You have to be as perfect as God???

The Lord’s prayer in Matthew is placed at the heart of the famous Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). People often point to this collection of teachings as the highpoint of Jesus’ ethics. But read it slowly, pay attention to what is really said and you will be amazed. You would expect Jesus to be lenient with the rules. Already then, that was what people said about him. But Jesus corrects them (5:17,20):

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. (…) For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus radically expands the law of Moses to go beyond what even pious people believe. For Jesus the same guilt is incurred from killing someone as from calling him a fool, from adultery and from secretly feeling lust when looking at a woman who is not your partner. ‘Don’t divorce your wife for someone new, turn the other cheek, love your enemies,’ he says. ‘Give your alms, say your prayers and hold your fasts in private, not to show others how pious you are. And, oh yes: don’t judge. If you want to be good, you have to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.’

Let’s be honest: these are not just challenging objectives, - these are impossible demands. If that would be the Law, then no one will be able to keep it! The way that the Pharisees interpreted the law was far more sensible. There are two values: care for your family and charity to the needy. Say you have money in your pocket to buy food for the family and you encounter a beggar, what do you do? The reasonable solution is inspired by the tithing of the harvest in the Law: use ten percent in your wallet as gifts and you know that your behavior is good. Again two values: caring for the sick, and the Sabbath’s rest to rejoice in your faith. What do you do? The reasonable solution is to care for him as needed, but to leave treatment that is not urgent to the next day. Study and debate more cases like these and you will know exactly how to behave righteously.

Jesus goes beyond the Law

Jesus’ problem with the Pharisees is not that they keep to the Law in everything they do and abstain from, but that some are more concerned about the external praxis of purity, than on a pure heart (Mark 7:14-23, Matthew 23:23-28). The Law is not meant as a goal in itself but as a support to help people. When they criticized Jesus for healing a man on Sabbath, he answers: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath!” (Mark 2:27). The point is, Jesus is not interested in the norms, but in the condition of the heart with which we act. For even when the external symptoms are under control, people can still hate each other and pass judgment without love. Is it our love for God and the other or our inflated ego that drives us? Satisfying your ego leads to hypocrisy: play-acting to receive praise. Acting out of love leads to breaking the laws and norms when you see that the other needs it.

It also goes beyond what the law can require, for the law only regulates what we do, say, or abstain from, not what motivates us. Often there are several values to serve, and we make compromises. Think about the time you spend to help your kids grow up and the time needed to do your work well and advance your career. The compromises most often made become the norms of society. That is not bad, but if we use the norms to silence our desire or conscience, or to judge others who choose differently, the law becomes an oppressor instead of a support.

We all need forgiveness

The Sermon on the Mount is a radical document: it does not accept the norms of society, but radically challenges us to uphold all values without compromise if we want to be truly ‘good.’ And once we find we cannot do full justice to all of these values at the same time, we start to realize that we all fall short and are in no position to judge each other. Compare it to the rules in a family. It is not enough that your family does not kill or rape each other or steal from each other. The Father desires family who support each other, who maintain a positive atmosphere, who are honest and caring. There is no real punishment for falling short in any of that, there is only the ultimate consequence of not being a functional family, or no longer being part of such a family. This exactly is the difference between crimes and relational debts. For crimes, you have the government (read Romans 12:19 with 13:4), for falling short to each other you have to restore the relationship first. We may not all be criminals, but we do see how frequently we fall short of what we would like to be for our loved ones. ‘Don’t judge, or you too will be judged,’ says Jesus, ‘but knock on the door and they will open to you’ (Matthew 7:1,7).

This is why in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus uses a different word for sin than we are used to: he speaks about ‘debt.’ Debt is not about forbidden acts, words, or thoughts. It is a relational term. I can sin against you, depending on our relationship: ‘You were kind to me, but I did not return your kindness.’ ‘I am your child, but did not honour you as I should.’ ‘I am your parent but could not protect you when you needed me most.’ ‘I am your friend but stood by as they gossiped about you.’ ‘I was there when you fell down, but I didn’t help you up.’ ‘I know, I fell short. I am sorry.’ Asking for forgiveness may save the relationship.
And when it is a brother or sister who sins against me, I too am there to try to save the relationship without loss of face. To try again with mediation if we disagree. But if someone refuses to give up his or her destructive behaviour, the community should draw a line to protect us. ‘But,’ Peter asked, ‘what if someone says sorry, but then sins again? How often should I forgive? Seven times?’ It seems a reasonable and even generous proposal. Jesus, however, does not accept Peter’s norm. Jesus’ value comes from God, whom he experiences as the one who forgives us an infinitely high debt: the fact that we are not as perfect as he is. If he were like a king who would see how we would refuse to forgive each other, how we would continue to lay our claims on one another and punish those who fall short, he would not forgive us. (Note: this also means that we cannot claim that the other must forgive).

