Or maybe if you are not interested in my sermons you might be interested in joining me on a Pilgrimage Tour of Mystical and Historical Places in England and Wales?
Or we might button-hole a member of Parliament, say Preston Manning, and ask him how he would apply our Lord's counsel in the House of Commons: "Well," he might say, "I'm a good Christian, but if I turned the other cheek to the Grits and the Bloc Quebecois and the NDP and the Tories they might stab me in the back, so I won't do it!"
Or we might go to the North of Ireland, and talk to the Orangemen and the Irish Republican Army, and say to them, "Now you fellows who say you are pure Protestants, and holy Roman Catholics, do you think this teaching of Jesus applies to you, and has something to say about how you bully and intimidate your neighbours, and how you handle your fears and resentments?" They might say, "Oh, Jesus was talking to heathen people when he said that, not to us Protestants and Catholics!"
It has been said that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, but that it has been tried and found difficult. It's not easy to be hit on one cheek, and then turn the other; or to have someone steal your cloak, and then offer him your coat also.
So does Jesus mean us to interpret these words literally?
What about His advice elsewhere in the Gospel to pluck out an eye, or cut off a hand, if we sin in our looking, or in our taking?
Obviously not. Yet He said it.
What He was doing was making sure His hearers got the point He was making by overstating the case. He was concerned not so much with what people do as He was with why they do what they do. He was concerned about the heart, not outward observance. If the heart is right, the outward observance will look after itself.
One time, referring to Jewish dietary laws, He said that nothing entering into a man can defile him, that it's what comes out of a man - out of his heart - that defiles him.
Religion in our Lord's time and place was Old Testament religion, a religion of law. If you do this, and do that; or don't do this, or don't do that, you will be all right in God's eyes.
Jesus went deeper than that. He said, in effect, you can't do the right thing for the wrong reason, because intention is everything. Indeed, one might conclude that it's almost better to do the wrong thing for the right reason than it is to do the right thing for the wrong reason - but note that I say "almost" because surely it is never right to do something that is wrong. The point is that our Lord's religion is a religion of Grace rather than a religion of law. It's not just enough to know and obey rules. What matters is what we are like in our heart. What kind of attitude do we have? It's not that the law is wrong or bad - Jesus said not one jot or tittle of it would pass from it - but it's that our relationship with God and His goodness must be at a deeper level than that of outward observance. When it is we shall then live lives obedient to God's Law out of our own free choice and desire. What we do will reflect what we believe. It will reflect what we love.
It has been said, "Love God, and do what you like." That's a philosophy that can be easily abused, but rightly understood it's perfectly true, because if we truly love God, we will like doing His will, which we know from His Law.
In closing, let's go back to Ireland. In Dublin stands St. Patrick's Cathedral, built over a stream where St. Patrick performed his first baptisms. The first thing you see when you go through the porch and into the nave of the Cathedral, is an old wooden door propped up by itself. It has a hole about 6 inches square in the middle of it. Nearby is a panel that explains the door, and the hole:
"In 1492 two prominent families, the Ormonds and the Kildares, were in the midst of a bitter feud. Beseiged by Gerald Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, Sir James Butler, Earl of Ormond, and his followers took refuge in the Chapter House of St. Patrick's Cathedral, bolting themselves in. As the siege wore on, the Earl of Kildare concluded that the feuding was foolish. Here were two families worshipping the same God, in the same church, in the same country, trying to kill each other. So he called out to Sir James, and 'undertooke on his honour that he should receive no villanie.' Wary of some 'further treacherie' Ormond did not respond. So Kildare seized his spear, cut away a hole in the door, and thrust his hand through. It was grasped by another hand inside the church, the door was opened, and the two men embraced, thus ending the family feud."
The inscription on the panel concludes, "there is a lesson here for
all of us who are engaged in 'family feuds,' whether brother to brother,
language to
language, nation to nation. If one of us would dare to 'chance his arm' perhaps
that would be the crucial step to the reconciliation we all unconsciously
seek."
(2) Advent:"...let's give ourselves some space to consider the great themes of Advent - Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven - without letting an anticipated Christmas ride roughshod over them..."
(3) Christmas: "...if Jesus is "God with us" ("Emmanuel") He is God with not only Christians, but also with Jews, Moslems, Hindus, Sikhs, Ba'hais, unbelievers, everybody..."
(4) Epiphany: "...a famous thinker once said, 'I believe in order to know' - but that is not what our modern world is doing, and in consequence it is failing to understand many things that previous generations understood very well.."
(5) Creation: "...if we tie our religious faith to this or that scientific theory or discovery today it may change tomorrow, and then where will we be...?"
