My sermon for 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A:The religion of the Old Testament is criticised sometimes for being too legalistic, but I think that's a mistake and a misrepresentation.
The faith of the Chosen People didn't revolve around a set of harsh rules; their faith revolved around the character of God, especially his quality of loving-kindness or steadfast love (hesed in Hebrew, a word that's used hundreds of times in the Old Testament to describe the main quality of God's character).
Under the Covenant between God and his people each individual member of the community had to try to take that quality to heart and practice it in his or her own life.
The whole community also had to put it into practice by making sure that basic standards of justice and compassion were observed in society as a whole, taking special care, for example, of the poorest and weakest members of the community ("the widow, the orphan and the stranger" in the symbolic language of the Old Testament).
That's why Jesus can say here, in his Sermon on the Mount, that, as far as his teaching is concerned, not even the tiniest part of the old Law or the preaching of the prophets is going to be done away with. It's a reminder, apart from anything else, that there aren't two Gods in the Bible - a harsh, legalistic God in the Old Testament and a nice loving God in the New Testament. It's the same God, and Jesus' whole mission was to reveal God's character more fully than before.
Having said that, Jesus does talk in terms of a contrast between what has been taught before and what he now has to teach: "You have heard that it was said to our ancestors..." is contrasted over and again with "But I say this to you...". We have to conclude that Jesus wants his disciples to aim for a new, higher standard in their moral attitudes and behaviour.
The main contrast Jesus makes is between a sort of outward conformity to moral rules and regulations and a real conversion of inner motives.
If we want to be a disciple of Christ, it's not enough to avoid killing someone. The motive of anger, which leads to violence, has got to be rooted out of our hearts, and everything should be done to settle differences and to be reconciled with persons who have offended us. It's not enough to avoid actually committing adultery; the motive of lust, which leads to adultery, has got to be eliminated.
We have all had the experience, surely, of being tempted to do something we know to be wrong, but failing to go through with it, not because we recognise it's inherently immoral but because we fear being found out, because other people would hold a lower opinion of us if they knew what we'd done, or maybe because we would face punishment if we were discovered. In other words sometimes there's a conflict between what we feel attracted to doing for selfish reasons and what we actually do.
Jesus holds out the ideal of there being no conflict between our inner motivations and our outward conduct: a counsel of perfection, of course, but not an impossible counsel.
I think the best way to look at it is in terms of spiritual combat, or spiritual warfare, as the Christian tradition has come to call it.
We know that our human nature is flawed and fallen. Our conscience is damaged; our will-power for doing good and avoiding evil is weak; our moral reasoning - how we deliberate about what's right and wrong is unreliable. And that means that we're easily misled by strong inclinations to self-seeking, treating other people as means to our own ends, which is a failure to love.
But at the same time we're not hopelessly corrupt. We also have inclinations towards self-sacrifice, towards love and care and service of others - the opposite of treating people as objects.
And Christian spiritual life has always been seen as a struggle to identify and resist our self-seeking tendencies and to deliberately cultivate our capacity for love and service. It's the difference between doing the right thing reluctantly or because we fear the unpleasant consequences that might follow from pursuing our selfish desires, and being transformed at root, in the motives that take shape in our mind, our imagination, our will and our conscience.
But that transformation doesn't happen just by our own efforts, or even mainly through our own efforts. Christian spiritual life isn't about having a strong will; it's about turning to God, trusting in God and being open to his grace. When we're receptive to God, he guides our mind, our imagination, our will, our conscience, in the direction of his own holiness. He changes us within, and our outward behaviour follows naturally from that.
That's why Jesus can put the standard of perfection before his disciples - because any moral progress Christians make in their lives is mostly God's work, not our own. God takes the initiative and we respond.
I'd like to think that this hopeful and encouraging message is one of the main lessons we can take from this particular section of Jesus' great Sermon on the Mount, as St Matthew presents it to us.
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