Sins and the Mind

Matthew 5:21-30

Introduction

Throughout our time together, I will be sharing different parts of my faith journey. Today, I’m going to share one of the most painful parts for me. It was the time that I began to believe in Jesus. I know that it sounds bizarre that believing in Jesus would be a painful experience but let me explain. 

I became an atheist in my mid-teens but began believing in God again in my early twenties but did not yet identify as a Christian. My employers were witnessing to me and I began reading the Bible. At some point, I began to believe what the Bible was saying about Jesus. I wouldn’t say I had faith, but I did believe the facts.

But what did Jesus want from me? Although I had attended church in my childhood, I did not think that was what he wanted. My understanding was that Jesus expected nothing less than perfection, not just in behaviour but in my thought life. Anything less than that would result in damnation. Since I knew that I was not capable of perfection, I was in the uncomfortable position of believing that Jesus was the only way but that I could not do what he wanted. To make a long story short, I eventually experienced grace and also came to a better place of interpreting the Bible.

But when we look at this passage in the Sermon on the Mount, you might be able to sympathize with my spiritual anxiety. We will take a closer look, but in summary, Jesus says that avoiding murder and adultery is not enough, to even have hateful or lustful thoughts is to commit a sin. Can any of us measure up?

What Jesus Said

Last week, we saw that Jesus came not to abolish the Law and the Prophets, what we would call the Old Testament, but to fulfill them. Much of what Jesus is going to do in this Sermon is to work out what that looks like for us. Of course, our hope is that Jesus is going to make things easier, but that is not exactly the case.

For some context, this was a time when there was vigorous debate among Jewish teachers on how to interpret the Law. The Law says you are not to work on the Sabbath, but what exactly is the definition of work? How much can you carry, how far can you walk? A modern example is that today you cannot get a cheeseburger in Israel. It goes back to a commandment that forbids boiling a kid in its mother’s milk. What are the chances that the cheese comes from the mother of the animal that provided the meat for the burger? What matters is that was how it was interpreted and that was how things were expected to be practiced.

Much of the debate was, just as modern legal debates go, how close can you get without actually breaking the rule. This is what we have always done since we were children. Mom and dad lay down a rule. How far can you go without technically breaking the rule?

Jesus looks at two of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not commit murder and thou shalt not commit adultery. They would seems to be straight forward. If its murder or adultery, just don’t do it.

Let’s start with murder. Murder is killing an innocent person with intent. We take into account accidents, where death might occur but there was no desire to cause harm of any kind. Both ancients and moderns understood this. So if you hate someone and then act on that hate by killing that person, you have committed murder. That seems simple enough.

But what if you really hate someone and you play over in your mind what you would like to do to them, but you never actually do it? According to Jesus, we are not innocent before God just because we haven’t acted on it. Perhaps we avoid the actual act because we are afraid of the consequences.

You might think that the fear of consequences doesn’t hold people back but history proves otherwise. An example is the 1969 Murray-Hill riots in Montreal. The police all across Montreal went on strike and there were not only riots, but significant looting and even systematic robbing of banks. Sadly, if we decriminalized murder, our nation would turn into a war zone.

What Jesus is not saying is that just feeling hate is exactly the same as committing murder. That would mean if you already felt hate that you might as well murder because you were already guilty. What Jesus is saying is that the spiritual problem doesn’t begin when the act of murder takes place. Something has gone terribly wrong the moment we are feeling hate toward another person. That’s when things need to be dealt with.

Let’s turn to adultery for a moment. It is the same basic principle. When does adultery take place? Actually in the ancient world, it was usually the woman who was found guilty. A husband could have extra-marital affairs, as long as it was not with a married woman. But a wife having an affair, would always be guilty. For many, the problem was not the breaking the marriage bond but a sin against the husband who desired faithfulness. 

Jesus takes a strong stand and brings adultery back to the root problem of lust. Notice that Jesus warns the man, and doesn’t just warn the man about lusting after married women. This is a radical step, one that helps protect the women, who were often victims.

Like murder, adultery doesn’t just become wrong the moment that it is acted upon. It is the result of a bad way of thinking and the person is sinning if they do everything leading up to adultery and then stop at the last minute. The sin must be dealt with at the root.

What Jesus Wants

This leads us to ask what Jesus wants for us. The truth is that each of us at some time have had experiences of strong anger or desire. They may come unbidden. Someone does something bad against us and the anger wells up inside us without our control. We may see someone attractive and even the most pious will have an emotional reaction. Are we condemned the moment we feel these things?

This is not about a heavenly thought police where we are guilty the moment our mind wanders to the slightest degree. What Jesus is really warning about here are those who want to live in the lands of hate and lust but keep just shy of the border so that they have not technically committed the sin. That misses the point of why those commands exist in the first place. God wants human flourishing, including for us, and that is incompatible with embracing hate and lust in our lives. 

The other part of this is that the time to prevent, not just murder and adultery, but other sins as well, is in the life of the mind. There have been many high profile Christian leaders who have fallen in recent years. Do we think that any of them were doing just fine and then suddenly, out of nowhere, they were having an affair or abusing their position of power or spiritually abusing their congregation? There was always a long lead up in the mind. When bad thinking begins in our mind, it is not time to give up and accept that we are condemned. It is time for us to make right choices. Just before Cain, son of Adam and Eve, committed the first murder, God warned him: “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” (Genesis 4:6-7) The same warning goes for us.

Conclusion

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us that just not committing murder or adultery is not enough. We must begin with the life of the mind and deal with the thoughts that live there.

This past week, we saw an example of this on the Academy Awards show. Chris Rock, who was the host, made a thoughtless joke about the actor Will Smith’s wife Jada and her hair loss. Will Smith realized that his wife was hurt by those comments and was filled with anger. That was a normal response and there was nothing wrong with that. He then had to choose what to do with that anger. He could have held on and told the host after the show that the joke was not acceptable. Instead, he let the anger fill him until he acted on it. He went on stage and hit Chris Rock. I share this not to judge either one but to say we have less visible experiences like this all the time.

We cannot control what thoughts pop into our heads but we can choose what we allow to live there. We also can choose what we do with those thoughts. The life of following Jesus is not seeing how far we can get to crossing the line without doing it. The life of following Jesus is about living the flourishing life he has for us.