ETHICS FOR MODERN CHRISTIANS OCTOBER 22, 1972

PART II - THE NEW MORALITY BETHANY PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
MATTHEW 5:17-22 LAFAYETTE, INDIANA
ISAIAH 1:12-17 JOHN M. BUCHANAN

Of all the things Jesus said, none is any more perplexing than this: "I have not come
to abolish the law - he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom
of heaven". And then, immediately, "Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes
and pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven".

Try to imagine the setting. Jesus was teaching his disciples: in the classical pos-
ture of rabbi and student, he was sitting and they were standing around him. Around the
periphery of their little circle, however, probably stood some other men; men who had
become rather intensely interested in what he was saying, particulary in the area of law
and righteousness and goodness. The scribes were there: these were the men responsible for
copying the law, teaching it, and interpreting its 613 separate statutes to the faithful.
The Pharisees were there: these were the men who had made a profession out of obeying the
law. Whatever it prescribed they did. Now, sometimes we're inclined to be a little
rough with the Pharisees. Their name has become synonymous with pompous, arrogant self-
righteousness. But I think we need to remember that in fact, the Pharisees were altogether
admirable men. They were generous in their charity: they bore responsibility for the
common life of the people: they were respectable pillars of society. They did not know-
ingly do anything forbidden by the law. Their interest in Jesus, therefore, was more
than academic: they had a personal stake in anything anybody said about the law.

And so when he said that he nad come not ie abolish the law they would have heaved
a sigh of relief: because they had heard, frankly,. that he was a rabble rouser: that he
was urging people to ignore the sacred law of Judaism. And when he went on to say that
the man who keeps the commandments and teaches them would be great in the kingdom of
heaven, the began to feel pretty good. This fellow wasn't so bad after all.

But then, without warning - or even a transitional sentence to soften the impact -
he said, "Unless your righte6éus exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you aren't
even going to get in the kingdom of heaven".

Now, obviously, that was very offensive to them. But beyond that it was perplexing:

it was logically inconsistant. How could he say all those supportive things about the

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Taw, and then turn right around and infer that real righteousness has very little to do
with the law? Well, he did say it: and what he was doing was shifting the definition of
righteousness, morality or goodness away from the law and depositing it somewhere else.
He was not, please notice, suggesting that the law had no validity: he was net suggesting
that it ought to be discarded. Quite ta the contrary, he was saying that the Taw is a
good thing - a necessary thing - but it is simply no longer the way to define goodness.

That issue did not originate with Jesus. In the history of Israel, time and time
again the people obey the law but fail te obey God. The praphets were the men who saw
it happening and had the courage to bring it to the attention of the people: Amos, Micah,
Jeremiah, Isaiah: "Cease to io evil" ~ that's the Taw: "learn to do good, seek justice,
correct oppression: defend the fatherless, plead for the widow": that's the will of God
that extends beyond the letter of the law. That's the "more than” to which Jesus was
referring.

And ~ it 7s still very much the issue as we think about ethics for modern Christians.
For our situation is really quite like that of the Pharisees. In our culture goodness, or
morality, is still being defined in the negative terms of the law. For us it is not the
Law of Moses, of course. It is the whole body of rules and regulations by which this
culture has attempted to define what is good and what is bad. Christian ethics, more
often than not, simply sound like good citizenship: don't kil1, steal, cheat or lie. Now,
I am not suggesting that the law is irrelevant or unimportant: I am saying that obeying
the law is not what constitutes a Christian ethic. It wasn't in Jesus day in regard to
the Pharisees: and ft isn't today. |

The whole issue was elevated to a level of national controversy in the Tast decade in
the form of "The New Morality" or "Situation Ethics". Men like Bishop Robison who wrote

Honest to God, the late Bishop James Pike and Professar Joseph Fletcher whose book

