Whoever says, "You fool!"

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

February 13, 2011; 6 Epiphany, Year A

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Matthew 5:21-37) Jesus said, "You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, `You shall not murder'; and `whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.' But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, `You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire. So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

"You have heard that it was said, `You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.

"It was also said, `Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.' But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

"Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, `You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.' But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let your word be `Yes, Yes' or `No, No'; anything more than this comes from the evil one.

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It can be a dangerous thing to read the Bible, or to hear it read to you in church.  I can remember my childhood reaction to part of this gospel.  Full of the violent passions that are the emotional landscape of childhood, these words caught my attention and created a literal terror:  “Whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to the hell of fire.” 

I racked my brain.  Had I ever called anybody a fool?  A sigh of relief.  I couldn’t think of a particular instance.  “You fool” wasn’t one of my habitual epithets.  But there were plenty of others.  Words of insult that just exploded out of me from time to time. 

A new panic set in.  Translations?  What about translations?  I knew that Jesus didn’t speak English.  And sometimes there are multiple translations for one word.  What other English words might be covered under whatever Jesus originally said that got translated “You fool,” in this Bible?  Oh, this was bad.  There were a lot of words that I had used that were a lot like “You fool.”  Is “you idiot” the same thing?  Or just plain “stupid!”  I knew I had called somebody “stupid.”  Was I going to the “hell of fire”? 

It didn’t seem fair, though.  Just for calling someone a name in the anger of a moment…  That’s not enough to merit the “hell of fire.”  Particularly if it was an eternal sentence.  That didn’t sound like God or Jesus.  So, I relaxed a bit and said I’d probably figure it out later.  But I reminded myself, just in case – do not call anyone a fool.  It’s not worth the risk.

Some years later I learned something interesting.  Translations again.  That phrase “hell of fire.”  The word is actually “Gehenna.”  Gehenna was a real place in Jesus’ day.  It was the Jerusalem garbage dump.  It was a stinking, nasty place, where rats and wild dogs scavenged and fires continually smoldered.  So he wasn’t saying “Hell,” as in an eternal place of torment after you died.  That’s a relief.

But reinterpreting “hell of fire” to “Gehenna the garbage dump” was merely a technical solution to a systemic problem.  Whenever we are anxious, we are very tempted by technical solutions to systemic problems.  Most political sound bytes are mere technical solutions to systemic problems. 

I read this week about a distressed minister who had lost a dear member and friend from his congregation.  The friend had left to join a right wing fundamentalist church, explaining, “I work hard all week, and when I come to church, I really don’t want to think.  In my new church they just tell me what to do.”  That’s a technical solution to a systemic problem.

I might guard against the use of the term “You fool” whenever I needed a strong, exclamatory adjective, and take relief knowing that the consequences of an inadvertent slip merely references the metaphor of a first century garbage dump, but that fails to address the real problem, the anger and other self-centered emotions that reside in my heart and so often motivate my intention.

Jesus is going for something far more radical here.  He’s not merely taking an old set of prohibited behaviors – “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’” – and replacing them with an even more demanding set of prohibited behaviors – “But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.”  It’s far more radical than that. 

He’s gone way past laws and sanctions.  Any straight guy could tell you that when we hear “that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”  And not even the most ardent fundamental Biblical literalist will condone eye gouging for looking.

Jesus is moving beyond mere behavior, beyond our actions, deeper into our motivation and intention, opening the tender territory of our internal dynamics of anger, derision, slander, alienation, false generosity, litigiousness, lust, scrupulosity and equivocating.  “It is one thing to behave rightly.  It is another thing entirely for one’s heart to be oriented toward love.  Just as it is easier to make a sacrifice at the temple than it is to do justice”[1] as Isaiah and Micah have urged us the past two Sundays.

Jesus makes it clear that what he’s interested in is more than mere behavior – looking good or just following the rules.  What Jesus wants is an internal surrender into love.  A personal transformation.  A heart transplant.  What Jesus wants is for us to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. 

To love God is to trust God.  To accept what is with the expectation that this is the context that God is present to us.  To trust…, even when things aren’t going the way we want them to.  To live in this new radical way, is to love anyway, because God loves first.  We see someone who is behaving stupid, like an idiot, …you fool – and we recognize this too is a child of God, infinitely beloved, bless his heart.  (And you need to resist saying that with a Southern accent.  “Bless his heart” can be another form of “You fool.”) 

Here’s the way Thomas Merton puts it.  “Ultimately, the secret of all this is perfect abandonment to the will of God in things you cannot control, and perfect obedience to [God] in everything that depends on your own volition, so that in all things, in your interior life and in your outward works for God, you desire only one thing, which is the fulfillment of [God’s] will.”[2]

All of the spiritual directors say that we don’t accomplish such abandonment by merely trying harder.  It has to go deeper than that.  It is an interior surrender.  Not unlike falling in love.  It is falling into the mystery of God. 

It starts when we let God love us completely.  With all our murderous anger and derision and lust.  When we know ourselves to be completely loved and accepted by God, then, and only then, can we face our failure and falsehood, and accept that as completely as God accepts us.  To become real, we let go of who we think we ought to be in order to be who we are.  We let God see us as we are.  God sees us as we are and loves us completely.  And we let God love us until we can rejoice even in our flaws.  That’s enough.

When we internalize that kind of divine compassion toward ourselves, then we begin to have room to be compassionate toward others.  The fires of our internal garbage dump begin to go out.  When we can look at ourselves and laugh, “You fool!  Bless your heart.”  Then we can look at another’s foolishness and laugh with unthreatened empathy, “You fool!  Bless your heart, too!”

God bless all us fools.

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[1] Amy Oden, quoted by Lindy Black, Sermon Nuggets, Epiphany 6, 2011, http://web.me.com/lindyblack/Sermon_Fodder/Lectionary/Entries/2011/2/13_EPIPHANY_6A.html found at textweek.com

[2] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, Shambhala, Boston, 1961, p. 196.

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