THE SATISFYING PURSUIT OF RIGHTEOUSNESS eer
Matthew 5:1--6
March 17, 1968

Experts in the field of communications tell us that there are certain common words
and phrases which mean absolutely nothing to the average American. Some words are intrin-—
sically vague: some carry with them unfortunate images: some are naturally associated
with certain styles and modes of life that are not, at the moment, fashionable. In
communications —- newspapers, radio and tele vision, particularly in the advertising
aspect of the business, it is imperative to avoid these words and phrases at all costs.

Several years ago the Presbyterian Church committed itself to taking seriously the
vast, and largely untapped, field of mass-media advertising to communicate the message
of Christianity... But to the great chagrin of the Dept. of Radio and Television, pre-
liminary studies revealed that the very people who were to be the targets of this
advertising - the average, unchurched, middle-aged, American suburbanite, simply
"turned-off" mentally as soon as he heard or saw religious broadcasting of any kind.

The key seemed to be the words and phrases, and images which were associated with them.
4nd so our church turned to Stan Freberg, a dedicated churchman, whose genius transformed
an unknown product like Chung King Chow Mein into an extremely successful venture over—
night. Freberg produced a series of spot commercials — and they were heard. People
stopped what they were doing and listened. Not everyone liked what they heard. Not
everyone agreed with what they heard. But the point is that they heard. And the secret
was that the commercials avoided using any of the older traditional words ordinarily
associated with religion.

There are a lot of these words and phrases —- salvation, reconciliation, redemption,
holy. High on the list are two which appear in our text for this morning - "Blessed"
and "Righteousness", two words which are workhorses in the religious vocabulary. Be-
sides that, they are part of the fourth Beatitude ~— and the Beatitudes, if anything,
suffer from over—exposure. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they shall be satisfied". Communications people would say that not only do we
fail to understand that, essentially we don't even hear it. It means nothing. But
how about this: " Deliriously happy are those men and women whose greatest desire is
to see right prevail. They will be satisfied."

Now lest you charge me with Biblical irresponsibility, let me admit that this is
a combination of the approximate way the fourth Beatitude reads in the Tiew English
Bible and Today's English Version. It is, I believe, what Jesus said to those people
, 2,000 years ago.

The word translated "blessed" actually indicates a state of joy and happiness.

I don'+ think that's what blessed means to us at all. For the first century Jewish
peasant, “hunger" and "thirst" represented very real and very immediate concerns.
They mew the feeling of a swollen tongue and an empty stomach. To hunger and thirst
was soiething urgent. It was not an idea but a feeling, a craving that had to be
satisfied. In short - it was "greatest desire".

Prior to acking what the Beatitude means, we need to hear what it says. "Happy are
those whose greatest desire is to see right prevail. They will be satisfied."

The concept of righteousness, or "the right" is a little more complex. In the j
Bible it is a troublesome idea. From the very beginning of their story the Israelites .
misunderstood it. God, in. the theology of Judaism, was righteous, but that divine
righteousness was not just an idea about which philosophérs and men of religion talked..
It was something which the Israelite nation had experienced. That is, God was righteous
in relation to his people. His righteousness had to do with the way he dealt. with them.
Likewise, human righteousness, in Judaic thought, has to do with relationships. A
man ig righteous by "doing right" to his neighbor, his family, his people and his God.
The accent is positive, not negative: righteousness issomething people do: it is a
communal, social concept, not personal and individual.

This theology was the very cornerstone of Judaism. God was righteous in his t
dealings with his people. They, in turn, were to be righteous in their dealings with a?
each other. There was an agreement between God and his people called a Covenant, a a
contract of mutual righteousness. -

dnd yet, over and over again, the Jews turned righteousness into something
else. In fact the entire Old Testament, in one sense, is the story of God's people
continually forgetting that righteousness is social. The Jews of old made it personal,
individualistic. They obeyed the relisious law fiendishly. They kept every rule,
every regulation; they fulfilled every ritual; they made every required sacrifice; they
defined righteousness in purely personal terms, forgetting altogether that the word
had to do with how they related to each other. Sometimes they were worse than others.
TM the days of Amos, the prophet, for instance, law keeping and the legalistic approach
to goodness were very popular. But people were going hungry: poor men were being
exploited by the rich. And so the prophet thundered, speaking for God, “I hate, I
despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Tven though you
offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them..... But
let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever—flowing stream."

