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What Proceeds From the Heart Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 20, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill II Chronicles 30:13-22 Matthew 15:1-20
Rabbi Leonard Gordon does not think the fire started in the pre-school room at the Germantown Jewish Center this last week was a hate crime; nor does he think the swastikas painted two weeks ago on the rear of the building and the fire were related. “The swastikas looked like something children would do,” said the Rabbi in the Inquirer. “We have wonderful relations with the community.” Rabbi Gordon speaks the truth about the relations of the Center with its neighbors and likely is playing down the significance of these incidents for the sake of those relations. Concerning the perpetrators of the fire and the swastikas, the truth is not known save the truth that “out of the heart come evil intentions….These are what defile a person.” Not the Jewish Center but the sinner has been defiled by these acts that proceeded from the heart. It must be in light of these acts that we ask after the meaning not only of our text today but also of the New Testament in relation to the Old and Rabbinic Judaism in relation to Christianity. Though to get at Matthew’s meaning for the living of these days we must also take a closer look at the first century context which fueled the conflict between the religious authorities from Jerusalem and the nascent Christian community addressed by Matthew’s gospel. For absent the original context, the texts from last week and this can be and have been used for two millennia to underwrite the tragic conflict between God’s chosen and God’s adopted children. According to James Sanders, retired Professor of Biblical Studies at Union Seminary in New York and our guide this morning to the first century, early Judaism (from the sixth century B.C. to 70 A.D. when the temple was destroyed) was a complex, pluralistic phenomena that could generally be categorized by two predominant ways of reading the Torah. One way emphasized the beliefs, the identity, the story Torah told (haggadah) and the other emphasized the laws, the ethics, the lifestyle Torah commanded (halechah). “But,” Sanders goes on, “only two of those Jewish denominations survived the second great destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple…: the Pharisees, who became what we know as Rabbinic Judaism; and the Christians of the early church. They may be viewed as two daughters of the mother faith of early Judaism, but each going after A.D. 70 in quite different directions….Rabbinic Judaism, following the emphasis of Pharisaism, stressed the…halechah [laws, ethics, lifestyle] aspect of Torah while Christianity emphasized the…haggadah [gospel, story, identity] aspect.” Remember, however, that neither Rabbinic Judaism nor early Christianity emphasized one to the exclusion of the other. In both communities, Torah was read and studied and interpreted as the document that addressed the questions of both identity and obedience: Who are we? What are we to do? Yet in the first century the book that constituted these two ongoing communities began to differ in both content and interpretation. As to content, for Rabbinic Judaism nothing changed: the final edition of the basic Torah begins in Genesis and ends with Moses’ last sermon and death on the east bank of the Jordan overlooking the Promised Land. Not everyone in the history of Israel was pleased with this ending! Jeremiah said twice that he thought the story of his time would be added to the Torah, to the story of God’s mighty acts. Ezekiel and Second Isaiah concurred. The Chronicler even rewrote the ending of the Torah making David and not Moses God’s greatest actor. But neither the prophets nor the history made it in. The Torah ends just shy of Israel’s entry into the Promised Land “so that Jews, if they happened to be scattered, would not feel they had to change and become something else just because they were not living in Palestine. And that,” Sanders thinks “is why Judaism has lasted so long, these twenty-five hundred years, because the basic Torah, the Pentateuch, in effect says that if you happen to be wandering and in dispersion, like Abraham, Jacob, Moses, you do not have to fret about being Jews….Nobody succeeded in adding a chapter to the basic Torah story,” says Sanders “until the New Testament.” The scandalous claim of the Christian Jews was that in Christ God acted in a way that was not only similar to God’s acts in the Torah but in a way that was the climax of the story. Therefore “The great concern of the whole early church of the first century (including most of the New Testament writers) was to try to show that the new Testament-Christ story was biblical. Most of Judaism said No.” Though there is more to the divide than the addition of the Jesus story: at issue also was interpretation. For if the Jesus story is believed to be the climax of God’s acts, then the way the Torah and the Prophets are read is very, very different. Paul’s frustration (and Matthew’s too given his emphasis on Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament texts) was not first that the Jews did not accept Jesus as Messiah but that Paul, a Pharisee, could not get the Pharisees “to read the Torah and the Prophets correctly, that is, in the way he read them. For he was certain that if they would review the Torah story with him in the way he viewed it, they would then accept the Christ.” The Pharisees, however, were headed down a very different interpretive road in relation to their