Jesus said, “So in
all the ways you would like people to treat you, you are to treat them. For
that is the Law and the Prophetic Writings.”
—
Matthew 7:12 (USC)
Overall themes are something we all want to understand as we read any
biblical text. And as we consider the entire Sermon on the Mount as the
Matthean synoptist has written it for us, we can easily come to this actual
verse above, in unison with Matthew 5:17, and land on two facts:
1.
Jesus came not to abolish what is specified in the Old
Testament; he came as its fulfilment! The ‘Law’ is seriously misunderstood. A
heart of obedience to his Law is what God seeks.
2.
In context of our relationships, everything relies on us
treating others as we would have them treat us. This reframes our entire
worldview and existence. No longer is selfishness going to cut it.
Jesus is challenging
the very ideas that are popular in our age. Grace doesn’t seek to free us from
the Law — it’s the very power behind
the Law. We cannot hope to obey God without relying on his grace; by his grace
we have the heart to want to obey.
The Law will finally come into its own when we see why is should be obeyed.
When we understand
that Jesus came as the fulfilment of
the Law and the Prophetic Writings we no longer have a problem with the Law. We
see it as once and for all, God’s.
Then we are able to
see the relational imperative in the
Law’s achievement.
Life can only
sensibly work when we have committed to treated others as we would like them to
treat us. We don’t ever want to be hurt. We don’t ever desire to be rejected.
We always want to be respected. We always want to be considered. Yet, when
others are the same way we see them being unreasonable; a human disparity.
In other words, we
need to be loved perfectly, so we need to love others perfectly.
Not that we’ll ever
get there; and where we fall short, we always have the recovery of apology,
within the multiple ‘languages’ of apology. Because we can see how impossible
it is to love others perfectly, we are convinced of the grace that should exude
from us toward others in the form of forgiveness. We find it hard to love
people, yet we are horrified that others find it hard to love us. These are
crucial truths that need necessarily to be dwelt upon. Meditate on these and we
are blessed with empathy for the human condition — theirs and ours. We forgive
them and us more readily.
The more we
understand grace as a free gift of God — that we are forgiven! That we have
done nothing to deserve grace — the
more we understand the reciprocal invocation of God: “love others as I have loved you;
forgive others as I have forgiven you. As you want me, through grace, to love
you,” says the Lord, “that’s how I want you to treat others.”
***
There is nothing
more fundamental to justice in life than to love others as we love God to love
us.
If we have
experienced God’s merciful grace — his forgiveness — we are convinced of the
value of extending his grace to others. We forgive them. And it is no big deal.
But if we haven’t
experienced the forgiveness of God we are less likely to give to another what
we haven’t ourselves ever known.
***
QUESTIONS in REVIEW:
1. How hard is it for you to love
someone who ‘doesn’t deserve it’? Have you asked yourself recently, “Have I got
a problem with my own being forgiven by God?”
2. Do you feel forgiven? Have you
experienced God’s grace? What connection is there between our personal
experience of grace and our ‘ability’ to forgive another person?
© 2015 S. J. Wickham.
Note: USC version is Under the Southern Cross, The New Testament in Australian English
(2014). This translation was painstakingly developed by Dr Richard Moore, a NT
Greek scholar, over nearly thirty years.
No comments:
Post a Comment