I was recently rereading C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity to prepare a few lessons for a Sunday Morning community when I came across this wonderful statement: “The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing, and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power and hatred.” As I read those words, my heart and mind started to sort through the previous day and week, trying to categorize those “spiritual sins” from the “fleshly sins” in my life. As I did so, my mind shifted to the words from Matthew’s Gospel in our passage today.
During the time in which Jesus lived, the majority of the religious Hebrew community focused their understanding of “good behavior” on the idea of following the Law of Moses, the six hundred and thirteen different rules contained within the words of the first five books of the Bible. These mitzvahs encompass the Ten Commandments, as well as a great deal of other information about the proper way to live, including such ideas as not making clothing out of two different fibers, the kosher dietary laws, and rules about ceremonial cleanliness. The challenge for a devout follower of Judaism was, and still is, that many of these six hundred and thirteen commandments focus not on the heart of the person but on actions alone.
If I choose to eat a bacon cheeseburger, then I violate at least two of these mitzvahs, laws that focus purely on my physical self while ignoring the state of my heart and soul. Jesus calls us, instead, for our walk of faith to focus on how our hearts might grow ever more like His heart. Jesus knows that it is within our thoughts and feelings that sin truly occurs and not in what we might eat or drink. When we are able to think about our lives (and our sins, too) through the lens of our intentions rather than our actions, we are able to make more room for God’s grace in our lives.