reading of the Torah…and the road was not, as we like to think, simply legalistic! It had become “the special vocation of Pharisaism, the most liberal denomination in the Judaism of the time, to try to find ways, in light of the specific expression of the will of God on Mount Sinai in the legal codes of the Old Testament, to discern through them the will of God for first century Judaism.” In addition, their belief in the verbal inspiration of the Torah made it legitimate to interpret a law by focusing on a single word or letter (a dot or iota). Once the contextual meaning of a passage was no longer the key to understanding its import, Sanders explains “the Torah received new life in its adaptability to the problems Judaism faced” in the first century. And soon the interpretive tradition of various schools of rabbis began to take precedence over a contextual interpretation of the commandments. In the case of the dispute before us this morning, the Pharisees accuse Jesus and his disciples of breaking the tradition of the elders, that is, ignoring the Pharisaic interpretation of the Torah. Jesus counters by quoting a commandment right out of the Torah and accuses the Pharisees of trumping the relational intent of the commandment with their interpretation. Does this not sound like the church today? You can begin to understand how these communities were now reading, for all intents and purposes, two completely different books. Believing the Torah to be primarily a story that culminated in the cross and resurrection; claiming that the resurrection constituted the same sort of mighty act as the exodus from Egypt; and so including the Jesus story as the key to the meaning of the Torah and the prophets would have been nonsense to the Pharisee. “In fact,” Sanders goes on, “if we had lived then and were good members of the first century Jewish church to the same measure as we are today, by dynamic analogy we would have felt the same way as did the good Presbyterians, I mean Pharisees of first century Palestine. We would have looked on the idea of additions to the old Bible very skeptically indeed!” So we necessarily come to the question of what proceeds from the heart of these characters engaged, according to Matthew, in an increasingly pitched battle, for they reveal our hearts too. In both Hellenistic Greek and biblical Hebrew “the heart was the seat of thinking. Jesus’ saying, ‘As a man thinks in his heart, so is he’ is the key here. It is a question of identity,” says Sanders. “That is, whatever story completely captivates you is the way you are going to see life and perceive problems and look for solutions to them.” To love God with all of the heart, mind, soul and strength is be captivated and to fill one’s head with this story so that it is who you are and guides what you do. That is precisely what I hope for us as we read Scripture together year after year! Still the question of what the story means is begged. No doubt the Pharisees were exceedingly irritated with the way Jesus and his disciples interpreted Torah. “Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?” the disciples asked Jesus. Make no mistake: Jesus was a Jew who kept the law—a fact that Matthew emphasizes from the beginning of his gospel to the end! So for the same reasons, Matthew was also exceedingly irritated with the Pharisees of his day who seemed to sidestep the commandments—but also sidestep the continuing story of God’s mighty acts--in favor of their ongoing interpretive tradition. So Matthew has the One who holds the key to the story’s meaning ask them, “Why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?” Clearly what is coming out of the mouths of both comes from the heart in that the Pharisees and the disciples see life and perceive problems and look for solutions through the interpretation of the story of God’s mighty acts that has captivated them. Yet both communities, in their own way, have been defiled by what has come out of the mouth concerning that story: the Pharisees in their growing intention, according to Matthew, to have Jesus arrested by stealth and killed. But the rancor evident in Matthew’s gospel toward the Pharisees has done more, over the centuries, to defile the Christian who has found warrant in Matthew’s gospel for the false witness borne, the slander hurled, the evil intentions symbolized and the unspeakable genocide recalled by swastikas still painted on the walls of synagogues. “The drawings are gone now” reported Denise James on Friday, “but the scars are apparent in the hearts of people…. ‘Growing up in Europe under Hitler, it evokes bad memories,’ said one member. The fire destroyed Linda Rich’s class,” the report went on. “She salvaged some preschoolers’ drawings of dreams done for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. ‘I feel sad and scared,’ she said. ‘When is this going to stop?’” When what comes out of the mouth, said Jesus, proceeds from a heart of love for the other. That love, we believe, was revealed in him and yet in his name and out of the mouths of his followers still there is hatred. “We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization,” said Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1957. “There is still a voice crying out in terms that echo across the generations, saying: Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you that you may be children of your Father which is in heaven.” By God’s grace may his love proceed anew from these hearts of ours that are both captivated and chastened by the story of the God made known to us in Jesus Christ, the God who is acting still! |