Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 5:17 - 37
When I was in grade school, I remember having attacks of scruples.  That probably doesn’t happen anymore in our permissive society.  But as I learned more and more about my faith in my Catholic school, I began to view God as someone who was just waiting for me to make a misstep, at which point he would zap me.  This problem  became severe when I was preparing for confession:  I fought with my sister five times -- or was it six?  If I don’t get this right, I will make a bad confession, and that is a really serious sin; and if I make a bad confession but don’t know about it and go to communion, that will be a mortal sin as well … and my mind would go on and on as I examined my conscience.  In other words, if I wanted God to love me and bring me to heaven, I had to be a very very good boy.
But we know that’s not a true picture of God, right?  Although when you hear today’s gospel and next weeks, you might think someone forgot to tell Jesus.  This part of the gospel of Matthew is referred to as the six “antitheses” -- four today, two next week.  Each starts out with Jesus saying “You have heard it said … But I say…) and each time he seems to paint a picture of a very harsh God who is going to treat calling someone a fool the same as killing someone in cold blood. 
But I think we can get a different perspective. First of all, Jesus is addressing his followers and not the world in general.  And he is addressing them as a community, the beloved community that will usher in the Kingdom of Heaven, that will show the world a radical and wonderful new way to live; a community which will be the beacon calling all people to take part. 
If you look at it this way, the God who is revealed is not sitting up there with a lightning bolt ready to zap us.  The God who speaks to us here cares profoundly about the relationships between people.  Murder is terrible, a horrible sin.  But what about behavior that estranges people, that destroys the bond that should exist in the beloved community -- like the one Jesus wants to form, like the one that this parish family is supposed to mirror?  When anger, or calling someone a bad name, or belittling someone drives a wedge between you and someone else, for God that is very serious.  That’s why Jesus says it’s more important to heal that division than to even worship in the temple.  Relationships are a big deal to God. 
The same is true of the other sins named; adultery ruptures the relationship between a married couple; divorce does that and even more, considering all those affected.  And when Jesus talks about oaths, he is really referring to the common practice in those days of swearing by something sacred that what you said was true.  It happened in the marketplace a lot and in courts of law.  It’s sort of like when my kids were young and came to me to decide who was right and who was wrong -- I think they thought that the louder you shouted the more likely you were right.  And in the world of advertising isn’t it the case that they try to persuade you of the quality of a product because someone famous endorses it? Or in politics, where you are confronted with promises you know will not be kept in order to persuade you to elect someone?  In the beloved community everyone simply speaks the truth, because lies and equivocations harm relationships.
But what about all the terrible consequences Jesus mentions?  The Pharisees had a practice called “putting a fence around the Torah” .  This meant that they would take a law like “you cannot boil a goat in its mother’s milk” which is right there in the Old Testament for reasons I doubt anyone knows today.  After much thought and argumentation, that would lead to “you can’t serve dairy and meat at the same meal, and maybe you shouldn’t even use the same dishes.”  Modern Jews who follow these rules today do so because they see following the law as a wonderful way to worship God -- it doesn’t matter if the law doesn’t make sense -- God gave it.  We Christians have other ways to worship God.  But Jesus is sort of mocking the Pharisees.  They would argue about how far you could walk on the sabbath day before you broke the commandment forbidding “work”.  They would classify sins against the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” by how severe the penalty was -- if you stoned a woman for adultery or a man for blasphemy, that was ok; there were different penalties for killing your slave versus your fellow citizen.  So Jesus is basically saying with his exaggerations that it’s all serious; in the beloved community everyone works toward perfection; we don’t consider how much we can get away with. 
It’s worth asking today, just as we are about to begin Lent, am I working to heal broken relationships? Am I growing in virtue through my relationships?  Are my friends and family members growing in virtue because of me?  Because I am part of the beloved community.