Choosing Reconciliation | Matthew 5:21-26

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good morning friends. My name's Alex. I'm a pastor here. If you're visiting, really great to meet you. And what. A performance and what a song like, can you feel the depths? Maybe it's new to you. How many of you feel like you've heard that song before at some point? And the emotion, the longing for reconnection.

It pushes us into the territory that we're in today. We've been in the series short series on anger and forgiveness. We will next week, beginning a new series, working through the book of John's gospel. We're gonna be following that through all the way around to Easter, so we're gonna sit in that for a while.

You'll hear the whole of that book and Jesus' passion in it for one person. In the other gospel stories, we see Jesus talk to lots of people most of the time. And specifically in John, it's one person after another. And so we're gonna invite you to healing through that book. I'm super excited about that.

This series though, has been, Aaron described it as a doozy. I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds like an American thing and. I can't ask him because I'm still not talking to him about last week. So last week he threw this up there and and this was a moment where I chose to wear a Bronco shirt.

I'm a well-known Detroit Lions fan, for those of you that don't know, and the idea that you could in a moment transform a lion into a burrow or a donkey or whatever you guys have as a symbol. Is heartbreaking. And so he pushed some buttons. And here we are today trying to learn forgiveness together.

And so we're gonna navigate a passage from scripture. This is a series that I have been managing from just a pastoral point of view, but I suspect it at some point. During the time of this series, something was gonna, a rouse a sense of anger and justice in me. It just usually seems to fall that way.

So I was kinda journeying along fairly happy. And then this week I got an email from an insurance company. It was an insurance email that let me know that I was probably gonna lose a significant chunk of money. And suddenly in that moment. Anger hit me personally too, and having toured on it, prayed over it, thought about how you deal with anger, having to, a couple of weeks ago, how you give anger to God.

I. Did the opposite. I stood on the side of a swimming pool while my kids were swimming, yelling at some poor customer service representative, telling her just what I thought of her company and the charlatans that were in charge of running it. Now, interestingly, when we talk about anger. As poorer performance as that is and as, as ha as embarrassed I am of my own sense of anger that if that's all anger gets to according to Jesus, like that's not worst case scenario, there's another response that we're gonna push into that extends beyond that moment of anger, that moment of ah, just.

I'm just furious about this. Of course, that too, has to be controlled. Has to be managed, but Jesus will talk about a different type of anger. So let's just remind ourselves what he says as we look at the rest of Matthew Chapter five. I'm gonna follow through the whole of it, but we looked at some of it briefly just the other week.

It starts with this idea actually in Matthew chapter five, verse 20. I tell you, unless your righteousness. Surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. You will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus is designing a new type of community and he says, this is what people in my community look like.

They don't look like the old type of law keeping. They have a different heartbeat, and then he goes on. To explain all the different ways that might look like, all the different elements to that. And so when we follow on from verse 20 to verse 21, we catch his heartbeat. You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, he's capturing.

Old pronouncements that everybody would agree on, and he's giving them new ideas or attaching new ideas to them. You've heard it said to the people long ago, you shall not murder the basic commandment, the easy one to keep. And anyone who murders will be subject to judgment. And everybody listening to him would say, absolutely yes, that is the case.

And then he adds his extension to it, his extra part. But I tell you. Anyone who's angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Now, if you go and read some writers on Matthew, some of them will say, what Jesus is doing here is he's building a fence around the old laws. So there were a group of teachers that what they would do to help you keep a law, they would say we're gonna stop you doing it by giving you more strict rules, so you'll never get close to doing it.

Let me give you a really good example of this. This is the travone round hole. It. Where we go on vacation in Cornwall, there's this big sinkhole up on the cliff side. People climb down it all the time and get stuck. Sadly, people fall down it all sorts of things. And there's big signs that say, don't go down the hole.

