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Proper 2

Deuteronomy 30.15–20

1 Corinthians 3.1–9

Matthew 5.21–37

A real choice with real consequences. The great temptation today is not so much to cast off all moral restraint – few would actually advocate that, though many act from time to time as though that were the norm – as to imply that there are so many different ways of being human, and of being Christian, that our choices in this life are not that important, and that God will sort it all out in some great (and at present unknowable) future.

This view is often coupled with a clever parody of the Sermon on the Mount. What matters, says Jesus, is not so much that you don’t commit murder, adultery and the rest, but that your heart is right. God is looking (as in Deuteronomy; this isn’t a Christian innovation over against a Jewish background) for an obedience which goes through and through a person, resulting in an integrity between heart and action. But today, with romanticism and existentialism as our hidden teachers, we ‘naturally’ think that, as long as we are acting from the heart, what we do outwardly doesn’t matter so much. ‘His heart’s in the right place’ is usually said as an excuse.

We apply this selectively, of course. Nobody excuses murder on the grounds that it was most sincerely meant. But it goes unnoticed elsewhere that the antithesis between outward and inward observance is never meant, in either Testament, as a way of abolishing the commandments themselves. It is a way of saying that the truly mature, integrated follower of Jesus will be someone for whom it is no longer a moral effort to keep the commandments. They will do so because they deeply want to. That, I suspect, shows what a steep mountain most of us still have to climb.

But, to recapitulate, the choices are real. It won’t do to say, ‘But we thought we were supposed to do what came naturally.’ Not to choose – to go with the flow, whether of the insidious pressures from around or the whispered suggestions from within – is still to choose, namely, to choose to disobey. Part of growing up as Christians is to realize that a tough choice is being asked of us. Jesus, after all, didn’t say ‘If anyone would come after me, they should go with the flow and do what comes naturally.’ The next part is to pray for that change of heart, that total reform and redirection from within, through which alone that obedience can become, as we say, second nature. That, according to both Deuteronomy and Jesus, is the way of life.

One sign of maturity and integration within a Christian community will lie, as Paul knew only too well, in its attitudes to its leaders. Going with the flow of natural instincts had produced personality cults in Corinth, a sure sign of spiritual immaturity. The Church is called to grow beyond what comes naturally to humans, and to embrace instead what comes as the fruit of the Spirit and faith.