In the Bible, God’s grace, God’s gift of life and love and mercy, always precede any demands. This is true from the Ten Commandments to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount to the Apostles’ teachings. Grace always precedes demand. The point is that we who have experienced amazing grace in the gifts of love and new life and community are to reflect that grace in the way we relate to others. The whole point of God’s outpouring of grace in the first place is to shape us into the people we we’re meant to be from the beginning. In the words of the pastor and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “when we ignore the demand for heartfelt obedience to God’s commands, we turn all that God has done for us into ‘cheap grace.’” (Matthew 5:13-37)
We’re told that Martin Luther originally had a hard time trying to live up to the demands of the God of the Old Testament—even literally beating himself at times. Finally he discovered that salvation was by grace alone, by faith alone. Through the lens of that discovery, he began to view the New Testament as “gospel” and the demands of the Hebrew Bible as “law.” For Luther, it was crucial that Jesus had come to set us free from the “law.” And he “wrote” this perspective into his translation of the Bible by placing books he didn’t care for at the end. But Luther wasn’t the first or the last to try to “edit” the Bible. I think the real problem for us is that what they did on paper, we do in fact. We simply omit those portions of the Bible from actual use. I think this tends to apply especially to the “law” with its demands.
Jesus opens the “Sermon on the Mount” with the beatitudes, which while not really instructions for living, are a declaration of the grace that God is pouring out on all people through Jesus Christ. They are a more detailed announcement of the heart of Jesus’ message: the kingdom of heaven is at hand. If you wonder what the kingdom of heaven is about, look at the beatitudes. It means blessing and peace and comfort for those who have been trampled on in our world. Right from the start of this “sermon,” Jesus makes an elaborate statement about the grace that God gives to all people who will open their hearts to it.
While the Jewish religious leaders had sought to fulfill God’s demands by specifying the precise actions one could or could not do, Jesus called his disciples to obey the commands from the heart. That would mean that it’s not just killing as an egregious offense, it also means avoiding the anger and hatred that leads us to devalue the life of another enough to justify killing. In reality, Jesus didn’t make it easier to obey God’s commands, he made it harder. He went back to the original intention of the commands--to produce a people who would practice God’s justice, compassion, and mercy toward one another. And they would do so not for fear of punishment or in order to gain some reward. They would practice this kind of life because God’s grace had changed their hearts, and they could do no less. In other words, for Jesus, obeying God is not just a matter of what we do, it’s something that comes from the heart. And when we have that kind of relationship that comes from the heart, we can do no less than make every effort to practice the way of life defined in Scripture as “walking in God’s ways.”
(Adapted from The Waking Dreamer, Alan Brehm, “Light for the World,” February 12, 2014)
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