The Rev’d Armando Ghinaglia
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany
February 9, 2020
“Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
For a concept that’s so utterly at the heart of all of Scripture, I have to admit that “righteousness” is not a word that crosses my lips all that often. Plenty of other concepts do: love, wisdom, hope, even justice. But righteousness hardly does—and I suspect that’s true for most of us, too—unless we’re talking about someone who’s being self-righteous, or someone who’s showing righteous anger.
The former is pretty universally awful. We don’t mean anything nice when we say someone is self-righteous. They’re smug. They’re condescending. They think they’re right, or morally superior, even when they’re not.
The latter, I imagine, isn’t all bad. Jesus himself evinces righteous anger when people sometimes. As he prepares to heal a man’s hand on the Sabbath, Jesus he asks the religious authorities whether it is lawful or not to heal on the Sabbath. Their silence provokes his anger, and he goes on to heal the man anyway.
On the other hand, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. A person can be self-righteous in others’ eyes, and yet believe himself to be righteously indignant in his own. As someone who’s grappled with this before, I can tell you from my own experience that it’s not always easy to tell when righteous anger is righteous, and when “righteous” anger is really a cloak for self-righteousness. After all, seeing red is usually incompatible with seeing clearly.
I dwell on the word “righteousness” because it’s both utterly central to all our readings today and because it’s often foreign to our day-to-day vocabulary outside the two contexts I just described. And to see the word “righteousness” through that minimal and relatively impoverished lens hardly does justice to the vision of the good life that the Scriptures evoke.
The reason is that the Scriptures in Greek most often use one word—δικαιοσύνη—to talk about what our translations call “righteousness” and “justice.” As a Spanish speaker, this strikes me as a peculiarly Anglophone problem. Like the Greek and even like the Hebrew much of the time, many other languages use the same word to describe both concepts: justice.
That we’ve translated one word in two ways isn’t always a problem, of course. Words take on different meanings in different contexts. And that is true for how we talk about righteousness and justice in English as the two words appear in Scripture. Righteousness generally refers to God, or to some divine standard; justice refers principally to our (often imperfect) relations to our fellow human beings.
But the fact that our biblical translations distinguish between them gives me pause, and it’s not because the translators are wrong as to some arcane matter that makes priests and biblical studies professors to stay up at night.
No, what worries me is this: if we have no other way of talking about righteousness than to talk about self-righteousness or righteous anger, we won’t be able to understand what it means for us to be righteous or to pursue righteousness. We’ll get caught on the horns of holy hypocrisy and incessant indignation. Perhaps even worse, we’ll delude ourselves as Christians into thinking that we can do the impossible: that we can be righteous before God without being just toward our neighbors.
That brings us back to our gospel reading today: “Unless your righteousness”—unless your justice—“exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” In some sense, given the context, it seems like Jesus means something like, unless you do what is right in line with God’s commandments, unless you do it more perfectly than the very ones who say they do it perfectly, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. This leads us to an important question, one that takes on special urgency as we face contentious elections this year: What does it mean for us to be righteous before God?
Jesus’s words in the gospel reading today are fairly similar to his words elsewhere, in the gospel of Luke: “Woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds, and neglect justice and the love of God; it is these you ought to have practiced, without neglecting the others.” For Jesus, loving God is inseparable from justice, because our friendship with God depends on our loving what God loves. And most broadly these are the two commandments to which God calls us in that friendship: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” And “love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus relates the two commandments to one another in this way: “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’” These lines turn on this one word: mercy. “Be merciful,” Jesus says, “just as your Father is merciful.”
And God’s mercies are countless. All that we are and all that we have comes from God. What more can we give the one who made heaven and earth, who made us in all our wonder? And if that’s true just for our very being in the world—“for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life”—how much more true that is for “the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace and for the hope of glory”? On what altar could we ever make a sacrifice that remotely adds anything to God’s goodness or mercy?
No sacrifice would ever be enough but what God asked us to make—and this is the one thing that God desires from us: “continually [to] offer a sacrifice of praise to God,” “the fruit of lips that confess his name,” and “to do good and to share what [we] have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”
In other words, we are called first and foremost to love God—and out of that love for God, we are called to turn away from our selfishness and injustice and instead to imitate God, the God whose mercies never end, by loving our neighbors with that same mercy. This is the justice—the righteousness—to which God beckons us.
None of this is incompatible with Paul’s words that “The one who is righteous will live by faith.” In the scriptural imagination, faith does indeed make it possible for us to be right before God, in large part because it’s faith that allows us to know God and know what God loves, that we might in turn love God and love what God loves. And once we do, the Scriptures are also abundantly clear: “the only thing that counts is faith working through love,” for “faith apart from works is barren” since “a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.”
Our other readings from today should dispel any doubt about this. “The righteous,” we hear in the psalm, “will be kept in everlasting remembrance.” Why? Because they are “generous in lending,” they “manage their affairs with justice,” “they have given freely to the poor.” In sum, they “are merciful and full of compassion.”
And in the book of the prophet Isaiah, we hear God’s call to mercy in righteousness and justice most clearly. “Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.” And what are the sins? That they’ve stopped worshipping God? No, for “day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God.” We fast, they say, and we humble ourselves—and that’s all great as far as it goes—but God makes clear that this isn’t “the fast that I choose,” that it’s not what is “acceptable to the Lord.” Instead:
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
What is righteous before God is inseparable from what is just toward our fellow human beings. And where we face injustice in the world around us, God’s righteousness and justice is inseparable from the mercy that wills the good of the victim as well as the mercy that wills the repentance of the aggressor.
That is the example we are given throughout Scripture. When Jesus sees the man with the withered hand and asks whether it is lawful to cure on the Sabbath, he does not merely look around with anger. He looks at those around him with grief and sorrow as well—grief for the man who has suffered for so long, and sorrow for his companions’ greater care for the precepts of men than the commandments of God. He looks on them with sorrow in part because their silence accepts—it justifies—his continued suffering, and in part because their silence reflects a failure to know love as the one who is Love would be known by us: in mercy, not in sacrifice.
In our own lives, what does it look like to do justice and righteousness in this way? To be merciful and full of compassion? Does it mean giving freely to the poor as we can? Does it mean sharing your bread with the hungry, as the Community Soup Kitchen here does day in and day out? And beyond our relationship with other individuals, what does it mean more broadly in our relationships with others as mediated by the laws and norms we adopt in our life together in this city and in this nation?
As we get closer and closer to Lent, to a season of almsgiving, fasting, and penitence, may we prepare to undertake those practices knowing full well that they point, not to our own righteousness, a righteousness that boasts in our own works, but to the merciful God who has given us all that we have and who asks us, in return, to give to those whom we have wronged as people and as a society our resources, our food, and our true repentance for injustice. That is the sacrifice that is pleasing to God. Then will be fulfilled what is said in the psalms:
Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other. Truth shall spring up from the earth, and righteousness shall look down from heaven.
Amen.