Sermon — February 12, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
There’s a traffic phenomenon I’ve discovered in my years driving around the Northeast. I call it “the New-England Green.” Now, a driver’s ed instructor will tell you that there are three states a traffic light can be in. Red means “Stop.” Yellow means, “Stop if safe.” Green means—not “Go,” but “Proceed with caution,” right? In New England, these work a little differently from the driver’s-ed textbook. Red means “Stop if safe and you’re not running late.” Yellow means, “Hit the gas to make it through.” Green means “Go, go, go!” (and/or “Start honking at the guy in front of you to go.”)
But in New England, there’s actually a fourth state the traffic light can be in, and it’s what I call “New England Green”: the three or four seconds when your light is red, but the other light has not yet turned to green. Now, your car is supposed to be stopped. But this time can be used for all sorts of things: a cautious right turn at 15 mph if there are no pedestrians; completing a left turn that you’d rolled out into the middle of the intersection to make; or just continuing on straight through the light because the guy in front of you was driving too slow down Main Street, and you’ve earned it.
Now: traffic engineers are the second-most-second-guessed profession in the world, after meteorologists. Who among us has not sat in traffic at an off-ramp and thought, “What kind of clown designed this intersection? But traffic engineers are actually pretty smart. And while you may sometimes doubt their skill in designing roadways, you have to admire their grasp of psychology. Because they know that people are going to take advantage of that “New England Green”—people are going to run those red lights, over and over and over again, every day—and so they build in a few seconds’ grace, between the moment that your light turns red, and the moment their light turns green, and in so doing they save what must be thousands of lives a year.
And I say all this because, believe it or not, this is one of the two best ways to understand what Jesus is doing in this morning’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew.
“You have heard that it was said,” Jesus says, “‘You shall not murder’… But I say to you that if you are angry…you will be liable to judgment.” (Matthew 5:21-22) “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that if you even look at someone with lust, you’ve already committed adultery in your heart.” (5:27-28) “You have heard it said, ‘Do not swear falsely, but carry out your vows’… But I say to you, ‘Do not swear at all.’ Let your word be, ‘Yes, yes,’ or ‘No, no.’ Anything more than this comes from the evil one.” (5:33-37)
Again and again, Jesus takes well-known and common-sense laws and makes them an order of magnitude stricter. He takes a law against murder and makes it a law against anger. He takes a law against adultery and makes it a law against wandering eyes. He takes a law against breaking the oaths you’ve sworn, and making it a law against swearing oaths in the first place. And he does it all in extravagant, even gruesome language: the hell of fire and the evil one, eyes ripped out and hands chopped off. He really wants to make his point: Jesus’ law is a very strict law.
This was a traditional technique. The ancient sages called “building a fence around the Torah.” The basic principle is the psychological insight discovered by New England traffic engineers: Whatever boundary you set, people will wander up to the edge of it, and often cross it. So if there’s something that’s very important at the center of a law—a murder, for example, or a collision—you need to build in some extra space. You don’t just make the law: you build a fence around it, so that even if someone crosses the boundary you’ve set, their behavior isn’t catastrophic.
The most famous example of this principle in action in Judaism is probably the prohibition against mixing meat and dairy. Three times, the Torah repeats the cryptic commandment, “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” (Exodus 23:19, 34:26; Deut. 14:21) And I can understand why. Cooking a young animal by boiling it in its own mother’s milk seems gross. But God seems unusually disturbed, and the rabbis take note. It’s unusual for the law to contain the same commandment three times. It must be an especially important one, the ancient rabbis thought. So they built a fence around it.
You can’t really know the source of any given milk; so it’s probably best not to boil a kid in any milk. And it’s hard to judge what counts as a “kid,” as opposed to a young goat or a calf, so just don’t cook meat in milk. And if it’s so important to God that meat not be cooked in milk, then surely we surely it’s splitting hairs to say that a beef in cream sauce or a cheeseburger is all right because the milk is just on it, rather than the meat being cooked in it. In fact in a kosher household, you keep separate sets of plates and cooking utensils for meat and dairy; you don’t eat them at the same meal. And this sets the fence at the right distance from the law: you might mix up your plates, you might have some milk chocolate too close in time to a hamburger, but there’s no way you could possibly end up boiling a kid in its mother’s milk.
And this is very similar to what Jesus is doing. It’s incredibly important that you not murder someone. So it’s better that you not even be violent toward them. And if you shouldn’t be violent toward them, you ought not even to be angry at them.
It’s basic traffic engineering: Jesus knows you’ll try to follow the law, that you’ll try to do what’s right. And he knows you’ll fail. So he builds in that grace period, that extra space. If you get angry with someone, okay, you’ve violated the Sermon on the Mount—but you’re nowhere close to murder. Even if your eye occasionally strays toward an attractive person who is not your spouse, you’re still far from infidelity. The further out Jesus pushes the boundaries of the law, the more likely it is you’ll break them—but the less of a life-and-death matter it is when you do.
I said this was one of the two best ways to understand what Jesus is doing here. Because the strictness of Jesus’ new law doesn’t just build a fence around the old one. It does something else, too. To the extent that we can imagine a boundary, a thin line separating the righteous from the unrighteous, us good people from those bad people, sinners from saints, Jesus has moved the boundary so that we’re all on the same side of it. And this was a theme of Jesus’ ministry. He became infamous among the respectable and righteous people of his society for hanging out with “tax collectors and sinners.” The Pharisees criticized him for it all the time. And the point is not that actually, tax collectors were good and the Pharisees are bad. It’s that there is no dividing line. There is no division into tax collectors and Pharisees, into sinners and saints, into sheriffs and outlaws; in the eyes of the Sermon on the Mount, we are all outlaws. We have all been angry. We have all made promises we can’t keep. We have all occasionally run that red light. We have all needed to forgive, and we have all needed to be forgiven. And you can tell that in a sense, what bothers Jesus more than anything else in the world is the self-righteous self-deception of people trying to convince themselves and the world that they are perfect, when instead we should be compassionate with one another, because we have all been imperfect.
In just a few more verses, the disciples will ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. And he’ll respond with a prayer that contains the famous words: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” Jesus doesn’t divide the world into sinners and saints. He reminds us that we are all both sinners and saints, all the time; that the people of God are always both holy and imperfect.
I don’t need to remind you that Lent is coming again. (Actually, in a few minutes I do need to remind you that Lent is coming, because we’re planning our Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper.) But Lent is coming, as it always does. And the Ash Wednesday service will include, as it always does, what’s called an “Invitation to a Holy Lent.” But this morning I also want to invite you to prepare for a compassionate Lent: to take a season in which to remember that you are imperfect. When someone around you goes astray, remember that you are imperfect. When you yourself make a mistake, remember that you are imperfect. Let Jesus’ unbelievably-strict interpretation of the law teach you that you can never be perfect, however hard you try; and let Jesus’ unbelievably-generous grace remind you that will be always be loved, even if and when you fail.