Uamo 5:21-24 )

Righteousness had a whole lot more to do with the way the poor people were being
treated than the fact that the law was kept and the rituals performed.

Of course, the matter didn't end there. I+ didn't end in the Old Testament. In
the New Testament we read about the Scribes and Pharisees who fell into this same
error — defining righteousness in terms of their personal legal fidelity. They were
good men - we don't ever want to forget that. They were respectable, law abiding
citizons. They harmed no one intentionally: they fanatically avoided evil. But they
were terribly offended by Jesus Christ. Why? Because he insisted on returning to the
' old definition of righteousness as the right relation between a man and his neighbor.
He told a story about a Samaritan whe saved the life of his legal enemy, and the
legalistic Jews came out looking very bad. One time he healed a man on the Sabbath,
even though the law prohibited it. He was concerned about people: they were concerned
about the law. And that got him into serious trouble.

The problei persisted in the early Christian Church. Everywhere Poul the Apostle
went he was followed by a group of legalistic Christians who insisted that the true
Christian must obey fully the Old Testament Law. That is, righteousness was the
personal possessicn and accomplishment of the man who obeyed all the rules, regardless
of his attitude and behavior in relationship with others. It is a problem that runs
through all the Pauline Mpistles, and in one merorable passage Paul sums it up. If
these over-zealous Christieis want to talk about righteousness in terms of the law,
Paul can play that game, too. “If any other man thinks he has reason for confidence,
IT have more’, and then he ticks off his qualifications: "Circumcised on the eighth
day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of licbrews: as
to the law a Pharisee.... as to righteousness under the law blameless‘. That is to
say, Peul had all the qualifications to be considered a righteous man, within the
going, individualistic definition of righteousness. And, ultimately, what did it
all amount to? ‘I count them as refuse," he said, but-a more accurate translation
is "garbage". (Phili-vinens 3:2~11)

So much for the Biblical concept of righteousness. Men never seemed to be able
to understend that righteousness dees not exist in a vacuum — but only in the realm of
interpersonal relationships. And the truth is that we are still having trouble at
this point. Traditionally, evangelical Protestantism has defined righteousness as a
goal to be achieved by conforming to a negative moral standard: a list of “don'ts" that
is an up-to-date replica of Old Testament legalism and New Testament Pharisaism.
"Don't do this: don't do that: avoid all these evil things and the result will be
righteousness." Now, we need to understand that this approach to life is not bad;
in fact, there is a lot of good in it. The point is that it is not the same thing at
all as the Biblical concept of righteousness. As a matter of fact, one of the by—
products of this negative morality is a process of withdrawal from the world, and
the arena of personal relationships in which righteousness becomes operative. Barriers
are built automatically between men on the basis of righteousness. For instance, I
was taught as a child, in theSunday School of another denomination, that the only sure

way to remain untainted by the obvious evil of sin was to stay away from naughty
childron. In very vivid terms I was told that the best way to cope with 2 friend —
who says nasty words, or sneaks a smoke in the alley, was to cross him off my lis
of friends - as if that alone - that avoidance of contact — would somehow automa:
result in. righteousness. : ae
In his excellent book, Shentung Compound, Langdon Gilkey comments on the way thi
fatal error in evangelical Protestantism works out in the world. The book, to wh
have referred before, retells the author's World ilar II ‘experience in a Japanese
interment camp. Among the 2,000 prisoners were communities of Roman Catholic pries
monks and nuns, and Fundamentalist Protestant Missionaries. Gilkey points cut that —
the fathers quickly endeared themselves to everyone in the camp: "They communica: ee
to others not how holy they were but their inexhaustable acceptance and warmth toward
the more worldly and wayword..... Consequently, no one felt uncomfortable with hem,
or sensed that sharpest of all hostilities - that nonacceptance which springs from petit
moral disapproval... -

