(Matthew 5:21-30)

There are many different types and levels of violence. There is a physical violence, verbal violence and the violence we do to ourselves. On one occasion, when a youth worker in Bermondsey, I had a wrench swung at my head. This violence is aggressive loud and nasty where one person is wanting only to hurt another. Youssef, the husband of one of our occasional members was beaten up in Shepherds Bush - his only crime is that of being a Muslim in an atmosphere of increased hysteria and mistrust.

There is violence that lies in verbal aggression. On Wednesday I was working in my regular café and there was a full blown argument between people over who should give way on the pavement. On the one side were three women with a large baby buggy. On the other side was a man on his own. They were taking up the whole of the pavement and forcing people to walk past them in the road. He reckoned that they should make some space. They were incandescent and felt that he had no right to speak as he did. The two groups stood their shouting at each other.

Then there is a third type of violence, which I find more sinister. It is so quiet and so common place that half the time it passes without even being noticed. When I worked in Luton the phones would always go quiet over Christmas and they would start to ring again in the New Year and the stories of the put downs, and slights and snubs would emerge.

There was a play made of the trial of Stephen Lawrence. I remember sitting there almost wanting them to show me some aggressive and nasty racism. Then I could sit there and feel smug in condemning them and feeling glad that I was not like that. That would have been too easy and the play worked its way through this welter of detail – it almost became boring. The point it was making was that the institutional racism was so common place that it could easily be overlooked. It is this regular, ordinary, day by day unacknowledged and unrecognised violence that Jesus is looking at in today's passage.

This passage is a face off between Jesus and the Pharisees. The righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees was an external, ceremonial, ritualistic, hypocritical legalism, the righteousness that God demands is something internal. That has always been God's concern. Matthew 23, He says, "Outside you're whitewashed, and inside you're like a tomb full of dead men's bones" (v. 27). Jesus made it plain that. This is as different from the world's standards today as it was for the scribes and Pharisees, who saw a man or woman as righteous if they never did the forbidden thing. They didn't care about their thoughts or attitudes. In contrast, Jesus said that a man is righteous if he never desires the forbidden things.

Men and women are not to be judged solely by their deeds and actions, but by their desires and attitudes as well. The outside is only validated insofar as it is representative of what is on the inside. It is the spirit of the law that is the priority, not the letter. The letter of the law which kills and the Spirit which gives life (2 Cor. 3:6), God is not looking for externals--He's looking for changed hearts. 1 Samuel 16:7 says, "...for man looks on the outward appearance...."John 7:24, "Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment."

For us to be judged by our attitudes and inclinations is both easier and harder than being judged by our actions. It is easier because it is a process of becoming rather than become – an ethic of awareness rather than perfection. It is harder because it cuts to the core of who we are and how we relate to the world. When Jesus talks about anger as murder, it is intentional harm that is being condemned – a conscious and deliberate commitment to maintain and nurture a resentment against another person is murder. When Jesus talks about lust as adultery it is a deliberate looking at a wo/man (or image thereof) in order to lust that is being condemned. Sexual fantasy simply for self gratification is adultery.