Faith and values: Look beyond Jesus’ words for the real meaning in the Scriptures

A few Sundays ago, I listened to a lay reader share part of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:43-48, as one of the day’s Scripture passages. I read along silently, but then found myself looking at prior teachings in that chapter, where Jesus reminds his hearers six times that he has something new to teach them.

You may know these phrases: “You have heard that people were told in the past … But now I tell you …” From Matthew 5:21-48, Jesus uses this kind of language to identify six teachings in their Hebrew Scriptures that he now says must change. How subversive that must have sounded to so many.

Please check for yourself those issues Jesus was emboldened to challenge. We struggle with most, if not all, still today, especially the last one, about loving your enemies. But before you check those six out, reflect on Matthew 5:20. It perfectly sets up what he says must change.

“Unless you do far better than the Pharisees in the matters of right living, you won’t know the first thing about entering the kingdom.” Jesus directly challenges those who obey only the words but miss the greater meanings of those words.

When we also look only at the literal words of Scripture, we can too easily miss the greater meanings of those words. In his helpful book “Reading the Bible Again for the First Time,” Marcus Borg used a wonderful Buddhist poetic image, “a finger pointing to the moon.”

This metaphor “helps guard against the mistake of thinking that being a Buddhist means believing in Buddhist teaching – that is, believing in the finger. As the metaphor implies, one is to see (and pay attention to) that to which the finger points.”

For Christians, the Bible becomes the finger pointing to the moon. We are called not to settle simply for the “finger,” but to seek the “moon,” the God-human relationships to which the Bible points.

I’m convinced that was why Jesus pushed his hearers to do more than the Pharisees did. He challenged them to act out those Hebrew teachings in new ways, ways that would more deeply honor the human relationships they identify.

So in one respect, I can honestly say “I don’t believe in the words of the Bible but I certainly seek the God and human connections those words point to.”

When Jesus prefaced his teachings with “You have heard it said … but I say to you …,” he was offering people an alternative way to understand more of who God is, and how God has created us to relate to each other. His students had likely never heard of God’s “will” presented in this way.

Frankly, based on how we normally relate to each other on a daily basis, most of us don’t take this Jesus-way of relationships seriously either. G. K. Chesterton, early 20th century British writer and philosopher, once cleverly observed: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

Jesus embodied a radically new understanding of what God wanted people to know about who they were, and what loving relationships they are capable of having. Jesus still embodies that promise.

But don’t look just at the literal words of Jesus found in the Gospels. If we forget the real meaning is beyond those words and is found in the radical, root-deep way Jesus lived his life, we’re likely stuck on just seeing the “finger” and forgetting to look at the “moon.”

See God beyond the words about God.