Saturday March 7
Readings: Dt 26:16-19; Mt 5:43-48
In Deuteronomy we witness God saying to Israel, “Are we good? You understand what we’re agreeing to, right?” God says, “Here are my laws. Obey them with your whole heart and soul and you will be my people.”
It gets me thinking a lot about our Lenten journey and the personal commitments that we have made in this world – commitments that maybe only you and God know, commitments that are written on our heart and soul – that we try hard to honor and live into. These are sacred vows.
I have always loved the poet David Whyte who has a beautiful poem called “All the True Vows” in which he says:
All the true vows are secret vows
the ones we speak out loud are the ones we break.
There is only one life you can call your own
and a thousand others you can call by any name you want.
God is calling Israel to true vows and the one life that is theirs to live.
Jesus is doing the same. He says his famous phrases, “You have heard it said…but I say…” in order to call his hearers back to their true vows. And in this passage he lays a heavy one on us, “You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy,’ but I say, ‘love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’”
I am not quite sure where the phrase he quotes comes from, but it does not seem to be directly from the Hebrew scriptures. There are multiples passages from the Hebrew bible that speak of love for neighbor as well as compassion for the enemy. My guess was that he was quoting something that had become “conventional wisdom” of the day. Loving the enemy was probably too hard, so at some point people started saying that it’s OK to just love our neighbors and “take care of our own.” Families, communities and societies start to put narratives in place that justify why something can or can’t happen.
I started thinking of some of the conventional wisdom that I have heard that if repeated often enough gets “truth” status. Things like “We can never solve poverty…” “Nonviolence doesn’t work…” “We need a strong national defense…” “We can’t let in everybody who wants to come here…” The list goes on and sometimes they are about specific groups or individuals as well. What ones have you heard? What ones have you said?
And so Jesus draws upon a deeper tradition – true vows that he was trying to be faithful to and one that his people once promised themselves to – that rejects some of the conventional wisdom that justifies exclusion, oppression, differential treatment, etc.
For today, identify one piece of “conventional wisdom” from your family or the wider society that you no longer believe and/or support and want to work against. Tell someone else about it.