Forgiveness sets us free

Jesus points to ‘letting go,’ to forgiveness, as the way to restore relationships. And he teaches that forgiveness is not an isolated thing: we will be forgiven by God as we have forgiven each other. What we forgive or not forgive here, burdens us in heaven and in our heart – in our relationship with God. Not that God lays claims on us, he wants us to be free. But we cannot imagine what that is until we experience it in our life here. I did not really know his unconditional love for me, until I became a father myself and held my first-born daughter in my arms, in Johannesburg, South-Africa. Nelson Mandela, after 27 years of prison for fighting Apartheid in South Africa, said, “the Spirit told me, ‘do not be a prisoner now that you have been set free.’” And he passed on his inspiration to his brothers and sisters, when he set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by bishop Desmond Tutu.

If judgment is a vicious circle, then forgiveness is a virtuous one. This is what spirit of Jesus teaches us: the more we grant forgiveness to each other, the more we experience forgiveness from others and from God. Static electricity does not make the lamp give light, it only makes your hairs stand out from your head. Forgiveness is an expression of self-giving Love (Agápè). Just as electricity passing through a lamp produces light, so Love passing through us to each other produces forgiveness and communion. This experience is what made apostles like Paul (I Corinthians 13:4-8) and Peter (I Peter 4:8) sing her praises:

Love is patient, Love is kind. She does not envy, she does not boast, she is not arrogant. She is not rude, she is not self-seeking, she is not easily irritated, she does not keep count of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. She covers all, she has faith in all, she hopes all, she endures all. Love never fails.

(...)

Above all, love each other deeply, because Love covers over a multitude of sins.

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In June 2013, during a seminar in South Africa, Kenyan artist Jackie Karuti learnt his story: “Her painting Stefaans’ Letters (…) attempts to depict Coetzee’s anguish as he came to realize what he had done. The searing oranges, bruised reds, and drips of paint capture the agony of someone longing for forgiveness. The words ‘I am sorry” are scrawled repeatedly across the canvas to frame a single beseeching hand thrusting up from the bottom in a poignant, however inadequate, gesture of repentance.”
Source: Rachel Hostetter Smith, “Still Mending: South Africa between the Shadow and the Light,” in: Image Journal, Issue 92, May 2017.

Truth and Reconciliation
On Christmas Eve 1996, four members of a white-supremacist cult had placed three bombs in a huge Christmas tree in a shopping centre in the Western Cape. Four people were killed and 67 more injured. Two of the injured died in hospital. The youngest bomber was Stefaans Coetzee, an orphan of just 17 years old – disappointed that only one of the three bombs had gone off. He went to jail without repentance. Ten years later, he shared a cell block with Eugene de Kock, a police commander sentenced for his exceptionally cruel behavior during Apartheid. But De Kock had opened up in the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In 2006, over many talks in jail, he convinced Coetzee that their racist ideology was wrong. Coetzee started to read the Bible to find the truth, as he called it, and felt that it ‘filled’ him with oxygen and led him to participate in awareness and reconciliation programs. In 2007 he cried out to Jesus, full of remorse and in desperate need of salvation and forgiveness.
In 2009, a miracle happened. One of his victims, Olga Macingwane, came to visit him in jail, a journey of a thousand miles from Cape Town to Pretoria. Fearful and still limping from her injury she spoke with Stefaans. The she said to him: “Stefaans, when I see you, I see my sister’s son in you, and I cannot hate you. Come here, my boy, I forgive you; I have heard what you said, and I forgive you.” Stefaans later described this moment as follows: “I did not expect her to forgive me, but the love in her heart imparted grace and forgiveness which resulted in freedom beyond understanding.”
Two imams who had suffered racist attacks on their mosques, visited Stefaans and suggested that he should dedicate his life to working with South African youths in need of reconciliation. A woman started to visit him every weekend in jail to help him write apologies to his victims. Shortly before Christmas 2012, his victims who had gathered for a Memorial event agreed to listen to his apology written from prison, read out by a friend.
Source: De Wet Potgieter, “Meet the youngest Worcester Bomber,” Daily Maverick, 20 December 2012.

Suggestions for dialogue

A moderator can explain the dialogue steps and invite people to contribute:

• Check in with yourself. Share with each other how you are in this moment. Then take a moment again to seek stillness, humility and openness. 
• First round: Share something from the text or image(s) that stood out to you and that you would like to explore with the group, briefly indicating the thoughts and feelings that it evoked within you. Listen to the others do the same: what resonates with you? Responses in this round should be limited to questions for clarification.
• Second round: Name one or two things that resonated with you from the things that others just shared. 
• Third round: Having heard the group, the moderator names the main topics for exploration. The moderator may also propose a common thread that emerged in several topics. The exploration normally starts with asking the person(s) who brought up the topic to expand on it.
• Leave room for silence and contemplation. 
• Check out by sharing what you take home from this dialogue.

These suggestions are an adaptation of the Estuary protocol. Look for more at https://www.estuaryhub.com