Matthew 5-7
“The Ethic of Jesus”
August 17, 2003 - Tenth after Pentecost

         His fingers tapped the arm of the chair to the music he was hearing. The young man sitting in the doctor’s office with us was passing the time wearing headphones connected to a little MP3 player in his shirt pocket. It’s quite possible he was listening to copyrighted tunes illegally downloaded over the Internet. Despite government action to protect the copyrights of musicians and other artists, a computer and a phone line can still bring you thousands of pieces of music without paying for them.

         Would it be right for a Christian to ignore the law and take advantage of those free music downloads? One might imagine that any account of the ethics of Jesus ought to help us answer such questions. We are constantly faced with moral choices and it seems like any decent ethic should provide us with the means to address them.

         A frequent understanding of Christian ethics is that we ought to read the Bible looking for principles which can guide our choices. Are you wondering whether it’s right to remarry after you’ve been divorced? Or whether you can invest in a mutual fund which holds stock in companies with dubious products like liquor, tobacco or weapons? Or whether you should have an abortion? Or whether you should report some items of income on your tax return? The most common approach to all such difficult questions is that you should study Scripture in order to discern divine law which will tell you how to choose. Find verses which clearly state principles such as “Do not steal,” “He who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery,” “Avoid every appearance of evil,” “Do not kill,” or “Do not bear false witness.”

         Thus the overwhelming temptation in considering the ethic of Jesus is to read what He has to say and then reduce it to a set of guiding principles. What He said in the lengthy text before us, in His Sermon on the Mount, is to be systematized and condensed into basic rules which will guide our difficult moral choices. But that approach will completely miss the real ethical genius of Jesus.

         The ethical sayings of Jesus are not so easily transformed into choice-guiding principles. In fact, some of what we find in Matthew 5 is Christ taking the fairly straightforward laws of the Old Testament and intensifying them in such a way that they become seemingly impossible to follow. The command not to commit adultery becomes the demand not to even lust in one’s thoughts. The law against killing becomes the expectation that one will not even become angry. Rules that might have been helpful principles for our decisions are transformed into impossible standards of conduct.

         That is why if you try to take what Jesus taught about ethics and make it into a list of rules, you will arrive at the very sort of ethical system which He in His genius protested and fought against. When Christ appeared among the first-century Jewish people, they already had a carefully constructed, well-developed system of laws and regulations. They had taken the Old Testament and done just what many Christians would like to do with the whole Bible. They searched out the principles behind what God had said and then created a legal system of rules to govern all of life.

         So in Jesus’ time, the command to observe the Sabbath by not working had become a whole network of commands that specified exactly when the Sabbath began, how much weight one could carry without it actually being work, what constituted an emergency which allowed one to break the Sabbath, and so on. Likewise, laws about offerings were expanded to cover, as Jesus pointed out, giving a tithe even of the herbs which grew in your back yard. Dietary commands became detailed instructions for the way you cook and how animals are slaughtered. Every aspect of life was discussed and regulated.

         The result was that first-century Judaism was an oppressive, rule-laden system which allowed only a few elite males to observe it fully and attain to the blessings of being right with God. The same kind of thing has happened throughout history whenever Christian ethics became focused on generating rules out of Scripture. The casuistry of the medieval church and the legalism of the Puritans are good examples.

         Even very general rules fail to capture completely the spirit of what Jesus taught about ethics. One famous example is the attempt to reduce Christian ethics to just one over-arching principle of love. In the 1960s, Joseph Fletcher published his book on situation ethics[1] as an argument that love is the only norm needed by Christians. Forget all other rules and always do the loving thing in every situation. Then you will have succeeded in following the teaching of Christ.

         Fletcher’s own book shows how such generalization of Jesus’ ethic goes astray. Far from what Christ says here in the Sermon on the Mount, Fletcher maintains that prostitution, murder, adultery and suicide can all be justified by situation ethics based on love. His conclusions sound just like the sort of carelessness about God’s commands which Jesus expressly condemned in chapter 5 verse 19.

         Making rules goes wrong in Christian ethics in both directions. Legalism arises when you create a specific rule for every situation and lawlessness appears when you try to reduce it all to one or two more general rules. That is because what Jesus taught about the way to live is not ultimately about rules.

         Think with me about cooking for a moment. Most of you know someone, a mother, a grandmother, who was or is a great cook. And perhaps you have had a conversation that goes something like this:

         You say, “Just tell me exactly how you make that [pie, casserole, coffee cake, whatever, you fill in the blank].

         The great cook then tries to give you an exact recipe, but ends up saying things like, “Then put in some salt.” “How much?” you ask. “I don’t know. Until it tastes good.” she answers. Or the cook will direct you to mix the ingredients until they “look right.” “What’s that mean?” you wonder. And so you’re told that it means “mealy” or “pasty” or “doughy” or any number of other inexact and confusing terms which don’t help you at all.

         In a book of poems entitled Bandanna Ballads, Miss Howard Weeden offered these words to those who request her recipe for beaten biscuits.

         Of course I’ll gladly give de rule
                  I meks beat biscuit by
         Dough I ain’t sure dat you will mek
                  Dat bread de same as I.

         ’Case cookin’s like religion is—
                  Some’s ’lected an’ some ain’t,
         An’ rules don’t no more mek a cook
                  Den sermons mek a saint.[2]

She’s right. About all of it, rules, cooking, saints and, I’m afraid, sermons. You don’t become the best sort of cook by learning rules to follow. And you don’t become a faithful Christian either by hearing sermons or by learning rules. One reason for that is that ethical living according to the genius of Jesus is not program, it’s virtue.

