Murder, Adultery and Oaths: The Hard Sayings (6 of 9)

Six times Jesus says you have heard it said, and then says something harder.

Read as a stricter code, this section is crushing and slightly absurd. Read as the law arriving where it was aimed, it is something else.

What Is the Pattern?

A command, then the thing behind the command.

The law says do not murder. Jesus goes to the anger that produces murder, and to the contempt in calling someone a fool.

The law says do not commit adultery. He goes to the look that has already decided.

The law regulates divorce. He goes to what divorce does to a woman in that society, which is leave her without protection.

The law regulates oath-taking. He goes to why oaths exist at all, which is that people lie when not under one.

In every case the command is not loosened and it is not merely tightened. The target moves from the act to the person committing it.

Is This a Higher Standard?

In one sense obviously yes, and that framing misses what is happening.

A higher standard implies the same kind of thing, more of it. Keep more rules, keep them harder.

What the section actually does is relocate the question. A man who has never murdered but carries contempt has kept the rule and failed the thing the rule was protecting. The law was never aimed at his hands.

Which is why the previous section matters. The law is being fulfilled, brought to what it was heading toward, and what it was heading toward was people rather than compliance.

What About the Eye and the Hand?

Hyperbole, and recognisably so to the original audience.

Tear out the eye, cut off the hand. Nobody in that room thought self-mutilation was being prescribed, and no strand of the early church read it that way.

Hyperbole is a standard rabbinic device, the same one behind the camel and the needle’s eye. It states an extreme to make a proportion clear: whatever this costs you, it is worth less than what it saves.

Reading it literally is the mistake. Reading it as merely figurative and therefore soft is the other one.

Why Does He Reject Oaths?

Because an oath concedes something about ordinary speech.

Swearing by heaven, by earth, by Jerusalem, by your own head. Jesus rules the whole apparatus out and replaces it with yes meaning yes and no meaning no.

The logic is that the machinery of oaths exists because plain statements are not trusted. Elaborate them and you have built a two-tier system, where some speech is guaranteed and the rest is negotiable.

Remove the tiers and every sentence carries the same weight. That is harder than swearing.

What Is the Point of the Extra Mile?

Not passivity, and the details are specific.

A strike on the right cheek in that world was almost certainly a backhanded blow, which is an insult from a superior to an inferior rather than a fight. Turning the other cheek does not invite a second insult of the same kind; it presents a face that has to be struck as an equal.

The mile is Roman. A soldier could compel a civilian to carry his pack for one mile and no further. Going a second puts the soldier in the wrong and hands the initiative to the man carrying.

Wright’s summing up is that Jesus offers a new sort of justice, creative and restorative. The old rule limited revenge, an eye for an eye rather than an escalating feud. This goes further and removes vengeance entirely, replacing it with something that acts rather than absorbs.

Why Love Your Enemies?

Because of what the Father is doing, and Wright reads that as the puzzle of the passage.

The sun rises on the bad and the good. Rain falls on the upright and the unjust. And the instruction is to be like that.

The difficulty is obvious. Israel is the chosen people, and the passage tells them God has no favourites. If they are chosen, are they not exactly his favourites?

The answer is back in the salt and light section. Israel was never chosen to be favoured while the world stayed dark. Israel was chosen so that through Israel all people would be blessed.

So loving enemies is not an unusually demanding ethical add-on. It is the vocation. A people who love only their own have become a nation like any other, and Jesus points out that tax collectors and Gentiles manage that much.

Part of a series on the Sermon on the Mount. See also salt, light and fulfilling the law.

Footnotes2

1. The backhand detail changes the instruction from submission to something considerably more awkward for the person delivering the blow. A backhanded strike is how a superior corrects an inferior. Offering the other cheek requires the second blow to be an open-handed one, which is how equals fight.
2. That tax collectors and Gentiles are the comparison is the sharpest line in the section. Jesus is not telling his hearers to be better than bad people. He is telling them that loving your own is the ordinary human baseline, achieved by the two groups his audience least wanted to be compared to.

Sources

N. T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-15 (SPCK, 2002), on Matt 5:21-26, 5:27-37 and 5:38-48. Supports the reading of the backhanded blow and the Roman mile, the account of restorative justice replacing limited revenge, and the resolution of the chosen-people puzzle through Israel's vocation to the nations. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 5:21-48 and Matt 19:24.

Where the sourcing stops: the identification of the eye and hand sayings as rabbinic hyperbole is standard background rather than something the text signals. The divorce material raises questions this post does not attempt to settle.