I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Matthew 5-6

Today’s passage forms the centerpiece of my understanding of what it means to follow Christ.  I want to start with, in my opinion, the central point that Jesus makes about what it means to worship, obey, and seek God: if you look for loopholes in God’s commands, you have missed the point of those commands.  What He says about anger and lust show us this.  If you allow yourself to get angry enough at someone that you want to kill them, you have allowed anger to override love and broken God’s commands just as badly as if you had actually murdered them.  If you look at someone and think about how much you would like to have sex with them you are guilty of sexual immorality.  Part and parcel with not seeking to take advantage of perceived loopholes in God’s commands is Jesus instruction to love others, even those we perceive as our enemies.  If we truly love others we will seek what is best for them.

I had a Bible professor in college who liked to talk about the paradoxes of Christianity.  Things where we answer a question by saying “yes, but no.”  We actually have an example of what he was talking about in this passage.  Jesus says that we should be like a lamp and put out righteousness up on a stand so that our light can shine for all to see.  Then, a little further down, He tells us not to perform our acts of righteousness for others to see.  This sounds like a contradiction, and it is a sort of paradox.  Jesus tells us that we should not try to hide our faith in Him, nor the fact that we seek to live righteous lives.  He also tells us that we should not do good things to get praise from others.  In a way, He says that we should be publicly righteous when it will cost us and keep others from seeing our acts of righteousness when it would benefit us to be seen doing good. I am slightly exaggerating.  It really comes down to the idea that you should do good things because they are good things and not because it may benefit you.