At the beginning of the movie Hook, Peter Banning, played by Robin Williams, tries to squeeze in one more meeting before a London trip with his family by scheduling it the same morning of his son’s last baseball game of the season.

In 2003, Aron Ralston committed the cardinal sin for solo mountaineering: he didn’t tell anyone where he was going or how long he planned to be away. This omission resulted in him being trapped in a canyon for five days, his hand and wrist pinned between a boulder and the canyon wall. He was only able to escape and find rescue after he amputated his arm. Ralston has said that if he hadn’t cut off his own arm he would have died in the canyon.

One of the ongoing themes within the Sermon on the Mount is the contrast between the law and the heart, what is put into practice for all to see and what is actually going on in the deepest parts of our souls. Jesus repeatedly emphasizes it is the latter that is important. The law was only ever intended to be the starting place; it was never designed as the end goal.

This is among Jesus’s hardest teachings. We are so prone to thinking of God as the epitome of love and forgiveness that we often forget being God means he is also the perfect example of judgement, justice, and holiness. In fact, his holiness is so important to our understanding of who God is that when Isaiah saw a vision of God on his throne in the Temple, two seraphim were also present and “they were calling out to each other, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Heaven’s Armies! The whole earth is filled with his glory!’” (Isaiah 6:3).