To Stop the Dying Inside--February 17, 2020

To Stop the Dying Inside--February 17, 2020

[Jesus taught:] "You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not murder'; and 'whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.' But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, 'You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire. SO when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift." [Matthew 5:21-24]

Hmmm... maybe there's more inside me that needs to be raised from the dead than I realized. Maybe I need to come face to face with the reality that Jesus sees deeper into me than I want to notice, and he can see places where hatred and bitterness have already begun to strangle the life out of me.

I've been having something of a re-introduction to passages like these--words of Jesus that often make Christians squirm with discomfort. We get uncomfortable because Jesus exposes how much deeper our brokenness actually goes--he isn't only concerned with our external actions, but with the attitudes, the hatreds, and the pettiness that sprout up out of our inmost selves. Most of us, after all, can get through an ordinary day without committing murder. We can probably avoid physical violence altogether in a regular day, and it would be easy then to assume that we're off the hook as far as God's commandment is concerned. But Jesus sees that the roots of the problem go deeper--not just to our external actions, but to our inner thoughts, our emotional life, and to our words. If there's hatred and animosity there, if there's rage and bitterness and rancor in our thoughts and speech, we are already starting to die inside. And Jesus won't let us off the hook by leaving us to stay dead inside our pet hatreds and spite. 

Jesus won't let that deadness stand. He just won't.

This is part of the re-awakening I've been having. Jesus isn't just protecting "other people" from me in this teaching about the murder commandment. He is about saving me from myself. See, here's the part I've had the hardest time realizing before. A commandment against murder--or against violence or assault or whatever other physical, external acts you might list--is obviously intended to protect potential victims. There's a good reason we need commandments, laws, and statutes against murder. But when Jesus goes deeper, to include things like my words, my thoughts, and the posture of my heart, he's getting into things that don't directly affect others. I can sit next to someone and feel positively toward them, feel neutral, or feel hostility toward them, and as long as I'm keeping my hands to myself, all three scenes would look the same. But Jesus still says that something has gone wrong when I allow hatred to fester in my heart toward someone else. The other person might not be able to feel it or sense it, but the hatred is slowly killing me from the inside, and Jesus is ruthless against all that prevents me from living life in the fullest, as well as against all that would diminish the life of others.

So when I hear Jesus say that it's not only my external actions that matter, but my words, my inner monologue, and my thoughts as well, it now becomes obvious that Jesus sees something that has gone wrong inside my heart that he has it in mind to heal. Where I have become consumed with hatred for someone else, even if the other person can't feel it, I am affected by the hatred. When I let myself get caught up prejudice against other people--other nationalities, other racial groups, other faiths, other social groups, and the like--I am dying inside already, even before that bubbles up to poison others. I may not see how it is affecting me right now (that's often how the worst cancers works), but that doesn't mean I'm well. While I go about my day, assuming I'm doing just fine, the rancor I allow to take root in my soul is metastasizing into something that will choke the life out of me altogether. And Jesus insists on cutting that out of me--which first means that I have to realize what it is doing to me.

Jesus' teaching here, then, exposes some of our old attitudes as lies. It is fashionable these days to hear people say, "Crude words and hateful speech aren't a big deal--as long as you get the job done." or "I don't care if someone is vitriolic and spiteful toward the people they don't like, as long as my bank account is doing fine." But Jesus says, quite plainly, "No--that's the business model of hell. And I am in the business of bringing people to life." Jesus calls us out when we grow comfortable with letting hatreds, pettiness, or cruel insults come out of our mouths, and he insists even on uprooting them from our minds and hearts as well. The criminal laws of a nation or statutes of a country do not police our thoughts and our words, that is true. They only handle the external actions we commit, like assault or murder. But Jesus insists that he has a higher authority and a deeper jurisdiction. And on his authority, he says that the hatreds, the bitterness, the childish pettiness, and the prejudices we allow to fester in our hearts are not OK. In fact, they are killing us.

Jesus doesn't say these things simply to leave us to fend for ourselves, but in order to heal them. We tend to run away from the insightful voices in our lives that call us out on the things we are not proud of, because we are afraid they are simply there to punish or shame us. But Jesus isn't here just to wag a judging finger at us or shuttle us into hell. He is here to name the deadness in us in order that he might bring us to life. He is here to cut out the cancer so that we can be healed. He has come to stop the dying inside.

Today, what if we opened up our deepest selves to Jesus' scalpel, to allow him to do surgery on these deadened hearts of ours and to bring us to life yet again?

Lord Jesus, cut away all the things we have gotten comfortable with that are also killing us, even the pet hatreds and familiar bitterness we have allowed to fester there.