In a traditional church I would have to give a series of sermons on how Jesus was a revolutionary, a rebel.  At this church, however, I don’t feel I have to do that.  Most of us are very comfortable with the idea of Jesus as a rebel.  Perhaps we have grown a little too comfortable with it.

As a community of believers seeking to follow Jesus and live out our personal discipleship and community life in new and innovative ways.  It is all too easy to fall into the trap of portraying Jesus as a leather-jacketed rebel who rebelled, just to be different ­ just for the sake of being rebellious.  More disturbingly, it becomes even easier to use him as a justification to attack traditional Christianity when in reality our motivation is our subconscious anger at God, at religious parents, or at our past experience with churches and Christians.

In turn we may as a church, try to be novel just for novelty’s sake.  We may overturn the central ideas and beliefs of Christianity, just for the sake of overturning them.  As a result, we may mistake our non-conformity for true discipleship.

Tearing down the rich tapestry of Christian scripture, and tradition just for the sake of it, does not make us innovative.  It makes us juvenile.

Now I am an ardent proponent of preaching about Jesus the Rebel.  However, over the years, I have come to the realization that the Jesus Revolution ­ or what he called the Kingdom of God ­ is not rooted in some adolescent problem with authority.  Quite to the contrary, the Jesus Revolution is rooted in authority.

As we continue today exploring the Sermon on the Mount, we encounter what for many of us, is a disturbing saying of Jesus.  The power of sacred scripture is the way that, just when we our comfortable in our assumptions, it has this wonderful property of challenging them and making us rethink everything.  Sometimes even our assumptions about scripture itself. 

So today, I am particularly thankful that in a church where we are all comfortable with the Rebel Jesus, that same Jesus speaks to us saying, “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. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.”

The Law and the Prophets, were the scripture, the Bible of Jesus’ day.  Jesus says he has come not to destroy them but to complete them.  Some scholars believe a better translation might go something like this, “I haven’t come to break the law, I have come to obey it.”

Well that doesn’t sound very rebellious to me.  I hear that verse and I cringe.  What is Jesus suggesting here?  Does this mean I have to be some legalistic, Bible-quoting, flag-waving, gay-hating, brain-washed, science-fearing fundamentalist? 

Curious how I got all that implication from a simple verse, “I haven’t come to break the law, but to obey it.”  Maybe all those implications and conclusions I just drew come from somewhere in my own experience and my own baggage, and not from Jesus’ actual words.

Ironically, those words, “I have not come to break the law but to obey it.” are not a call to conformity but a manifesto for a revolution.  For Jesus, the most rebellious and revolutionary act he could perform in his day was to obey the Law ­ truly obey it. 

Let me clarify this, because some of you may have a mistake impression of what I am describing.  I am not describing the historical tendency for the pendulum of cultural morality to swing too far one way or another.  It was not just that Jesus’ actions were in reality very traditional, but only seemed rebellious because the world had become too permissive.  He was not Alex P. Keaton.  Neither was it that Jesus’ teachings were so progressive that they were a rebellion against the legalism of his day.  What I am trying to have you imagine here is something much different.

For Jesus, the Law he was obeying was not identical to the religious leaders, practices or institutions of his day.  It was not even identical to exact words or literal interpretation of the texts themselves.  For Jesus, God’s Law was often conveyed by all these elements, but it was not limited to or identical to them.  As we will see in coming weeks, Jesus criticizes how God’s Law is practiced, or the motivations of religious leaders, but never criticizes the Law itself.  Instead, he calls his followers to practice laws like “Do not murder” or “Do not commit adultery” at an even deeper level. 

This Law, this reality, was the ultimate authority for Jesus.  But even though, it was once carved in stone, even stone undergoes some geologic change.  If we read the book of Leviticus and just take it at face value, we are told that children who talk back to their parents are to be stoned.  Yet we know that the Jews of Jesus’ day no longer enforced that Law so harshly.  As a Jewish person, Jesus knew that some of God’s Laws superceded others.  God’s love and compassion could overrule the limitations of an ancient text.

Pam always explains it to people this way; in the story of the woman caught in adultery, Jesus stops the crowd from stoning her.  But by doing so, he is not condoning adultery.  He is telling the crowd that we are not going break one of God’s Laws just to punish someone else for breaking it. 

Even today, we read a harsh passage in the Bible and some Christians say, “Well there it is in black and white.  That settles it.”  While other Christians read the same passage and recoil in horror, since the words on the page are not congruent with the loving and forgiving God they know form personal experience. 

Could it be that God’s Law is bigger and more expansive than the words on a page and it was this authority to which Jesus claimed his ultimate allegiance?  It seems to me that for Jesus, God’s Law is an expanding all encompassing reality of the universe.  It is not merely rules in a book or a religious institution.  It lives and breaths and calls us all into wider and deeper understandings of who God is and what God is doing in the world.  It is not merely the rules. It is the reality behind the rules. 

That viewpoint does not give us a license to behave any way we want. That reality behind the rules never changes.  If anything, it calls us to a higher standard. Moving us beyond the crude limitations of mere words, it calls us to a life of action, a life of obedience.  The kind of life Jesus lived.

As Christians, it sometimes hard for us to come to terms with the Jewishness of Jesus.  The Sermon on the Mount operates out of the context of being a devout Jew.  It is not meant to be a collection of independent good ideas from which one can pick and choose a few appealing ethical ideas.  It is a complete package and Jesus is claiming to complete the package.

Also as Christians, we often ignorantly portray Jesus as putting a loving spin on the angry judgmental legalistic God of the Old Testament.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Even a cursory reading of the Old Testament prophets reveals to us a Jewish God who is passionately in love with God’s people, whose main desire is for his people is for them to be to be righteous.

That righteousness is not some holier-than-thou-you-can-tell-how-many-times-my-wife-and-I-have-had-sex-by-how-many-kids-we-have sort of morality.  The righteousness God calls us to is more accurately translated as delivering or restoring justice.  Not justice as punishment, but justice that restores a person’s relationship with their community.

That is the kind of righteousness Jesus is talking about when he says our righteousness must exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees.  He is not beckoning us to be even more anal than they could be.  He was demanding that we be more compassionate, more fair, more loving and more just.

In other words, this is really hard stuff.  As we discovered last week, this is the kind of stuff that if you start doing, you will stand out from the surrounding culture.  Ironically, the more obedient you are to this authority, the more rebellious you may appear, even to those who claim to be religious.

This is the life Jesus has called us to ­ a complex, yet simple existence.  The life of an obedient rebel.

For Further Reflection: