“Blessed Are Ye” #BCCSundaySchool2019 (3 of 3)

Part Three: Rules, what are they good for?

There is a moment in one of the Terminator movies that perfectly encapsulates one of the key tensions in the Sermon on the Mount. In this scene, a young boy learns that his future self has sent back a killer robot (played by a pre-gubernatorial Arnold Schwarzenegger) to protect him and make sure that he grows up to save humanity and stuff. Naturally, the boy is nervous about hanging around with a killer robot, so he makes a rule: no killing. Being a robot and all, Arnold Schwarzenegger has to follow rules, so the kid makes him take an oath not to kill anyone.

About ten seconds later, they are stopped by a security guard who tries to prevent them from entering a compound. Without saying a word, Schwarzenegger pulls out his gun and shoots the guy twice. While the poor guard is writing and screaming on the ground, the boy shouts, “what the hell are you doing?”

“He’ll live,” says the Robot. And they go in.

The humor in this scene comes from the tension between two different understandings of the “don’t kill anybody” rule. For the young boy, this meant something like “don’t be the sort of robot who solves every problem by shooting somebody” or “don’t be a violent, amoral killing machine.” For the Schwarzenegger robot, it means something much more precise: “Make sure that none of the injuries that you cause result directly in death.” He remains a violent, amoral killing machine (he is “the Terminator” after all). Killing people is still his essential nature. But he is now bound by an external rule to stop just short of killing the people he attacks and maims.

These are the two basic understandings of rules and laws that we have to understand to see what Jesus is saying in Matthew 5. One can understand a rule as something that tells us what sorts of things to do, or we can understand it as something that tells us what sort of person to become. For the sake of illustration, let’s call these Position 1 and Position 2. Yes it’s more complicated than this. Yes this is a false dichotomy. And yes everybody understands rules both ways to some degree. But it can still be useful to separate these two positions out and look at them more closely:

• Position 1 sees rules as regulative constraints on one’s behavior. To follow such a rule means to draw a line around certain behaviors and not cross them, not even once. This does not require any fundamental change in the type of person one is. Rules are something external to oneself–something for which one has accountability to another person or institution. One can still WANT to engage in the proscribed behaviors. One must simply avoid crossing the lines. The correct term for trying to obey these kinds of rules is “behavior modification.”
• Position 2 sees rules as constitutive elements of one’s character. To follow this kind of rule is to understand the principles behind it and try to acquire the character traits that are embedded within it. Rules are primarily internal, and accountability for them is wholly to oneself, and the proper goal is not to constrain a set of behaviors, but to acquire a set of characteristics. The best word for trying to obey these kinds of rules is “repentance.”  

Position 1 is a lot easier that Position 2 because it can be measured and assessed. There was nothing unique about Second Temple Judaism here. Pretty much every culture ever has settled on a Position 1 understanding of rules–be they religious, political, legal, or linguistic. Position 1 maps nicely onto the way that institutions work. It lets us draw lines, identify an inside and an outside, reward obedience, punish defection, and keep track of how we are doing. You don’t technically need a net to play tennis, but it makes it a lot easier to know who is winning.

But, if we believe what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, Position 1 cannot bring about the Kingdom of God. Jesus identifies four areas where obedience to rules has become automatic and behavior-based when it should be purposeful and principle based. All four areas continue to be issues today with people all over the world, including members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (who no longer call themselves “Mormons” because that would be against the rules). The four areas that Jesus mentions in Matthew 5 are as follows:

Anger

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. (Matthew 5: 21-22)

This is basically the principle of the Terminator clip that we began with. As a regulative commandment, “thou shalt not kill” leaves a lot of room for awfulness, including wounding, maiming, and incapacitating, but also including slandering, hating, backstabbing, and just generally being mad all the time.

I am convinced that there are a lot of murderers walking around free today because they have never had a good opportunity to kill someone. They have never crossed that line, but they would under the right circumstances, because they are angry and spiteful and prone to violence. Not killing has to be about more than not having a good opportunity.

The Position 1 response to what Jesus is saying would be to draw up a bigger list of behavioral constraints: no maiming, no wounding, no punching, no insulting, no raca-saying, no thou-fooling, and so on. But this just misses the point again. What he is saying is that there is no set of rules that can make you a loving person who treats other people the way that you want to be treated yourself. You have to change your nature.

Sexual Morality

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. (Matthew 5:27-28)

Latter-day Saints probably hold the world record for multiplying Position 1-type regulations about sexual behavior. Most of us probably remember the “appropriate behavior” lessons from our Young Men/Young Women classes, complete with charts and diagrams of what triggers a required confession to a bishop. And most of us probably remember agonizing over what exactly constitutes “light” vs “heavy” petting, when exploration ends and “masturbation” begins, and what stage of photographed undress rises to the level of “pornography.” Worrying about stuff like this is our superpower.

What we need to talk more about is the way that our understanding of sexuality, and our sexual behavior, embeds assumptions about the value of other people. Do we see and value people primarily for their ability to contribute to our pleasure? Do we reduce others to mechanisms for satisfying our desires? If we do, then we need to repent, and change, and develop the capacity to see other humans as beings of intrinsic worth and divine potential whose value in this world has nothing to do with fulfilling our desires.

The sin of “committing adultery in our heart” is not a sin of impure sexual thoughts–this formulation reduces the other person to the status of “temptation to be avoided” instead of “human being to be loved.” When we look at another person as a mechanism for gratifying our sexual desires, we are committing a sin against that person by negating their status as anything other than an extension of ourselves. It has nothing to do with zones of propriety. It has everything to do with what other people mean in the context of our lives.

Oathing

Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths: But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God’s throne: Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black. But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. (Matthew 5:33-37)

“Swearing” is probably the best example we have of a rule that has been turned into something that it isn’t by rote obedience. The original commandment not to take the name of the Lord in vain meant something like, “don’t swear by God’s name that you are going to do something and then not do it, because that is dishonest.” What Jesus says here is “don’t swear by God’s name at all, because the only reason you are doing it is to get people to believe you, which makes it easier to lie. Just say, “I’ll do it, and then do it.” In both cases, the core of the instruction was “do what you say you are going to do.”

In contemporary religious thought, this has gotten reduced to “don’t say God’s name in non-religious contexts.” We have focused on linguistic issue of saying a word rather than the character issue of being honest with other people. And we have turned the word “swearing” into a way to say “using bad words.” This is how Position 1 thinking about rules generally works. It empties the rule of all of its substance and then turns it into a box that can be checked. And lost in all of this is the need to become a trustworthy person who can be counted on by other people to mean what they say.

Reciprocity

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. (Matthew 5: 38-39)

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. (Matthew 5: 33-34)

In these final two injunctions, Jesus makes the underlying logic of the first three clear: The rules are not about you; they are about other people. The point of the rules is not to keep you free from some abstract nature of sin so you can return to God pure and undefiled and inherit the Kingdom of God. The point is to get you to see other people differently than you do now so you can become the kind of person who can work with other people to build the Kingdom of God right here and right now.   

The Gospel is other people, and the Kingdom of God is the natural consequence of people who have internalized these rules and used them to become something other than natural human beings. That’s a tall order, and it takes a lifetime of repentance and a mighty change of heart. Behavior modification won’t do it. We don’t have to change what we do; we have to change who we are. And another word for this is “the Gospel.”