Improvising with the law and the prophets
A sermon by Jamie Howison on Isaiah 58:1-12 and Matthew 5:13-20
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets,” Jesus says in tonight’s gospel text. “I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.”
Now doesn’t that sound like a rather strong mandate, telling us that we should be following the Torah just as scrupulously as Orthodox Jews? Particularly when Jesus then goes on to say that “whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” Among other things, I guess we’ll have to shift our Sunday evening service back to Saturdays… oh, and no more bacon with your breakfast!
But then you begin to consider that in his letter to the Romans Paul wrote that we “are not under law but under grace,” (6:14) and that “we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are slaves not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit.” And what of Peter’s dream showing him this sheet being let down, filled with birds and animals of all sorts, with a voice telling him he could take and eat any of it. I can’t touch those, they’re unclean, he replies. “The voice spoke to him, ‘Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.’” (Acts 10)
To say nothing of Jesus himself, who several times over-rides sabbath laws, and in the story from John 8 about the woman caught in adultery, he basically says to the crowd, “sure, go ahead and execute her according to the law… provided that the first stone can be thrown by someone who is entirely righteous and without sin.”
I used the term “over-rides laws”, while the biblical scholar Emerson Powry prefers the term “re-interpret.” “When Jesus says he will not abolish, he clearly does not mean he will not re-interpret: ‘You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times... but I say to you.’” Powry is citing the verses that follow immediately on the ones we read tonight, when Jesus says,
You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgement.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement…” “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Maybe the better word than over-ride or re-interpret is improvise; that in his teaching Jesus engages the law like a jazz improvisor taking a very familiar melody—a standard—and then creating something new and fresh with it, without ever losing sight of the original.
Notice, too, that he’s not talking about just the law, but the law and the prophets, and those prophets tended to be rather grand improvisors on the Torah. We’ve got a rather wonderful sample of that on our plate this evening, in the reading from the 58th chapter of Isaiah. The prophet begins,
Shout out, do not hold back!
Lift up your voice like a trumpet!
Announce to my people their rebellion,
to the house of Jacob their sins.
Yet day after day they seek me
and delight to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that practised righteousness
and did not forsake the ordinance of their God;
they ask of me righteous judgements,
they delight to draw near to God.
These two opening verses, comments Walter Brueggemann, “establish the core problem of the community, namely, a hypocritical gap between the actual conduct of the community and the intention of the community expressed in worship. There is, asserts the poem, a deep, dishonest variance between the two, a variance that must be overcome if there is to be well-being in the community.”
But Lord, the people say, look at the way we keep our fasts. Look at the way we humble ourselves before you. Don’t you even see those things? Nonsense is the word the prophet effectively delivers to them. “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, / and oppress all your workers.” That’s not the kind of fasting God has called for, Isaiah says, and it certainly isn’t humble. And then come those remarkable lines, which are really a kind of foretaste of Jesus in his ministry:
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you,
the glory of the Lord shall be your rearguard.
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and God will say, Here I am.
“These verses,” Brueggemann comments, “present a clear, radical statement of social ethics that is at the heart of Judaism, derivative from older covenantal-prophetic tradition.” The older covenantal-prophet tradition, by which Brueggemann means the dynamic, improvisational interplay between the torah—which sets out the shape of the covenant between God and Israel—and the prophets, who again and again call the people back to first things in new ways.
And more than a collection of laws or rules, the torah—the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures—also includes story; the whole of the book of Genesis and the stories of the Exodus and the long journey in the Sinai wilderness, right up to the moment near the end of Deuteronomy when Moses stands on Mount Nebo and looks across the Jordan and in to the land of promise. Yes there are laws in those books—613 in all—and many seem to us obscure, arbitrary, and even a little arcane, but along with the stories these laws were meant to shape a people; a people of God, who will live according to a different faith, a different set of ethics, a different politics.
It is the view of N.T. Wright that this is precisely what Jesus is doing when he first calls the people salt and light, and then challenges them to live under the guidance of the law and the prophets. “Jesus,” Bishop Wright comments,
Jesus is calling the Israel of his day to be Israel, now that he is there… God had called Israel to be the salt of the earth; but Israel was behaving like everyone else, with its power politics, its factional squabbles, its militant revolutions. How could God keep the world from going bad—the main function of salt in the ancient world—if Israel, [God’s] chosen ‘salt’, had lost its distinctive taste?
On the other side of his resurrection, on the other side of Pentecost and the coming of the Spirit in a new way, we have indeed been placed “not under law but under grace” as Paul proclaims. So what now for us, freed from rules against such things as eating shellfish, wearing clothing of mixed fabric, mixing dairy and meat as we prepare meals? No longer bound by such laws, we are still called to an improvisational engagement with the wisdom of the torah. To give just one example, while we’re not going to shift our liturgy from Sunday evening back to Saturday, we really must keep in view the wisdom of sabbath. Sabbath tells us that we all need rest; that we should not be driven by a marketplace economy that never stops; that we need to give honour to the One who has given us life.
And then there’s the integrity to which Isaiah points, when there will be no gap between the actual conduct of the community and the intention of the community expressed in worship; my goodness, but isn’t that a core claim placed on us still? That what we do in our actual conduct, decision-making, and priorities—as individuals and as a community—is in fact in keeping with—at one with—what we say we believe and what we express in our worship. Isaiah and Jesus would certainly counsel such integrity, now wouldn’t they?
Attend to the wisdom of the law and the prophets, and improvise that wisdom into the fabric of your life and faith.