Don't fall down. It don't climb down. It don't think about falling down. It just. Avoid the hole. Now, some people might say what you do to stop someone doing that is you put up a really big fence, like a good 20 or 30 yards around it. We haven't done that there. It's no. We want people to see the hole just not fall down it.

And of course the two sometimes overlap. This is what some people would do with the law, but that's not exactly what Jesus is doing. It is maybe part of it, but he's also doing something that no other teachers of his time really did. He's pushing into the realm of how you feel of your emotions, of how you think for a long time, law, guilt, all those sorts of things were attached to what you did and Jesus is starting to say now how your thought life.

That actually matters as well. And he pushes into how anger is a response to something somebody has done. And that brings us close to murder, which brings us close to judgment. May maybe you felt some of that. Clarence Darrow said this, all men have an emotion to kill when they strongly dislike someone.

They involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed anyone, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction. It's like you can feel that, right? It's like that. Yeah I'm pretty mad when Jesus talks about anger. He doesn't use the one Greek word that's available to him or he is translators.

Don't use that one Greek word, which is through muscle, which, which is like that explosion, that moment I had. But he uses this word, the root is all gay. It's actually where we get the word agy from. It's angry bitterness. It's losing your mind. This settled state of settled, state of anger that continues over time.

The translation in Dale Bruin's, brilliant commentary. Probably the best commentator I've come across on. Matthew says this, whoever is nursing a grudge. Just holding it over the long days and months and years. That is the anger he's concerned about, and he actually builds this list of three different things.

There's the thought, the anger, and then he talks about using a word rucker. If you've used this word recently, you're definitely strange. Nobody really uses this anymore. That's okay. I like strange. I'm pretty strange. But anyone who uses the word raku is answerable to the court. There's not a lot of difference in thinking about someone in an angry way Jesus says, and then also using this term, raku towards them.

And you can imagine some of his listeners, especially the religious ones sitting there thinking, this is just quite funny. The idea that someone might use this word and end up in court. Is quite unlikely. And then Jesus goes further and you can almost pack picture them being caught off guard as he says.

And anyone who says You fool will be in danger of the fire of hell. The word there is Ena. It was a rubbish dump on the side of the hill in Jerusalem and people will go throw, refuse in it all day long. And so on one level he is maybe talking about something eternal and another level he is talking about something that was known to continue to burn and he starts to push into what it might be like to live in that settled state of anger year after year.

Artie France. Another brilliant commentator on Matthew said this, the deliberate paradox of Jesus' pronouncement is that an ordinary insult may be try an attitude of contempt, which God takes really seriously. I love this Another day, or Bruner quote, catch the heartbeat here towards the end, the source of all these injuries.

It is orga, menos, grudging, resenting, being angry, continuing mad. Out of this cesspool. Hiss is the carelessness of a bitter word, and both the pool and its aef fusion poison. Others, and in some cases lead to death. Resentment and hard words kill more people than drugs, alcohol, tobacco, combined. There are more pollutants in the world than we think.

Catch this last part because there's been a shift. Jesus has healed people physically and now he's stepping into like how we live. This last part is beautiful. Thus when Jesus left the sick at the end of the last chapter and began teaching. He did not cease healing. He began to heal in the deep places.

Those long years of resentment are able to be healed, and we begin to imagine what freedom might look on the other side of it. This is the teaching that Jesus is interested in. So we talked about first week when anger can surface and be trusted to God, our journey can start. And then Aaron came off and he threw a bomb into this idea of forgiveness last year, forgiveness last week.

Forgiveness is when we can say with Jesus, I forgive them. And because they have no idea what they have done. Jesus makes this unusual statement about people who clearly know what they are doing. The soldiers that crucified him knew what they were doing. The people that sentenced him to that cru of fiction knew what they were doing.

And in the midst of that, Jesus says, no somewhere really this broken soul that it is core is an image bearer of God, does not really know the extent of what they are doing. Forgiveness is extensive, and while we've talked about it mainly about another person. Let me remind you of this where we began, this Ronald Roll Heiser quote, as we age, we need to forgive.

