prescription of the former law, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” had not meant so much that vengeance is divinely demanded as that such retaliation as is demanded by the aggrieved and permitted by law must be limited to the measure of the offense and no more. It is this restraining intent that Jesus “fills full” as he sets aside all vengeance and illustrates the abandonment of that kind of response to conflict with the counter strategy of the other cheek and the second mile.
Similarly the commandment to love the neighbor is in no way done away with by the Sermon. Jesus universalizes its meaning by including even the enemy in the definition of the “neighbor” to be loved. “Neighbor” here, as in most other languages than English, means anyone with whom we have to do, the representative “other” person with whom we are dealing, and not a person especially close to us. There is no person to whom neighbor love does not apply. Specifically the enemy becomes the test of whether our love for neighbor is authentic. Loving those who are close to us (“neighbors” in the English sense) is characterized by Jesus as the morality of “sinners” or “gentiles.”
The life-style that Jesus rejects is thus not selfishness in the sense of a failure to love anyone, so that the devotion of someone who makes a sacrifice on behalf of posterity or client or nation should be praised as virtuous. The most destructive kinds of selfishness, especially on the level of institutional injustice, are those that have their root in the claim to be altruistic. They claim to need, in the name of some cause, some human solidarity, some bearer of rights, to exclude another person or category of people from their loving concern. The more clear we are that our own intentions are “just,” that they constitute “rights,” or that the hostilities in which we are involved are on behalf of some legitimate beneficiary, the more unquestioning we become about the unworthy means we are ready to use for that higher cause.
It would take little moral profundity to reject purely personal selfishness. What Jesus rejects is every ground for dealing with a fellow human being as if he or she were an exception to the obligation to love. This does not mean, in some idealistic way, saying that we have no enemies, or refusing to recognize them as such. It means the opposite: we are to name the relationship as one of enmity and then to express love within it.
Imitating the Father (Matt 5:45–48, Luke 6:35–36)
What Jesus does not mean by “Be perfect”
The thought that we might be like God the Father is not a frequent one in the New Testament. Small wonder that it has seemed shocking or frightening, so that efforts to interpret such a simple and sweeping phrase have gone in several directions.
One meaning of “Christian perfection” has seen it as a distant target, an “ideal,” to be achieved only at the end of a lengthy process of growth and self-discipline whereby the seeker after perfection develops character, sets aside lesser values, and lives only for God and God’s cause in a growing wholeness of consecration. Such understandings of perfection have been at home especially in the religious life, in mysticism, and in the literature of devotion, both Catholic and Protestant.
Another view, more widely represented in middle America, sees “perfection” not as the end of a long process of human effort but as a unique gift of divine grace offered to those who will accept it in faith. This view is represented in those evangelical denominations called “Wesleyan,” amid continuing debate about whether and if so how clearly John Wesley really meant this kind of experience when he wrote about “perfection.”
The two models just named have in common with the evident meaning of the teaching of Jesus that they seek to describe something that is possible. A third classical approach is to see in this text an impossible demand: Jesus calls us precisely to do what he knows we cannot do. He demands of us that we be flawless, sinless. He demands it not because he expects it but because he knows it to be unattainable. He wants to leave us no excuse or escape before the humiliating recognition of our sinfulness. The purpose of moral teaching generally, and therefore also—especially—of the Sermon on the Mount, is not first to instruct us but to condemn us, bringing us to our knees, driving us to recognize that we can be acceptable before God only by grace.7
Each of these interpretations of “perfection” is solidly rooted somewhere else in the thought and piety of the people who then bring it from there into this passage. In the text itself, however, when taken straightforwardly, the context makes evident that to be “perfect” is something far more simple and, although not easy, not by definition impossible. We are called to be nondiscriminatory in our love just as God does not discriminate. Discriminating in favor of those to whom we are closer is something that the Gentiles, the tax-collectors, the “sinners” do; the contrast is with God, whose benevolence aids the evil and the good alike (Matt 5:46), whose generosity is extended to the “ungrateful and the selfish” (Luke 6:35).
Most of our discussions of social justice center upon the debates about what is a desirable goal and who should lead us toward it. Jesus asks a prior question: For whom do we want what we want? Whose welfare do we seek to serve? Do we recognize a moral priority to the needs and claims of our adversaries in the social system? If not, we do not initiate the search for social justice were Jesus does, namely at the point of the fundamental flaw in our community. That flaw is not that food is scarce, nor that every individual is self-seeking. It is that we have acquiesced in a truncated understanding of community, according to which certain adversaries are excluded from the range of our mercy.
One of the reasons that the misunderstanding identified above could persist was the tendency in our culture to see “love” as an emotion whose grasp upon us is pre-rational, a given kind of empathy or a bond with a claim on our sentiments, powerful to move our decisions toward the needs of those whom we “love.” Romantic or erotic understandings of love as drive are only the extreme forms of this. Familial and cultural, ethnic and national forms make the same kinds of claim. They affirm a loyalty that is not reasoned, not a decision but a given, a loyalty that by its nature is part of a wider social selfishness, rather than ennobling adversaries. What Jesus says is not that we have or should cultivate that kind of “love,” in the sense of an emotional attachment, toward people with whom we have nothing human in common. It is that we should (and can) seek their welfare and serve their needs, whoever they be.
The Power of Praise and Forgiveness (Matt 6:9–15; Luke 11:2–4)
What it means not to heap up empty phrases
When we lift the “Our Father” or “Lord’s Prayer” out of the text of the Sermon and take it simply as a standard outline for prayer in common worship, we get the impression of a series of seven petitions, each of them meaningful in its own right, but with no special internal connections among them, except that (logically enough) they begin and end with the honor of God, with our own needs in the middle. Closer attention, however, yields a less scattered impression, and focuses more upon a commitment to concrete righteousness on the part of the one who prays.
Jewish thought holds that since the revelation of God’s holiness has been received most adequately in the form of gracious commands (Torah), therefore to recognize and proclaim the holiness of God is not an action of mere cultic adoration or mystical contemplation. To “sanctify the Name,” to proclaim the holiness of God, is most fittingly to obey God. Especially it means obeying God in a context where obedience must be a matter of costly choice. “To sanctify the Name” in fact became, in later Jewish thought, the standard designation for martyrdom.
When we take account of the place of parallelism in Hebrew prayer and poetry, we see that the first three petitions are three facets of the same thing. That God’s Name is sanctified, that God’s Kingdom comes, that God’s will is done on earth as in heaven are three formulations of the same reality for which we pray. The three together constitute one massive petition, one superscription over the entire prayer, asking for the doing of God’s
