simply 'do not kill' – Jesus takes this publicly observable and definable law and says 'it is not enough'. It is not enough to refrain from killing someone if you harbour such enmity and hatred in your heart that you have killed them many times in your imagination – and that is partly because those feelings will have inevitable consequences in our wider life. It may not lead directly to your killing someone, but there is something called 'hate speech' and what hate speech does is generate a climate in which certain people and certain groups become scapegoated and vulnerable. Even if the person speaking the hate doesn't kill someone, it makes it more likely that someone else will. Ponder the fact that the Nazis didn't start physically terrorising the Jewish population until around 1938, but they were drawing upon five years of propaganda in order to do so. What we say matters, which is why in Scripture there is so much extensive teaching about guarding our tongues.

For what we say will reflect the nature of our heart – as Jesus teaches elsewhere, it is out of the abundance of the heart that a person speaks. What Jesus is challenging us to do is to change our hearts so that we recognise that we do not have a place to stand in our own right, that we are entirely dependent upon God. We are therefore required to forgive those who sin against us, to not set ourselves up in judgement over them, for when we do we only bring judgement down upon ourselves. We can only do this when we are firmly rooted in God, when we know that He knows us better than we know ourselves, and when we know and really believe that He loves us nonetheless. In other words, if we are to follow what Jesus commands then we must spend time in prayer and reflection, seeking to purify our own desires and longings in the fire of a genuine relationship with the living God.

For this is really how we are to consider those who make us angry, whom we wish to insult and call a fool. When such things happen, they reveal to us our own inner state. Have you ever had a day when you are driving the car, and someone ahead of you does something really stupid – like overtaking around the corner that you are driving into – and then suddenly the red mist descends and your feelings of anger are overwhelming? Perhaps it is just me... And then there are other days when the same sort of provocation happens, and yet all you do is slow down calmly and carefully, and then carry on with your business, and you don't give it another moments thought. The difference is in the state of our own hearts, not in the behaviour of other people. There will always be people doing crazy things, and as we live in a fallen and broken world, that means that there will always be people sinning and hurting others, hurting us. That will happen – and all that we can control is how we react to it. So when we come across someone who angers us, their behaviour is simply a revelation: a revelation of who we truly are, of all the passions which are locked up within us. For the saintly, therefore, someone who provokes our own anger is to be profoundly thanked, for they bear a message from the Lord to us, and the message is “Anyone who says 'you fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.”

The truth is that, if with the Lord's help and through his grace we are enabled to conquer our own restless and unruly hearts then we are enabled to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, we become peacemakers, we become the children of God, we can let our yes be yes and our no be no. We can simply speak from the abundance of our hearts. Whereas, if we are ruled by our anger and bitterness, if our mouths speak only scorn and ridicule, then hell becomes our home. Our integrity is lost, our souls are lost, and destruction and havoc in our social relations are not far away.

Let us then take our Lord's words to heart, repent and change our hearts so that we can become bearers of peace to all with whom we have to do. Amen.