Forgive those who hurt us, forgive ourselves for our own mistakes. Forgive life for having been unfair and then forgive God for seemingly not have not having protected us. All of this is so that we do not die bitter and angry, which is perhaps the greatest religious imperative of all. In the midst of this painful work that we're doing, and for some of you, I know I've heard we're pulling at things that are old stories, things that feel like the wound is almost covered over.

But I'd suggest that this somewhere is true, that under what looks like a scar, there's actually a sore. Something that has to be exposed and healed before you can live the life that you were intended to do. So after talking about anger, Jesus takes a turn and he gives us the language for the third piece of this series.

After teaching that anger, Jesus shares two example scenarios. You heard them in the story. Let me repeat them briefly. Therefore, if you're offering your gift at the altar and there, remember that your brother or sister has something against you. Leave your gift there in front of the altar first, go and be reconciled to them and then come and offer your gift.

The language there is a bit vague. How many of you, when you read that the first time, would believe the person who is currently offering the gift is the guilty party? Show of hands. Anyone? Throw a hand up. Some of you read it just now. Yeah, you got it. A few hands. Not sure. Maybe some of you. That's fine.

It's vague. There's some English kind of sense that no the person who's offering their gift now has to leave 'cause they've done something against somebody else and now goes to apologize. But in the Greek language, certainly there's uncertainty. The language there is just that you remember that somebody has a problem in the relationship.

And so some examples of an idiom that might fit in here are these, have you ever said one of these oh, that person, they never let things go. That's having. Something against someone. I'm always the bad guy that's in this language. Having something against someone, it's never their fault. Having something against someone, I try saying sorry, and it's never enough.

The language is vague as to who the original person at fault was, and that'd suggests that Jesus isn't actually that bothered. It actually could be any situation. Where the relationship is broken, and Jesus then invites us to do something quite unusual. He says this, leave your gift there in the front of the altar first.

Go and be reconciled to them, and then come back and offer your gift. So this is what Jesus is asking of his first disciples. He creates a scenario where he says, imagine you remember in your moment of being about to offer a sacrifice. That you need to mend a relationship. This is what I want you to do. I want you to pause and go all the way home.

Jesus is teaching in a place called Capernaum, which is up here in the north, and you make sacrifices somewhere down here in the south. This is a walk of 40 hours or five to six days, and Jesus says that mending relationships is so important to me. That in the moment you're about to make a sacrifice and conclude your duties in the city of Jerusalem and are about to head home, don't wait to just do the sacrifice quickly and then leave.

Go all the way home, five days, mend the relationship, come all the way back five days, finish your sacrifice, and then go all the way home. It. It's as we'll look later. It's an extreme ask. Jesus says, this is how serious I take mending relationship. Leave your sacrifice with the priest. You might imagine how the priest feels in that situation.

I'm not a place just to store things. I'm actually here for an important religious function but somewhere in the midst of that, Jesus says, here is an example that will educate you on what forgiveness really looks like. To give you a parallel of it, it's as if you were to leave South Fellowship Church.

Right now because you are in the midst of offering a sacrifice and head all the way to Pueblo walking, and then come back and finish the service and then go back. It's extreme again, right? That's what this story is asking, talking about second story. Settle matters quickly with your adversary. He was taking you to court, knew it while you were still together on the way.

Or your adversary may hand you over to the judge and the judge may hand you over to the officer and you may be thrown into prison. Truly, I tell you, you will not get out until you have paid for last penny. Jesus talks about a scenario in which you might be being the equivalent of being sued. Someone wants to take you to court and says, settle quickly.

Make sure the relationship is mended. Do everything you can to make that happen. Both scenarios, they go further than forgiveness. They're reconciliation stories. They're interested in what it takes to repair a relationship. Now, I would suggest. When Jesus tells these stories, he's not giving you laws to obey.

