Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
8^th of February 2026

Exodus 20:1-17
Matthew 5:17-26

‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil.’

Today, we hear the second extract from the Sermon on the Mount. As I said last week, in this Sermon the author of the Gospel according to Matthew presents Jesus as the one greater than Moses, someone who does not simply receive the law from God on a mountain, but who gives it. But while Jesus might be greater than Moses, in the passage we hear today Jesus makes it clear that he is speaking in the tradition of Moses. This would be much more important for the Jewish Christians who made up Matthew’s community than it is for us. Those who followed Jesus would have been accused by their family and friends of abandoning the Torah and thus abandoning their membership of the people of God. Jesus’ words here would reassure the community of his followers, members of the new inclusive Israel, that they are still part of God’s people. With our very different understanding of the law we may hear Jesus saying, ‘For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished,’ as a burden, but that is not the way Jesus’ Jewish followers thought of the Torah. The psalmists wrote of the law of the Lord: ‘How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!’ (Psalm 119:103); ‘More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb.’ (Psalm 19:10) Jesus is speaking of this sweetness.

To the sweetness of the law, Jesus adds the saltiness of the prophets. Israel’s prophets made a profession of challenging Israel’s religious self-satisfaction. They repeatedly proclaimed that true religion, true worship of the God who brought Israel out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, must always include justice. Without justice, said the prophets, no matter how carefully worshippers follow outward forms, religion is meaningless. We heard those warnings last year; we know none of the prophets held back when the word of the Lord came to them. Just as Jesus’ teaching is in the tradition of Moses, so it is in the tradition of Amos and Hosea and Isaiah and Jeremiah. Jesus quotes the prophet Hosea twice in the Gospel according to Matthew: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’ (Matthew 9:13 and 12:7), and this is the key to Jesus’ teachings. He may seem to the scribes and the Pharisees to be abolishing the Torah, but what he is doing is focusing on the law’s weightier matters as revealed by the prophets: love, justice and mercy.

Again, for us as Christians listening to the Sermon two thousand years after it was delivered, it is quite terrifying to hear Jesus say, ‘For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’ Later in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus will go further, ‘Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.’ How can we possibly do that? How could Jesus’ first followers do that, no matter how sweet they found the Torah? We need to remember that when questioned by the Pharisees about which commandment in the law is the greatest, Jesus said that ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”’ (Matthew 22:32-40) When Jesus tells his disciples that unless their righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, they will never enter the kingdom of heaven, what he means is that his disciples must outdo the scribes and Pharisees in love.

To fulfil the law and the prophets, Jesus now makes six authoritative interpretations of the Torah, of which we hear the first today. These are called the ‘antitheses’ because that is the form they take: ‘You have heard that it was said … But I say to you’. The first antithesis deals with the most basic commandment of the law, the one with which no one, whether Jewish, Christian, of another faith, or none, could argue – you shall not murder. Easy. I do not imagine that many preachers spend much time convincing congregation members that committing murder is a bad thing to do, although if any of you are thinking of doing it, please let me know. But Jesus gets to the root of what so often causes people to commit murder, anger against those around us, or the dehumanisation of others. The commandment, ‘You shall not murder,’ was intended to prevent the worst outcomes of hostility between people; Jesus is saying that anger that is well short of a killing rage can still be destructive of people and relationships. He wishes to get to the heart of what destroys relationships and communities; he also wishes to shock us so that we will take him seriously. I do not know how many of you are liable to the hell of fire for saying ‘You fool,’ but I certainly am. Luckily, most commentators believe that this is an example of semitic exaggeration.

Interestingly, when Jesus tells his followers to reconcile with an alienated brother or sister, he does not say, ‘if you have something against your brother or sister,’ but ‘if your brother or sister has something against you’. He is not speaking primarily of how we should respond when someone has mistreated us, that will come later in the Sermon, but of how we should respond if we have mistreated someone else. He is reminding us that, although he will later call us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect, in fact, none of us is perfect. We all fail and fall short. We all do things that could lead a sister or brother to be angry with us, and we need to save them from expressing that anger in ways that might lead them to judgement; we need to reconcile with them. The prophets told the people of Israel that worship without justice was meaningless; Jesus tells us that worship without reconciliation is meaningless. This is why we pass the peace before we receive communion; we are not meant to gather around the Lord’s table if a brother or sister has something against us.

One of the things that the psychologist I see most often tells me is that anger in itself is not a bad thing. When someone attacks us, anger can be protective and is certainly healthier than the self-blame that leads to depression. Anger can strengthen relationships when it prompts us to address issues and set boundaries. Righteous anger at injustice can lead us to change the world. When Jesus says, ‘if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement,’ I do not believe he is telling us never to be angry. He is telling us that the response to our anger should not be to insult others or call them a fool, and that if we do express our anger in such a way that it hurts another, then we need to seek reconciliation with them before rejoicing in our place as a member of God’s family.

A couple of weeks ago, I told you that of all the teachings in the Sermon, it is those about anger and the lack of retaliation that I find most difficult. My awareness that these are the parts of the Sermon with which I most struggle does not mean that I should stop struggling with them. Trying to obey Jesus’ commands, or obeying them in action even when we know we are failing them in spirit, does help us to more truly be Jesus’ disciples. Every time we are angry with someone but refuse to call them ‘You fool,’ every time we refuse to insult someone even if we feel they deserve it, we come closer to being able to live as Jesus’ disciples, without our anger destroying us or our relationships. Pastor Martin B. Copenhaver writes that being a pastor has made him better than he is, simply because those around him have expected him to behave in ways that he thought beyond him. He describes a 1897 short story written by Max Beerbohm called ‘The Happy Hypocrite’.  In it, a wicked man falls in love with a virtuous woman. To marry her, the man buys and wears a mask of a saint’s face. To maintain his marriage, he then changes his behaviour to suit the mask. Later, his old lover turns up and refuses to leave until she is granted one look at the man’s true face. When, after a scuffle, the mask is removed, it turns out that his face has assumed the contours of the mask. He has become what he pretended to be.[1]

But that is just a story. What I would like you to do now is to smile. Imagine that I am about to take your photo. Did you know that an analysis of psychological studies conducted over the past fifty years has found that ‘smiling makes people feel happier, scowling makes them feel angrier, and frowning makes them feel sadder’? If we pretend to be better than we are, we may find ourselves becoming that which we pretend, in the same way that if we smile, we may find ourselves becoming happier. So, if we are angry with a brother or sister, then let us at least try not to insult them, and if we cannot yet be reconciled with those who have something against us, then let us at least ask God for help to heal the relationship.

Are you still smiling?  Did you know that children smile about four hundred times a day, while happy adults usually only manage forty to fifty smiles? As we try to truly follow Jesus, to live out the life described in the Sermon on the Mount, let us smile, remembering that what God wants of us is mercy, not sacrifice. Amen.

[1] Lillian Daniel and Martin B. Copenhaver, This Odd and Wondrous Calling: The Public and Private Lives of Two Ministers (Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2009), p. 65.