A Matter of Perspective

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The perennial question is: Is the glass half full or half empty? I recently saw a cartoon with four panels. The first two showed the same glass with the same amount of water. The first said, “the glass is half full”, and the second, “the glass is half empty”. In the third panel, the same water was filling a half-size glass, and the caption said, “the glass has been downsized”. The fourth panel showed a puddle on the table and the caption said, “the glass made a lateral move”. Is the glass half empty or half full? Of course, the answer itself is irrelevant, but the question serves to identify one's perspective. The optimist sees the glass as half full, that there is more to come. The pessimist sees the glass as half empty, that half the water has already been drunk, and what's gone is gone. The Buddhist might just say, “The glass is.” The post-modernist might say, “The glass has as much water as you think it does.” The Hindu might even say, “The glass is an illusion.” To a certain extent, it is all a matter of perspective.

Today's Gospel lesson speaks to us about our perspective on our actions and on other people, and, of course, ultimately about our perspective with respect to God. Jesus, in the midst of the Sermon on the Mount takes up a variety of topics related to the Law of Moses, and expounds them to give a true sense, rather than the obnoxious fencing the interpretations of the Jewish teachers had erected around the Law of God. But the Lord speaks to His people and gives them a choice, as He did in the reading from Deuteronomy. The Lord says, “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil.” Having called the children of Israel out of the Egypt, having brought them through the Red Sea on dry land, having brought them through the desert to the Promised Land, having established the covenant and having made them His people, the Lord offers to them the option to choose life or to choose death.

At first glance, this seems like a simple choice – choose life. After all, who would choose to die for evil things? No one dies voluntarily for what he knows and believes is evil. But here is a matter of perspective. What the heart of man sees as good, God sees as evil. Since the fall of Adam and Eve, no man is capable of choosing life and good by himself. The choice of our forebears made our choice for us. Death has been chosen for us, and we cannot by our own reason or strength un-choose death. The inclination of our hearts is evil from beginning to end, and we are so blinded by sin that we do not even realize that what seems good in our eyes is the most heinous evil in the eyes of the One who creates and sustains us. Far from opening our eyes and enriching our sight, that fateful bite of the fruit blinded us from ever seeing the good and wise things of God. So what good is it for God to offer us the choice, if we can't choose anyhow?

The choice is offered to us because there is one who has chosen death for the evil. Jesus, the only perfect, sinless man, chose to become sin for us, so that He might choose to die the death owed to us. Jesus made the choice that Adam failed to choose, and so gives us the option to choose. By His death upon the cross, Jesus opened to us the way of everlasting life. By the shedding of His blood, Jesus removed the sentence of death from over us. By His rising again on the third day, Jesus brought life and immortality to light. Through all this, Jesus has restored to us the power to choose life and good, to choose the blessings of life with God. And this choice has been given us by the Holy Spirit working in our hearts through the Holy Word and the Blessed Sacraments. As the waters of Holy Baptism were poured over you, the Holy Spirit was working in your heart, choosing you to be a child of God, sundering you from the number of the unbelieving, and marking you as one redeemed by Christ the Crucified. It is not so much that you have a choice, but that God your heavenly Father has chosen for you, chosen to give you the forgiveness, life, and salvation won for you by Jesus. The Holy Spirit has given you what you could not choose – faith in Christ. By His work, you have come to faith, so that you continue to choose life and good, blessing and the forgiveness of sins. By the grace of God, you continue to choose what is good and spurn what is evil.

God has chosen to give you all these gifts, and so much more. He has chosen to give you your eyes, ears, and all your members, your reason and all your senses. He has chosen to give you all that you need to support this body and life. He has even given His only Son to die for you. And He daily and richly sustains you out of His fatherly, divine goodness and mercy.

But there are bounds on what God has given you. God may give you food, but He does not give you license for gluttony. God may give you drink, but He does not give you over to drunkenness. God may give you a wife, but He does not give you a husband or several wives or someone else's wife. God may give you a heart kindled to righteous indignation, but He does not allow you to hate your brother. Your heavenly Father gives you just exactly what He sees that you need, but He does not give you what your brother needs, nor does He give to you to take from your brother what he needs and you do not. All this our Lord condemns as what it is – idolatry of the heart. When you fear, love, and trust in God above all things, it naturally follows that you will not be angry with your brother. You will not scheme to get his goods, fame, child, or wife. You will not seek to put away your wife from you, nor look with longing at one who is not yours to desire. To trust in God is to allow Him to be God.

There is also another dimension to Jesus' teaching we have heard today. Just as God has chosen you to be His beloved son and has given you all His good gifts, so also has he chosen your brother and your neighbor and your spouse. Each and every person in this world is a precious child of God, created by our heavenly Father for a specific purpose in a specific realm. Regardless of his faith, your brother is beloved of God. However, besides the general love of God for His creation, your brother in the faith is beloved by God on account of the Spirit of Christ that dwells within him. As the Scriptures declare, each believer is a little Christ, carrying about in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested through him. And so, since you see your brother as the image of Christ in the flesh, you will be rather so disinclined to hate him, to steal his wife or his goods, or to hold a grudge against him.

Since you see your spouse as a little Christ to you, a mask of God given to you for the purposes of God, you will be much less inclined to look with lust upon those whom God has not given you. Seeing her as a child of Christ, you will seek to act as Christ to her, giving your all in service to her out of love. Seeing him as a picture of Christ given to you as a blessing from God, you will give yourself to him as the Church gives herself to her Bridegroom.

From this perspective, the sins which Jesus condemns seem much less appealing. When we see things through the lens of Jesus and His blood shed for us, we want to choose the good and shun the evil, we want to bless and not curse, we want what God has given us and nothing else. When we see things from this perspective, we are wont to sing with the Psalmist:

I will praise you with an upright heart,

when I learn your righteous rules.

I will keep your statutes;

do not utterly forsake me!

In the Name of Jesus. Amen.