He's giving you examples of how passionate he hopes his followers are to mend relationships quickly and easily. Most of you will not be asked to walk five days back in the other way. Today you have a phone, you could pick it up, amend the relationship that way. It's not a law to follow, but it is an attitude towards forgiveness.

And reconciliation to live into both examples would seem extreme to his original audience. Nobody would listen and say, this is normal behavior. They would listen and say Jesus has a high standard of what it is in relationship, and I hope as we get to the end of this, you'll see why. My goal in this is not to tell you.

You should reconcile with someone if you are in a relationship that's struggling. That's between you and Jesus. That's for him to work through in those years. My hope today is I leave you with this idea that I would love to find ways to reconcile that reconciliation looks beautiful and that I'll be able to create in you with the Holy Spirit, this idea of longing for that thing to make it happen on the surface.

I would say this, that Jesus teaching. It seems unfair and maybe even unwise. Reconciliation is hard work, especially when you are the injured party, but also when you are the guilty party too. Finding out how blame is shared is complicated. It can seem at times unfair and when done badly. Is perhaps unwise too.

I'm gonna, I'm not gonna ask you to put up your hands because I'm guessing it's a hundred percent. How many of you have seen this story floating around? Funny that it's so big, heartbreaking because of just the lives in the midst of it. Two people that were caught in this romantic dalliance, let's call it in the midst of a cold play concert.

But what's actually more heartbreaking to me is the number of opinions on what should happen next on the inter. There's all sorts of people that would say, this is what he should do, this is what she should do. This is what the wife of one should do. This is what the husband of the other should do, and yet at the core are two people who now have to figure out what is next, and two other people that have to figure out what is next together.

I would suggest our opinions don't necessarily matter on the subject. All we can do is hope as followers of Jesus, that reconciliation. Happens a couple of things I wrote 'cause I wanted to be a bit more specific on this section than I sometimes am. I think Jesus pushes us beyond the place of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is great, but you don't have to interact with anyone for forgiveness. Forgiveness is a challenging place in itself. Forgiveness, painful as it can be, at least requires no contact, no interaction simply, and forgiveness. I just let the other person go. I set them free and potentially find that I have become free.

That's the beautiful offer of forgiveness that you've been holding a caged door shut, and you are the person that is caged in it, but reconciliation is a little further maybe in forgiveness. You've caught yourself saying language close to this. I forgave them, but they're dead to me now. I never want to see them again.

Never want to think about them again. I've let it go, but I just don't want to be connected to them at all. Reconciliation asks more than that. Reconciliation pushes you onwards. It means acknowledging some relationship, not in the same term. Perhaps they may be in jail. They may live in a different house or apartment, attend a different church.

You may never hang out socially. All sorts of buffers might be in place, but for reconciliation to exist, you have to acknowledge that they are a person. That can be a bigger ask than it might sound to some of us. In the midst of watching people try to find reconciliation, one of the things you see regularly is this idea that the other person doesn't really seem interested in it.

This was an anonymous story that I read in the midst of this week. He said, I'm sorry, but it's at least the 10th time. I dunno what to do. I am told that it's my duty to forgive, and I've tried, but each time I forgive him, he changes for a little while. And then he returns to the same behavior. I have a gut feeling I'm handling things the wrong way.

He never really changes, and I get angrier. What should I do? You can feel the tension in that story, right? Someone who's actively engaged in reconciliation and finds that the other person doesn't take it seriously at all. Perhaps one of the unfair things about reconciliation is it requires a partner, someone who's just as interested.

In it as you are, who actively wants to make this thing work here? Here's what I would say about its unfairness. I would say reconciliation at its heart is always unfair, or at least fairness is not its purpose. It can never really be fair. It can't fully ute for the damage. And when we talk about reconciliation, let lemme just say this it's so much broader than just an individual relationship that's important.

