This is the last week in which we read from the Sermon on the Mount. Lent starts Wednesday, followed by the specific readings for Lenten Sundays. Today’s reading wraps up Matthew, Chapter 5, discussing the lex talionis (“an eye for an eye”) and love of enemies. 

I call it “injustice, justice and charity,” because people often have confused ideas about all those things and never really straighten them out in non-contradictory sorts of ways. There is a measure of justice in the lex talionis in that its adoption curtailed far more retaliatory blood feuds. In some instances, outdoing a harassing litigant by giving him even more of what he’s not entitled to is injustice. But let’s look at verses 38-48 in their context within the Sermon on the Mount.

Remember that we have been emphasizing that the Sermon on the Mount seeks to elevate the level of our morality, so that we do the right thing and we do it out of the right motives. We seek to do good because we love good, not just because we think we will gain God’s approval or dare think we can then have a claim on God. Jesus continues that line of thought in today’s Gospel.

As noted above, the Old Testament (Leviticus 24:19-21) lex talionis — the law of retaliation — actually represented Israel’s moral progress vis-à-vis its neighbors by establishing reciprocal justice for injuries: an eye for an eye, not 10 eyes for an eye; a tooth for a tooth rather than half a denture for a tooth. Against the backdrop of its neighbors, Israel’s limits on retaliation moved away from revenge toward justice. 

But Jesus is not interested merely in strict justice. He seeks to move his listener to charity, to putting himself in his debtor’s place because we all have our trespasses behind our ears. That is why he exhorts his listener not just to settle for a one-on-one correspondence but to consider non-resistance toward evil. 

Jesus’ advice here is not “one size fits all.” It also presupposes another virtue: the cardinal virtue of prudence. Prudence is not being noncommittal or cagey. Prudence is choosing the best means under concrete circumstances to promote the good. And while “thou shalt not” tells me what not to do, it doesn’t tell me what to do right now.

Maybe the best way to get to point A is the short highway there. Or maybe, at 4 o’clock, that short highway is clogged up with traffic and taking the back roads, while adding miles, helps me get to where I want to go. The path to evil that is barred may be one, but there are usually many paths to the good.

Sometimes nonresistance is the prudent thing to do. Sometimes standing up to bullying best advances the good. That requires an assessment of circumstances that involves the virtue of prudence — both natural (acquired by my habit of making good, prudent choices) and supernatural (infused by God’s grace).

What Jesus wants is for us to consider these broader choices to do good out of love rather than our usually cramped notions of “justice.” He warns against only “loving those who love you.” How often does our charity deteriorate into a “balancing of accounts,” e.g., “They gave Johnny X so we should give them Y,” or, “We’re overdue to have XYZ over.” The Sermon on the Mount wants us to expand our horizons beyond those narrow, cramped and often self-interested perspectives to one that, out of love, embraces all people. 

Nowhere in the Old Testament does it say, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But tendencies to think of “us” versus “them” — especially when one thinks of one’s self in a special relationship with God — tends to divide people.

It’s not that one might not have a special relationship with God. Israel was certainly God’s Chosen People, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t love others — even nasty Ninevites — an idea that just blew the prophet Jonah’s mind! Without undermining our awareness of the difference between good and evil, love should open our eyes to bringing all within the ambit of our love.

The Gospel concludes with the goal: “Be perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect.” The Gospel is telling us nothing different than the Old Testament does when it reminds us, “Be holy as I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44-45; 20:26; 21:8). We will never attain God’s infinite holiness, but we can always be holier, better, more loving than we are. No one who aspires to be loving, good and holy can ever say, “I am loving, good and holy enough.” If I stop going forward, I will go backward. That’s what God is warning us against and why he is calling us to aspire to perfection — not out of obsession or compulsion, but out of true goodness.

Becoming more loving, good and holy are all excellent Lenten goals.

Completing our view of the Sermon on the Mount in art, we see it illustrated today in a stained glass window in Boston’s Arlington Street Church, adjacent to Boston Common, by the American artist Louis Tiffany (1848-1933). The Church actually has a series of Tiffany windows, at least six of which (in addition to this one) focus on the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. They were installed from 1899-1929.

Tiffany’s name is synonymous in America with glass, especially stained glass and lamps. Educated in Pennsylvania and New Jersey (in my hometown, Perth Amboy, under the American painter George Inness) and New York, he first turned to painting before finding his métier in glass. Commissioned to do the interior decoration of Mark Twain’s house in Hartford and the White House gave Tiffany’s superb skills a national platform. 

The artist studied classical European medieval stained glassmaking. He also used classical methods of glass making while incorporating modern (i.e., 19th and early 20th century) possibilities created by subsequent technologies.

As the Arlington Church brochure linked above notes, Tiffany built on what he received in traditional stained glass making, including techniques like “confetti glass” (very thin pieces of shattered colored glass layered into the larger window to provide small details, like leaves on the foliage or in the window borders), multiple layering of glass to play with the light the window receives, and a more subdued pastel color palette to replace the strong primary colors that marked medieval stained glass.

Tiffany, the erstwhile painter, considered that he “painted in glass” and incorporated two prominent styles in American art of the late 19th/early 20th centuries: the art nouveau and aesthetic.

Tiffany was no doubt a consummate master of his art. No discussion of stained glass can ignore him. And bringing modern schools of art, like art nouveau, into religious art represented progress. That said, I will take issue with the “theology” of the art.

Let me admit my bias: I believe sacred art should “speak” for itself, primarily through Christian iconography. Art is visual, not literate: what you see should be what is communicated, especially in sacred art. Christian iconography has provided a “language” by which sacred art speaks, including by identifying the figure and his virtues through attributes. Put bluntly: A piece of art, including stained glass, that has to be labeled “St. Athanasius” is not doing its job. 

This window is not labeled, except by a sticker on the window sill. So ask yourself: If I didn’t tell you it’s “the Sermon on the Mount,” would the window itself have told you that? Jesus’ “mount” is hardly a gopher’s mound or over-rooted tree. Why would you think this is a “sermon?” Nobody else is visible. One could say the audience is in front of Jesus and invisible to the viewer, whose focus is (in a sense rightly) on Jesus. His hand gestures are typical of spoken gesticulation. But they are also not atypical of a pose depicting the Sacred Heart (which, obviously, I would not expect in a Unitarian church, but a Catholic looking at the window might imagine that image first). Jesus’ mouth does not appear to be moving, and his bowed head looks more meditative than communicative. Is he preaching a sermon or quietly walking and communing with his Father? Obviously, from the context of the other windows, the “Sermon on the Mount” focus becomes apparent, but not from the individual work itself. 

I suspect the Sermon on the Mount was chosen as the theme for these windows because it tallies well with Unitarian Universalist theology: Jesus not as divine but as Semitic Socrates, preaching an elevated and inspirational morality. Look carefully, consciously being aware of your Christian eyes that are looking: is there anything about this robed man standing under a tree that is necessarily divine? Could the same scene be recast as Buddha under the Bodhi Tree? 

The aesthetic movement in art prized “art for art’s sake,” i.e., visual beauty, without necessarily any didactic or moralizing purpose. Beauty is indeed critical to art: the Swiss stained glass master Alexandre Cingria notes that ugliness, especially in sacred art, is the work of the devil. But can beauty alone fully carry the unique Christian message?