Situation Ethics became a best seller, stirred up the pot and got the centroversy going

and sold a lot of books. The basic thrust of their argument was simply to move the emphasis
in Christian Ethics from the negative to the positive. But nebody seemed to hear that part:
what sold books and made the proponents of the “New Morality popular speakers on the

lecture circuit wore the illustrations they used and their statements that no Taw is

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ultimate: that a Christian has to decide what to do for himself in every different situa-
tion. That sounded pretty shaky to a lot of folks, particularly those with a rather
strong sense of man's sinful nature. It sounded, frankly, like a rationale for doing
what you want to do; and the deep seated Calvinism in us concluded that if that's all there
is to making moral decisions things aren't going to turn out well very mucn of the time.

1 happen to think that the "New Morality" is not really very new. I think that any
responsible moral decision is always situational. I think that laws are situational: that
is tomy, it is illegal to kil? another man - sometimes, depending on the circumstances.
But more to the point, let's look for a minute at what the “New Morality" was trying to
say.

In nis book, Fletcher summarizes the basic idea, "Only one thing is intrinsically
good, namely, Jove: nothing else. The ultimate norm of Christian decisions is love:
nothing else." What that means is that there are situations in which a sensitive man may :

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given set of circumstances may not be at all that simple. I cited the example of the 4

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Frontier woman who had to decide between smothering her own baby, or allowing the baby's

find himself torn between what traditionally he regards as right behavior, but what in a
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crying to expose her entire family to massacre. Another dramatic tilustration had to do
with a German woman, captured by the Russianswho allowed herself to be impregnated by a
prison camp guard because that was the only way she could get back to Germany and her
husband and children. The decision to drop the Atomic Bomb was situational: based on the
assumption that evil as it was, it was better than the alternatives.

Fletcher, et.al., have been criticized because their illustrations are so “abnorma}".
Lawrence of Arabia is cited, for instance. Two of his Arab lieutenants got into a feud
and one killed the other. Lawrence knew that a blood bath would be the result with the
victim's family warring with the murderer's family for a generation. And so he simply
shot the murderer and solved tha problem.

Now, you and I aren't likely to be in that situation, nor in the situation of the
German woman: nor da I have plans to be in on the decision to push the nuclear button.
Ethical decisions come at us a little less dramatically, and so I think it's probably

irrelevant to spend a lot of time talking about those incidents proposed by the authors

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to prove their point.

What is important, however, is to understand and sea the rightness of the basic
argument: that the law - whatever it is for us - is not the sole arbiter of moral behavior:
that any kind of meaningful ethic for Christians taday is going to take us outside the safe
perimeters of the Taw.

Therein lies the problem. The flow Morality ~ and the ethical teaching of Jesus
assumes that people can be and want to be free: free to come to théir own conclusions,

But people don't always want to be free. There is a very famous passage from Dostoyevsky's

great novel The Brothers Karamazoy in which Jesus has returned to earth and is arrested.

In the dark of night the Grand Inquisitor visits him to explain that people want security,
not freedom. If you really love peaple, Ae argues, you want to make them happy, not free.
People want law, not responsibility...Christ, he says, must not start again all that old
business about freedom and grace and commitment and responsibility. Let things be: let
the church with its laws handle them. Will Jesus please go away (Barclay: Christian

Ethics in a Permissive Society. P.80)

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themselves to us there is a certain anxicty and insecurity. Legalism looks pretty good,

Given the new complexity of our culture and the kinds of issues that are presenting

It would be comforting to rely on the law to tel] what is right and wrong.

But there are dangers in legatism: and here,I believe, the New Morality has served
well in keeping us alert. Mark Twain once refcrred to a man as “good, in the very worst
sense of the word." And Donald Mathers has suggested that "the flinatical love of virture
has done more damage to men and society than all the vices put together because it tends
to discredit virture itself. "An example of that might be the way our nation's method
of combatting drug addition has turned the traffic in narcotics into the life bleod of the
underworld.