         Virtue, like cooking, is ultimately not a set of recipes for behavior. Virtue is a set of skills for living. And you don’t learn skills by obeying rules. You learn them by observing examples and then practicing what you see. You have to spend time with your teacher and watch how she does it. What Miss Weeden doesn’t say is that you could learn to make her biscuits if you spent a few days with her in the kitchen.

         It’s true of most skills. Paul Halupa could take me out on a basketball court and give me spoken directions all day on how to shoot 3 pointers from the top of the key. I might get slightly better at it. But I would only really learn if he would take the ball and say, “Look, watch me. Do it like this.” and then put one in. Then he would give me back the ball and let me try again, “Not like that. Watch my elbows.” So I would watch, then make another attempt. Over and over, probably for weeks, until I was doing something like what he does. Not rules, but example and practice. Christian virtue, Christian ethics is the same sort of thing. Jesus is not our rule giver. He is our example.

         Most of the Sermon on the Mount is simply examples, not rules. Those passages about anger and lust and revenge and loving your enemies are not so much new laws as they are new examples. “Here,” says Jesus, “are some illustrations of how you will behave if you are following me.” Turn them into rules and they are impossible and confusing. Take them as examples of the sort of life you are to be living and they become both doable and inspiring.

         There is one more absolutely necessary piece to our picture of the ethics of Jesus. It’s hinted at there in Miss Weeden’s verse in the lines, “’Case cookin’s like religion is—Some’s ’lected an’ some ain’t.” At the bottom of it, cooks are born, “elected,” not made, even by a lot of practice. Even a great deal of effort won’t make you a cook if you’re not elected, if you don’t have the gift. And if you have to be “elected” to be a cook, then it’s even more true of Christian living. You cannot do it if you do not have the gift for it.

         Fortunately, there is one major difference between the gift of being a Christian and every other sort of talent on earth. Great cooks and basketball players have to be born with their talents. Practice just builds on something they’ve already received. If you weren’t born with the natural gifts, you can’t do anything about it. Paul Halupa could teach me to shoot better than I do, but never as good as he can. I haven’t got the athletic gifts he has. But Jesus Christ offers the gift of Christian life to anyone willing to receive it. In fact, He says in John 3 that anyone can be born again. Anyone and everyone can be elected, just by believing in Jesus. And part of the new birth you receive is the gift for a new way of living.

         That’s why the Sermon on the Mount doesn’t begin with anything that sounds like rules at all. It starts with what we call “The Beatitudes,” blessings. The ethic of Jesus is not rooted in God’s expectations for our behavior. It is rooted in God’s gracious gift of a blessing which we do not achieve or practice at all. The first four Beatitudes, which I read this morning, are Jesus’ announcement that God is going to give His gifts to anyone and everyone. It doesn’t matter if you are poor or sad or weak or unrighteous, He blesses you and gives you everything you need to begin a new sort of life.

         So the ethic of Jesus begins with grace, God’s grace. You cannot follow His ethic unless you are elected, unless you have willingly received the grace He offers you. But if you accept His grace, if you believe in Him, then the gift is yours. You are among those elected to be His saints. Sermons and rules won’t make you a saint, but God’s grace will.

         Beginning from grace, then, Jesus spells out His ethic not in rules, but in examples and stories which give us not a program but a pattern for life. Yes, love is the general ruling principle behind His ethic. Fletcher had that much right. But Jesus made the rule of love explicit and specific by teaching us that it means not letting anger rule us, not letting the false lure of lust replace real love, not hating even our enemies.

         Jesus also expanded His ethic in parables, letting us see how it works out in real-life examples. A man who was forgiven a great debt is expected to forgive those who owe him. A foreigner robbed and beaten on the road is to be treated with the same care as a member of your own family. A dinner party should not always be only for your friends, but for poor strangers as well. These stories are not there to be mined for the laws we must obey, but to inspire us to live in the loving spirit they describe.

         The ethic of Jesus is demonstrated in one more crucial manner. All other ethical teachers must eventually reach the limits of their own character.

         I’ve been reminded of those limits as I’ve been teaching my daughter Susan to drive for the past year. Now as I drive she observes and points out all the times I fail to do the things which I’ve been teaching her are good practice. In particular, my whole family reminds me of a journey to our favorite Mexican restaurant in Portland, when I discovered I was passing the freeway exit we needed. I made a screeching, rubber burning, heart-stopping change in course in order to get off anyway. Now whenever she sees me make some questionable driving maneuver, Susan sweetly reminds me of the time I burned rubber, and asks, “Is that the way you want me to drive, Daddy?”

         All those who teach good practice face this dilemma. Especially when it comes to ethics. We are not perfect examples for our children or anyone else. Eventually we must all say those ironic words, which every parent has said, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Jesus in Matthew 23, verses 2 and 3 points out that the same was true of the Jewish Pharisees. “Do everything they tell you,” He said. They were good, authoritative moral teachers. “But,” Jesus warned, “do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach.”

         The supreme ethical genius of Jesus is that He Himself perfectly embodied what He was teaching and preaching. He did not communicate His ethic just with verbal illustrations and parables. He acted out in His own life the complete sum of what He wants us to know about the way to live. That means, Robert Stein says, “the believer can both do as Jesus said and do as he did.”[3] There is no hypocrisy in Him at all.

         That is why Jesus does not base His ethic on rules. He is the foundation for what He taught about morality. His self-giving love on the Cross is both the grace which gifts you and me with a new life, and the living image of what that new life is to be like. You won’t get it by learning rules. The only way is to accept the gift and take the long course of learning to be like Him. May you and I today either begin or continue on that course of grace.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2003 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj