Relationships are cosmic

Perhaps someone reading this has murdered someone? If so you probably expect to be judged and punished. In fact we would all expect a murderer to be judged and punished.

More likely is that someone has called someone else an idiot. In fact I suspect we all have done that and we have certainly all thought it. Now let me think, who I have called an idiot? Who have I fallen out with?

·         Myself

·         My children

·         My wife

·         My employer

·         Someone driving in the middle lane (or even the outside lane)

·         A celebrity

·         A player for my sport team

·         The government

·         The person I read about in the papers who did something stupid

·         My housegroup leaders

·         The church

·         My church leader…

This passage follows Jesus’ call to super-righteousness and is the first of a series of pithy sayings dealing with core life issues.

Matthew 5:21-26

V21 - Jesus introduces each saying with, “You have heard it said … but I say to you…”

In doing so he is using a familiar teaching formula of the time. What his hearers would have heard is, “You all know the Ten Commandments and you have heard the priests and rabbis explain how it works. Well, forget what they say. I am giving you the decisive interpretation of those laws.”

Jesus is saying that judgement falls not just on actions we do but on what we are like. If we are angry people, falling out with each other, insulting each other, thinking bad things about each other, we are in the wrong in just the same way as someone who actually does something violent or nasty.

Jesus says that I am in line to be judged and punished alongside a murderer if I just have a mindset of angry thoughts or if I have fallen out with someone else. The commentators call this the Messianic Radicalising of the law! I call it raising the bar too high!

V.22 – are you angry with someone or something? Is anyone never?

V. 22 – have you insulted someone or thought of them as an idiot? Mindless, imbecile.

v. 23, 24,25 - Taking the sacrifice would be a good thing but leaving it and walking a day or two back to Galilee to sort out a relationship is over the top isn’t it? Having a chat with the person taking you to court as you wander there together is hardly likely. If you could do that you wouldn’t be there at all.

And in these last two examples the inference is that the other person is upset or angry with you. Yet it is your job to sort it out. Mmmm. That turns the tables a bit.

I know that Alison is cross with me about something (I can tell because it all goes quiet … for quite a long time!). What do I do? Well it’s her problem, let come and talk to me. I haven’t done anything wrong, I don’t need to make up.

Well that may or may not be true (although there is usually only one person at fault in our marriage and that person is not usually Alison) but that isn’t the point. It is my job to go and sort it out. That doesn’t let Alison off the hook. Jesus is saying the same thing to her too.

So why is Jesus making anger and falling out with someone such a big deal, why is he linking it with murder?

What’s behind all this? Where is he coming from?

Relationship are cosmic

Because Jesus is coming from an awesome intimate relationship with the Father and Holy Spirit. A relationship – out of which anger and discord never emerge. This is cosmic in the sense of being awesome and huge.

Our faith is a relational religion – it starts with the love between God the Father, Jesus His Son and the Holy Spirit. What is known as the trinity. The Shack provides quite a helpful way of seeing this (breaks down some of our pre-conceptions and describes the persons of the trinity and their relationship in unusual ways).

The Big Story of the bible is one of perfect relationships, broken relationships and restored relationships.

Jesus is demanding that our lives are based on profoundly redeemed relationships: our relationship with God first and our relationship with others following.

Loving relationships which know how to deal with anger or insult, which sort things out before worship, which are dealt with without going to court.

Let me try and explain this in a graphical way which highlights the role of anger.

The relationship cycle between us and God

1. God in perfect relationship – without anger. Genesis: 1:27 – let us make man in our own image – the Trinitarian relationship – perfect relationships within the Godhead and between God and man, his creation.
2. There is wrong done – something outrageous happens – sin, separation from God, broken relationships. Romans 3:23 For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Hosea 11:1-4 – Broken relationships and God’s perpetual desire for restoration.
3. An appropriate reaction is anger – outrage. Isaiah’s reaction says it all in 6:5 after he has seen God, “Woe to me, I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips…”
4. God is faced with the outrage of our sin and our rejection of him. Our relationship with our creator has broken down. Quite appropriately he is angry and would be perfectly justified in wiping us out and starting again.
   But instead he deals with the outrage and provides a way for relationship to be restored. God executes judgement and punishes the outrage by the sacrifice of Jesus’ death on the cross. 2 Corinthian 5:17-19. 
5. With the climax of the cross we have the ultimate reconciliation in relationship. We are offered forgiveness and reconciliation and can be in relationship with God again (2 Corinthians 5:17-19).

V. 25 Matthew provides an apocalyptic description in the adversaries going to court. He is saying, look you are on your way to court before God. Take the opportunity to settle matters quickly before you get there. This is restoration of relationship on a cosmic scale.

 

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The relationship cycle can be applied to our relationships with each other too. We can live in reconciled relationship with God – and we are called to live in reconciled relationship with each other. 

1. We are in relationship (even if we don’t know the person – employer, the bank, the other driver) This can also happen in terms of our relationship with ourselves. 
2. There is outrage, a wrong is done. The relationship, in some form, breaks down. It can take many forms, some very serious, some trivial.
3. There is anger. Sometimes anger is not justified, something trivial triggers off a reaction out of all proportion to the event.
   
   But anger is one of the four essential emotions – along with fear, sorrow and joy. You can’t just not do anger, it is there and the issue is what do you do with it. The outrage that causes anger needs to be addressed too. Where something outrageous happens, outrage is the only appropriate reaction.
   
   Jesus saw the abuse of the place of worship and he resorted to a demonstration of anger (although only once).
   