William Barclay cites Ogden Nash's play The Rainmaker. "The Rainmaker makes Tove

to a spinster gir] in a barn at midnight. He does not really love her, but he is deter-
mined to save her from becoming spinsterized: he wants to give her back her womanhood,
and to rekindle her hopes of marriage and children. Her morally outraged brother

threatens to shoot him. Her father, a wise old rancher, says to his son: ‘Noah, you're

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so full of what's right that you can't see what's good! "(P,73)
Sometimes ,I would suggest, the good and the right are in conflict: and in those
situations a Christian must decide for himself - and not be a slave to Tegalism.
The real danger of legalism, howaver, ~ the disturbing aspect of religion that
offers a set of rules as a Christian Ethic - is that it allows us very comfortably to
ignore the “more than" of Jesus. It allows us - and this was the Pharsaical stance -

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to feel rightcous because we have avoided doing things that are bad. And that's just Me
not an adequate ~ nor honest ~ ethic for people who are trying to follow Jesus Christ.

In fairness it ought to be said that the New Morality - the situational rather than
the legal approach to ethical decision making - has probably been abused and exploited
and used as a rationale for casting the traditional standards to the wind and doing whats fy
ever one wants to do. But only because people have not heard what the situationists are AA
saying about love as the ultimate moral arbiter. I regard it as simply foolish to attribute
the collapse of morality - if, in fact, it is collapsing, tothe New Morality. If pre-
marital sex is on the increase, I would suggedt that it's not because the church has said
it's OK, but because young people have cars, mature earlier and marry later,and come of

age in a culture so neurotically obsessed with sex that talking about it, reading about
LBA Yh see tee ee det

it and watching it have become a national past time. cesta We

Etnics for Modern Christians? The New Morality? The New Morality is-'t new. And
ne matter how hardwe squeeze it the New Testament will not cough up a code or set of rules
for every situation. It just isn't there. pick He

what is there is a model: an example - and the "more than" of Jesus. "Your righteous-
ness", he totd them, “must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees." It must be more
than refraining from those activities the law defines as evil. It is a positive ethic -
not negative and his own life and teaching serve as the model for what it might look like
if we aver bogan to take it seriously.

“Love your neighbor as yourself - that's the whole law in a nutshell" he told them
once. "A man was going down to Jericho and he fell among robbers" he told them once, and

in that story the men who stayed within the perimeters of Tegal morality walked on by. The

good man was a samaritan who stopped,took the coat off his back, bound up the bloody

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wounds and carried the victim to safety. “Feed my sheep" he told them, "heal the sick,
hetp the blind to see, and sec free people who are captives."

The word for it is love: not romantic love - not filial love: but hard-nosed good will

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me toward all men: love that rolls its sleeves up to help: love that is at once tough and
| gentle: love that is cpen to ciers - that shares the personhood of another.

That, I would suggest has implications right here - particularly here ~ in the
fellowship of the Church. ticre, cf all places, when one of us hurts, we all must Tearn
to hurt. Here, of all places, joy ought te be shared and pain passed around. When one of
us suffers the loss of someone dear, I count it one of the most rudimentary of Christian
responsibilitics for the people of the Church ta close ranks and help bear that burden of
sorrow.

Tt has ether implications as well ~ for instance, in the way we spend our money, in
the causes we support and the candidates wo help te elect.

Tne word for it is love: and the model is the one who loved and gave until it cost
him his life.

An ethic fur modern Christians begins with the law - the law as the distilled
essence of our culture's wisdom. But it ceases te be Christian if it stops there. Rather,
it considers next the situation: and then finally, and most important of all, it asks,
"what does love demand of me".

That is the "More than" of Jesus. That is anything but moral laxity. It is, rather,

tne most cifficult and demanding ethic you and I have ever tried. I invite you to it. AMEN

Father, help us to sort out the goud when we make cur decisions. Then give us the courage

to do it. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. AMEN