Completely Joining God

This is our last week immersed in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5. The sermon itself goes on for 2 more chapters. But we need to stop because Lent is knocking on the door.

With the Holiness Code of Leviticus 19 and Psalm 119’s deep love for Torah in hand, with Paul's
 vision for all the church community might be from 1 Corinthians, we continue to listen to Jesus taking part in the ongoing need to reinterpret the law to new situations. We listen as he offers what God’s intentions in Torah look like in his time, and they invite us to do the same. How might he apply the law to Roman occupation  and new social assumptions.

All this is based on the image of the empire of Heaven laid out in the Beatitudes; a community where love and reconciliation are the norm. It lays out what Jesus will be ushering in for the rest of the gospel. With Lent just around the corner it is good to hear Jesus invitation to imagine an entirely different world from the one we live in. A world where the measure of who is deemed important, notable, eminent and influential was not the rich, the powerful, the high born; but the wretched, despised, and the meek.

While what Jesus says today have often been used to encourage people to endure abuse and domestic violence, Jesus is offer a way of subversively acting to end violence and declare the superiority of God’s reign. He offers way for those who are oppressed and exploited to help bring in God’s purposes for the humanity.

The Greek word translated as perfect more often means “mature, complete, grown up, ripe”.  Being perfect is not being flawless, but, complete – being all that we might be, just as God is the completion of all, and God's desires for this world are yet to be complete. That is what the Sermon on the Mount is all about. When we live the kind of generosity, mercy, compassion, love for all that Jesus is talking about we we join God in bring completeness to this world.

May God’s desire for us to grow in compassion, working for a world where all thrive, especially the poor and meek, shape our journey into Lent.

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