February 20, 2011
Due Process in the Kingdom - Matthew 5:38-48
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadAmong the many blessings that we have in this country that almost all of us take for granted is something called due process. Due process begins with the idea that we are born with certain rights. “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This country was founded on that statement, or as the 5th amendment to the US Constitution says, “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Life, liberty, and property. They are mine, baby. Now with due process, somebody can take all three. If I commit a crime, then the government can take all three of those, but first there has to be a fair court case in which I tried by a jury of my peers. You can take my money, but not without suing me, and going court and putting your case before a jury. As much as we complain about taxes (and the tax man will indeed come soon), there is a due process that we use, and we have a say in that due process. No tax collector in this country will 50% of your money, and keep 20% for himself. That’s what tax collectors did in Jesus’ day, which is why people hated tax collectors. We have rights in the country, and those rights cannot be taken away from us without the fair and due process of the law. We should be very, very thankful for that. Go hang out in Mexico for a while and you’ll learn how important due process is. The Jews of Jesus’ day had due process, too. Due process of the law is actually a good chunk of the Old Testament. Everyone of the examples in this passage has to do with due process. “And eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth,” which Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy all mention, is part of due process. It limits retaliation to the specific offense. If I steal $10 from you, then you cannot take any more than $10 from me in retaliation. Exodus 22 and Deuteronomy 24 gave people a right to their cloaks. It doesn’t matter how indebted you may be, for example, nobody has a right to take your cloak, which is probably the only one you have, and without which you’d literally be naked. In that culture in that day, that was very important. The Roman government, unlike ours, reserved the right to use either you or your equipment. They could literally require you to walk a mile with them and help them carry something, or they could conscript your livestock and wagon for awhile. Jesus was not just speaking figuratively here. He was speaking legally, using examples that any first Century Jew would understand. Under both American and Jewish law, people had rights, and when those rights were compromised in some way, there was due process.
Never did Jesus say that those rights, or the due process that protected those rights, were bad. In fact, I honestly think that our system of government and law and due process is pleasing to God. It is as fair and honest and open as any system of government has ever been. But, what Jesus tells us here is that the Kingdom of God is about more than that. You could look at the Sermon on the Mount as the Constitution of the Kingdom of God. The whole premise of the Kingdom of God is that we love both God and our neighbors, and our neighbors could be anyone. So the issue in God’s Kingdom is not that you have a legal right to retaliate, or that you have a legal right to your cloak, or that you have a legal right to somebody else’s money, or even that you have a legal right to punch somebody in the face. All of that is beside the point in God’s Kingdom. Even more important than your rights or due process is how we love our neighbor. That’s the key. And if it comes down to either defending our rights or loving our neighbors, then Jesus tells us to love our neighbors.
I don’t think Jesus is talking specifically literally here, in that I don’t think Jesus is saying that we should give all of our clothes away and walk around naked, or that we should constantly have two black eyes from turning the other cheek all the time. Jesus speaks to the foundation of our behavior. It seems to me that Jesus expects us to have almost a radical concern for other people. That’s what it’s all about. Jesus takes that to the most outlandish and unreasonable extreme. You may have heard that we should love our neighbor and hate our enemies, which makes perfectly good sense. I really can’t think of anybody who wants to kill me. 1st Century Israel, though, like 21st Century Israel, is surrounded by enemies. People wanted to kill them, and they were very successful at doing that. Jesus is telling them to love those Roman soldiers, who may have killed their parents or children. That’s how radical this love is. It’s not that by loving them, we may win them over, or we may shame them into being nice. We love them because that’s what Christians do. Or maybe you can look at it this way: the key word in the Constitution is “rights,” but the key word for Christians is “love.”
I think one of the biggest mistakes that Christians have made in the last hundred years is that we have tried to make Jesus reasonable. We have tried to make our faith reasonable. Reason is good. God gave us the ability to reason, and we should use it. But, God is bigger than reason. There is no possible way, for just one glaring example, that we can make Jesus’ Resurrection reasonable. Jesus was dead at the end of Good Friday, but, we claim, he was alive and well on Easter Sunday. Now that’s just not reasonable. There is a truth beyond reason, we say. There has to be. There’s an explanation beyond the explainable. There is a truth beyond the facts, and we have seen some of that truth.
We hold fast to that. But often we don’t turn that truth beyond reason into behavior beyond reason. So therefore people look at us acting like everybody else and conclude that whatever it is that we believe must be make-believe. A friend of mine was a Methodist minister in Texas. He tells the story once of taking Ben Barnes (who was the Speaker of the House of Representatives in Texas at the time), to a Methodist Annual Conference. This particular conference was very controversial. There was name calling, and wheeling and dealing, and politics, and mud-slinging and everything else. Finally after about an hour watching all of that, Ben Barnes whispered over to my friend, “This is worse than Austin.”
That sends a terrible message, doesn’t it? Christians send that message sometimes. And sometimes, we don’t send any message at all. We just sort of show up and fade into the wood work, in which case people must believe that we serve a dull god. It really is true, you know, that they will know that we are Christians by our love. And if our love is just reasonable, then what’s the big deal? Do we really want our spouses to love us reasonably? Think about how unreasonable it is for a young couple to pledge themselves to the other, “in sickness and in health, in plenty and in want, until death do us part.” If it was all about reason, or if there was nothing about marriage that was beyond reason, then my wife, for one, would have left me a long time ago. If we just love those who love us back (any old crook can do that), or if we just do favors to people who can return those favors, then, what kind of love is that? And what kind of God commands that kind of lack-luster love? I often go out to eat for lunch, and I give a person $5 for a hamburger. The person at the restaurant does not give me that hamburger out of love, and I don’t give him my $5 out of love. It’s not love at all. It’s an exchange. Love is not reasonable. God is not reasonable. God is beyond reasonable. So the love that God demands of us to others is beyond reason, too. I went to John’s Restaurant behind us last Wednesday and told John that we needed him cook for forty or fifty people each Wednesday night for a Bible Study through the end of May. When I asked him how much I owed him, John said nothing, that our money is no good there. Now that is love. It speaks volumes, you know, when Christians show that kind of disinterested, selfless, sacrificial love.
The main premise in the Kingdom of God is not our rights, or our due, or what we earn or deserve. The main premise of the Kingdom of God is love. God has loved us and saved us when we were completely and utterly lost. God saves us every day, when we continue to get lost. That’s unreasonable. And God commands us to love others like God has loved us, or, as Jesus said, to be complete or perfect, as God is. You become a complete person, according to Jesus here, by loving others.
We know what being a US Citizen looks like. We have rights, and due processes, and policemen, and courthouses, and judges. What does being a citizen in God’s Kingdom look like? What does it look like in your life, where you are, where you work, where you sleep? What does it look like for us as a Church? It’s all about loving our neighbors. It’s all about loving God. So in whatever we do together and Church and individually as members, may we do that always.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