“How mach less creative.... and how far from the Gospels - is the frequent Protes—
tant reaction of moral disapproval and physical withdrawal... Not wmlike the Pharisees
in the lew Testament (the Protestant missi mnasi a ip to their own flock of saved
souls, ovidently because they feared to be contatimated in some way by this sinful
world which they inwardly abhorred. (Page 172) sy

That is, I believe, a very profound observation of what, too frequently, hag =
become the typical Christian approach to the world ~ and the accepted definition of
rightcousness. We need some very basic honesty at this point. We need to acknow=
ledge that righteousness means only to what is right in relationship with other cecias
people. We need to acknowledge that we are judged not by what wo refrain from doing, —
but on the basis of what we have done in relationships. Righteousness docs not exist
in o vacuum. +

Thet, of course, has come rather radical implications which we well night heed. —
Tae excellent television documentary "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich® brought) = 7g
home once again that the Germans were. good, respectable, law-abiding people; people eS,
who wore "rishteous", if all we mean by that term is personal involvement with evils 79
The judgment of history, however, is that they were guilty by default of participation —
in ‘the horrors of Nazism. 3

So ~ for us -- the fact that we have never personally exploited 2 poor man nor ;
personally attended a Kn Klux Klan rally doesn't count for anything. That doesn't =
make us righ. cs. The question that comes thundering out of the pages of the Bible
is not “lKhat have you refrained from doing?" but "What have you done?‘ : :

in the fourth Peatitude, Jesus defined the pursuit of rightcousness ~ doing what x
is right - as an exciting aud happy venture. I'd like merely to say thot to you. «| ~
Volumes of words have been written and spoken about the false and shallow pursuits of
our culture. . Money, sex, success, pleasure. We know these are ghallow goals: we S
know, intellectually, that it is a betrayal of our manhood to fall dow before the 2m
altar of a men-made God. We know this intellectually - but we need to bCar, again and
again, that the caly really important thing about our lives = in the long run -is (§
what we have ccniribused, what good we have done ar-ng men. Take

Hany men have written movingly about this: none more so than Graham Greene in his
excellent novel The Power_and the Glory. The hero of that book is a scedy, alcoholic
clergyman who afier months as a fugiicve from the Mexican govern © is caught and
condennd to be shot. On the evening before his execution he sits in his cell, with a
bottle of brandy, recalling the dingy failure of his life. "Tears poured down his
face. He was not afraid of damiation — even the fear of pain was in the background.
He folt only an immonse disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed,
with nothing done at all. I+ seemed to him at that moment that it would have been
quite casy to heve been a saint... He felt like gomeone who has missed happiness by —
Seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the end there was only one thir
thet counted ~ to be a saint,” . sa Ay

‘eee are those
- and at for a ele 2 “That's all that really matters. : rs
yet there is one more word - the most important one of all - “they will be ra
ad." In the eo of things as they are, that is a rather remarkable prediction,
even naive. The right does not appedr to be winning the day: if good is more
than evil it is not very obvious. The blunt reality of the world appears
riradict this with the reverse prediction - that the pursuit of ri-tcousness will
trating —- not satisfying. Particularly it is a remarkable prediction from
Man whose own personal pursuit of rightcousness among men ended in such a dismal

2. They crucified him: the result of his effort Was execution 2s a public
menace. At the time, the cross of Jesus Christ, seemed to make all this talk about
Vanes OS ete being satisfied sheer lunacy.
that is exactly what it would have been, except for the fact that the cross - —
the defeat - is not the final word. The final word is an open tomb — the victory of
Theil over death: the resurrection of Jesus Christ: the historical bade basco

2 1 story - aes the right will prevail.

oa eng is what he meant when, to a crowd of people, early in his ministry, he said
caage: words:

eo ose are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be |
“That ei the best news men have ever heard. Amen.

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