I don't wanna devalue that, but reconciliation is national scale. We've seen it in all sorts of places. America, Peru. We've seen it in Sudan, we've seen it in Bosnia, we've seen it in Rwanda, we've seen it in South Africa. We've seen all sorts of places where people have tried to reconcile as a nation. I grew up in a city in England that had bombs multiple times from organizations in Islanders.

They tried to figure out what they were going through as a nation. This is small and it's huge as well. Reconciliation is always unfair. It's not interested in being fair. It's interested in healing. It doesn't have to be unwise. When you realize that Jesus wants you to have a heart for reconciliation, not that he's just giving you laws to obey, it means reconciliation can be a slow considered process as you decide how to approach another person, as you decide what terms you can actually figure out this thing on how it might possibly move forward, and eventually I would suggest you have to stop figuring out who's to blame.

You have to start figuring out how you can move forward together. Reconciliation doesn't happen in a moment. And I think when you read Jesus' story on the surface, you assume that it does. And yet I think reconciliation is always a process. It takes time for two people to figure out how they might continue on together.

And I spent time this week reading about what that process looks like, and then I hit pause on all of that. Because I'm not sure I can describe to you what a process might look like for you, for somebody else, for a nation. Again, my hope is this, that you catch God's passion for reconciliation and then working with a pastor, with a counselor, and we have many counselors in this church that are brilliant.

Working with a professional, you can actually design what looks like reconciliation to you. You get to start pushing into it and exploring what those steps might look like. It's not one fits all, it's just a considered process. It happens not in a moment, but through a process. I think a couple of things I will say on that process first, I think pro reconciliation to work requires two people that are willing to say, I need to enter into this with you.

You can't do it alone. Tony Morrison, the writer, says this, it's difficult to move on from any side of suffering if that suffering goes unacknowledged and undescribed. If you've been a, in a relationship that has pain in it without the other person buying in, I'm not sure you actually can get anywhere.

You can choose to forgive them, but ultimately it is a two or at least a two. Person event. But when we reconcile, when we bring truth, we start to rehumanize the other person. And that might be the greatest gift they ever experience in the process. We rehumanize. The other couple of pictures for you to describe reconciliation on a macro level and how it works and doesn't work?

I don't, I'm not an expert on these areas, so I'm just pressing into some ideas here so I could be wrong. This is a picture of the Nuremberg trials held in Nuremberg because the Nuremberg laws were the first place where the Nazi party of Germany announced that Jewish people would no longer be considered citizens.

And so when the second World War finished, they brought everyone back to this place. And that was the place of judgment. They sat 21 Nazi leaders, the monsters of history in one place, and they brought judgment on them. And most people would agree, these are people that deserve some kind of judgment, some kind of case.

But as history looks back on this event, a couple of things that have been said about this, it was a judgment for laws that didn't yet exist and that it told the whole of the German people. They were guilty too. It left Germans as outsiders in society, monsters as well. Now again, whole bunch of opinions on that.

You may have different opinions. This is another way of doing reconciliation. This is the TRC Councils in South Africa, led by the man in the center there, Desmond Tutu, which rightly or longly wrongly tried a different approach to judgment. In the fallout of apartheid, in the first steps of Nelson Mandela becoming Prime Minister, one of the things they did is they invited people to come and ask for amnesty.

They asked for the guilty to come and to confess, to tell in front of the nation and their victims the things they had done. And if they would do that, they would be forgiven. They could never be charged for the crimes they committed. If they could just come and be completely honest about what they had done.

If they're found to have lied later, they could be brought back for judgment. But if they could be honest, there was freedom waiting and people came and they told their stories. And so what happened was this truth was heard. A whole nation heard from the mouths of the people that were guilty confessions.

I have done this. There were no longer questions about what had really happened. There were statements from the mouths of the people that were guilty, and then reconciliation could begin on that confession. Look at a couple of quotes that came out of this. We would like to forgive. We just want to know whom.