   You can think of examples where there is injustice and a breach in relationship. Where there has been abuse or bullying or law breaking. The reaction to an outrage or injustice is a good thing, when something goes wrong we should react. 
   1. Adrenalin, temperature rising, volume rising
   2. Feel cross
   3. Can’t stop thinking about it
   4. It’s not fair
   5. An ongoing internal conversation

3.       We have to address the issue. To choose a response. Anger is motivating.  It gets us to move - but it can move us either into sin or into seeking grace and justice. 

Ephesians 4:26 In your anger do not sin 

 

You could choose the road of reconciliation

We need to restore the broken relationship. It takes the power of God to do it. He has dealt with the sin, the price has been paid and forgiveness is there. We may need to take action, fuelled by anger, to get correct an injustice, to get wrong put right.

A caricature: Whatever else you might say about Bob Geldof, there is someone whose anger gets movement. He makes things happen to try and put right things that are wrong.

But in the normal run of life – dealing with family, work colleagues, friends at church: 

1. We quickly extend forgiveness – where appropriate
2.  We quickly ask for forgiveness. We become familiar with the phrase, “I am sorry”
3. We attend to the state of our heart – how do we think about the other person?
4. This does not necessarily mean that the person who has hurt us need become our best buddy again. Sometimes the damage is too deep, too painful to expect reconciliation to equal reinstatement.
   
   This is a big area to explore another time. When there is abuse and theft and serious betrayal it is not always straightforward. Especially challenging is mending the brokenness in marriage. But it is made easier when this is the response we choose quickly everytime.

You could choose the road of resentment

If you make this choice you will hold onto the anger. Allow it to fester, dwell on it, pursue that winning conversations with yourself. Allow it to seep out in complaint and gossip (I don’t like the way this church does things, did you know what so and so did).

On this road there is relationship breakdown and that is the way some choose to keep it. Perhaps for years. Anger mixed with unforgiveness is a toxic cocktail. It is a mix that, in time, will move you from feeling anger to being possessed by anger. 

1. Some people suppress it. At first you wouldn’t know they were angry. But then you find out they haven’t spoken to their mother or friend for years. The relationship remains broken. They live in passivity and denial.
   
   The inevitable journey’s end on this road is illness: psychological or emotional and sometimes physical.
   
   Sometimes we can feel this in people, they leak anger. Their body language is tense, their language terse and every now and again they say something harsh about another person.
   
   It can even become their identity (I am the person whose wife left me, I am the one who always gets made redundant).
   
2. Other people express their anger. They go down a road of insult, violence and eventually murder.
   In the course of an argument your voice begins to rise until you are shouting.
   A car cuts you up in traffic and you shout, “you idiot” – or something worse.
   You are short of sleep and someone critiques your work and you over-react and get really defensive (this is an area where I sin).
   Your household hides a climate of fear because no one quite knows when Dad or Mum is going to lose it.
   The murderer started out at the beginning of this road as a person who got angry.

What Jesus is saying is that the murderer has done wrong and will be judged but also that when you hit the point of decision about reacting to a wrong and you head off down the road of resentment you are travelling down the same road. It ends up in the same place.

Anger, mixed with unforgiveness, is a nasty cocktail.  It is toxic to the max.  But anger when mixed with grief, intercession, and justice lead down a road to grace in a way that passivity and denial cannot.

But our inevitable anger can, instead, move us into deeper reflection, higher wisdom, and courageous contact - if we allow the Spirit to remain in control.  It isn’t easy, it takes the power of God but when we get it right it is a taste of heaven on earth.

That’s easily said and there are some occasions when it is much, much more difficult – if you have a family member who has been abused, or if you have been the victim of workplace bullying or if you have lost a loved one. Although it is true to say that through the power of the Holy Spirit we can see even the most broken relationship restored and even the most grievous hurt forgiven, nevertheless it can be hard.

Let us pay attention to our relationships. When things go wrong let our anger turn us to reconciliation. That means a climate of: Forgiveness, Grace, Thinking the best, Avoiding gossip, Not taking offence easily, Not always seeking restitution.

We have received love and are living conduits of love to others – as this becomes who we are, not just what we do, we live in such relationships with each other that we don’t run the risk of fruitless trips to worship, of losing control in anger and insults, of being taken to court. We are to grow a community where people will say, “they must be followers of Jesus, because they love one another.” A foretaste of Heaven on Earth

• As our relationship with God is restored through the cross (Love God)
• So our relationships with each other are to be restored (love people)
• Then we live a different sort of reconciling life (love in action)

You can be a person who experiences anger and then chooses grace and justice. You can deal with it in a healthy way. You don’t always need to win the argument but you always need to rescue the relationship. And when something comes between you and another you can be one who puts aside gossip, offence and self-justification in favour of grace and mending relationships.

You are invited into a reconciled relationship with Jesus. Unqualified yet invited to dance with our creator. To be understood yet accepted and forgiven, to be held and to be guided.

Matthew 5:21-26

We can now read this in the light of Jesus’ saving message of relationship reconciliation.

You are loved and forgiven by the one who knows all and yet has paid the price to set you free and so you are invited to repent and experience power of redemption into relationship with your creator and into a new way of living

You are to live in radical, uncompromisingly redeemed relationships with those around you – demonstrating Heaven on Earth in the way you live and love. Not falling for the lure of the world’s way – gossip, blame, anger and violence but, by the power of the Holy Spirit, being different, visibly, tangibly, noticeably, practically, consistently different.

Relationships are cosmic, let us commit to tending them.