(6) Society: "...when "Samaritans" start loving "Jews" - and "Jews" "Samaritans" - as the Good Samaritan in the parable loved the man who had fallen among thieves - human society will be transformed..."
(7) Holy Week: "...the later history of the places where Jesus was crucified, dead and buried, and the condition of some of them today, suggest that God does not protect holy places against either vandalism or bad taste..."
(8) Easter: "...the Church's ceremonial celebration of Christ's Resurrection, centred in the eucharistic thanksgiving He commanded, post-figures, so to speak, the mystery of His life and death prefigured in the Scriptures..."
(9) Intercession: "...however, since we human beings are, even after all the marvellous discoveries of modern science, essentially a mystery, we must believe and behave as though all things are possible with God..."
(10) Ascensiontide: "...the Ascension, and the gift of the Holy Spirit, may have been movements that had many moments, not just one..."
(11) Pentecost: "...I am convinced that we all are more edified this morning by our choir in the anthem they have sung than if they had broken forth in a babble of ecstatic utterance..."
(12) Michaelmas: "...let's begin our thoughts about angels by acknowledging the symbolic character of much of the information we have about them...but that is not to say they are not real..."
(13) All Saints: "...the Creation's inborn urge towards order the thoughtful person sees as evidence of a Divine Providence ...we may go further and see in the emergence in human affairs of a moral dimension evidence that God is good..."
(14) The Blessed Virgin Mary "...a Christian's conversion to Christ is incomplete until he or she loves the Blessed Virgin Mary..."
(15) St. Mary Magdalene: "...God continues to love the sinner even while He cannot accept the sin..."
(16) SS Peter and Paul:"...Peter and James told Paul everything there was to know about Jesus; and Paul interpreted it all theologically..."
(17) St. James:"...change is constant, and we must always be adapting to it. But we shall go astray if our changing and adapting leads us into denials and contradictions of Scripture..."
(18) Formgeschicte: "...when we think about it we must conclude that the notion that the New Testament Church invented a different Jesus to the real Jesus - which is what the Form Critics are saying - and that this happened everywhere about the same time - is nonsense..."
(19) Hands: "...we do not think of our Lord's hands for what they did with wood, but for what they did with men..."
(20) Jesus as "The Fixed Link": "...I can think of nothing more Christlike than being a bridge, a "go-between", that brings people together and makes peace between them..."
(21) At a Wedding:"...Jesus Christ not only provides us with a counsel of perfection but also frees us, through forgiveness and acceptance, to pursue it..."
(22) At a Funeral: "...the death and resurrection of Jesus provides a pattern or model of what awaits us all..."
(23) Scientism: "...there are many today who are tempted to conclude that God and the soul are only the constructs of our imagination..."
(24) Advertising myself:"...is the effect of modern liturgies, with their shift away from penitence and forgiveness, the creation of a kind of "yuppy religion", appropriate to the sorts of people who advertise themselves in the Saturday Globe and Mail...?
(25) What to do when the Church Goes Bananas?:"...the flaws in the Church, doctrinal as well as behavioural, don't absolve you and me of obedience to the plain meaning of Scripture..."
(26) Direct experience of God? "...otherwise seemingly normal people, including academics in turtleneck sweaters, burst into spasms of uncontrollable laughter..."
(27) Feminism: "...when I was in Grade 7 we sang a song that supposed "What a great world this would be if the boys/girls were all transported far beyond the northern sea..."
(28) William Tyndale: "...no Christians today, not even bishops, strangle and burn other Christians as in Tyndale's day, but there are still discriminations, often based in "political correctness", that force good young men with vocations to serve God to go overseas, as Tyndale did..."
(29) The Church's Organ of Orthodoxy: "...it is a perilous thing to marginalise the Book of Common Prayer because it is not just a book of services, but the rail that keeps our Anglican train on track..."
(30) Hell: "...heaven and hell may both be the same thing; if you are a lover the warmth of God's love will be ecstasy, if you are a hater the fire of God's love will be hell..."
(31) Paradise: "...the Reformation swept away Purgatory but it failed to restore the early Christians' sense of ... the linkage of those in this world and the next in the Communion of Saints..."
(32) Heaven: "...Heaven is much more someONE than it is someWHERE..."
(33) Temptations and Perversions:"...the use of condoms contributes nothing to protection from the moral disease of making sex the self-centred expression of an instinctual urge..."
(34) God as My Author:"...when God presses "Save as"
we go into His memory and disappear from the monitor; but that does not mean that He won't
one day bring us back and turn us into hard copy..."