To forgive. We want to move on together, but we want to know who we get to set free. How about this one? We have told our story many times already, but this is the first time that after telling it, it's as if a huge weight has been lifted off our shoulders. It's what reconciliation does. It releases people from weights that have sat on their shoulders for years somewhere in amidst this.

This is Desmond Tu to a person as a person because they recognize others as persons. And in this process, a guilty person gets to come and see their victim. And victim gets to come and see the guilty and both acknowledge that they're humans made in the image of God. Warped maybe, but they move on together.

Reconciliation is something I love. For this reason, and this is where I really want us to land, this is what I want you to take away a process of reconciliation it. It simply mirrors God's passion for reconciliation. This is why you should love it and why I love it. This is what God does. This is what he's interested in.

Remind yourself of this. This is Second Corinthians chapter five. God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them, and he is committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassador as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God.

The thing that God does is reconciliation, and each of you and me, if you call yourself a follower of Jesus, are a reconciled person. God has said of you, I do not hold against you. The things that have gone before, they are gone. They are done. I have let go. Guilty you have been. But free you now are go and know that you are reconciled never to her.

Be held to judgment for the things you have done. Whatever they look like, however heinous you believe them to be however much you would hold your thing up against everyone else's and say, mine is worse at its depth, mine is worse. God sends you away and says, no, go free soul. Receive the weight lifted off your shoulders.

Know you are loved. Those are the things that God speaks over us, reconciled people. And then he says, go and find ways to do that in the world around you. Share the beauty of reconciliation for those that desperately need it. From Genesis three, the Scripture Center on God's Reconciliation Plan. It's what he dreams for, plans for act upon.

What he brings to life in people like you and me. And when you see those stories, life simply emerges in a beautiful way. One more story for you before I invite Aaron to come. This is an Andrew and Calixte two men that lived in Ruanda before 1994. Childhood friends, people that loved each other deeply, and then when the just genocide began in 1994.

Calixte with a group of other men, went and killed the entirety of Andrew's wife's family, murdered them. Of course, the outfall is that genocide ends, new rulership comes in and there's an opportunity to go and indict people for what they have done. And so Andrew goes and indicts. Kasti can never forgive him for what has happened.

But in prison, Kati changes, starts to learn about reconciliation, starts to realize what has happened, what he is responsible for, and see if he comes out looking for ways that he can try to make that right, try to reconcile. But Andrew and he can never reconcile. They accept that the relationship is dead until one day they sat in a church service just like this.

The pastor begins to preach and reconciliation. Andrew and Kasi look at each other from across the room and realize in that moment God is speaking to them today. They are the best friends. Their friends say that when you see one, you see the other God is healed. Even that wound through reconciliation, that's his gift to us.

Josephine Manali says this, the process of forgiveness involves expressing how you feel, saying, now, I want peace in my heart. Please forgive me. Or I don't want to stay connected to the bad memories of when you did evil to me, or I plan. I don't want to be a prisoner of my pain. Andrew says this, it is set us free, me and him, it has set our families free.

Reconciliation takes courage. For every single person involved. It takes courage for a guilty person to say, I am guilty. It takes courage for a wounded person to say, I forgive you, and it takes courage of two people to move on together, but this is the beauty reconciliation stories. Put the gospel on display.

They say, this is what God has done. This is what he's always been doing, and this is what he can do. For you. One more quote, Desmond Du, for us, who are Christians, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is proof positive that love is stronger than hate, that life is stronger than death. That light is stronger than darkness.

That laughter and joy and compassion, and gentleness and truth, all of these are so much stronger than the ghastly counterparts. Aaron leads us, I'm gonna leave a few questions on the stage and then I'm gonna sing together. Does your heart long for reconciliation? Do you plan for it? Will you pray for strength for it?

Will you do what you can do? Jesus, thank you for the mirror that we see this good gospel. You're very good news. You're not here to condemn us. It's all forgotten, forgiven, washed away. We celebrate that. And we ask that you would give us strength to become reconciling people. Amen.