Jesus' Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount

by Richard Rohr

Every indication is that the growing phenomenon in our society will be fundamentalism. Fundamentalism refuses to listen to what the Gospel authors are really saying to their communities. It enters into a nonhistorical love affair with words—I don’t know how else to describe it. The human need for clarity and certitude leads fundamentalists to use sacred writings in a mechanical, closed-ended and authoritarian manner. This invariably leaves them trapped in their own cultural moment in history, and they often totally miss the real message along with the deepest challenges and consolations of Scripture. In the name of taking the word literally, the fundamentalist is in fact missing the literal word. Isn’t that ironic? The real meaning of the text is largely missed by people who say they take it all literally. In other words, the metaphorical sense, the mythological sense, the sense of religious psychology and sacred story is in fact the literal, real sense—just as it is when you and I talk, write and communicate with one another. There is an especially telling passage in Mark’s Gospel where Jesus becomes angry even with his disciples, who are unable to understand his clearly metaphorical language. He tells them to watch out for the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod. Taking him literally, they began looking quizzically at one another because they did not have any bread (see Mark 8:14-16). Is “Herod Bread” a new brand that they had not heard about? Aware of their ...

We also tend to think of freedom as freedom of movement and the liberty to choose between options. This is surely a good and important freedom. There is no indication that the great spiritual teachers, Jesus included, see it as essential, however. They seem to recognize that the world of preferences and possibilities does not of itself lead to wisdom, truth or even depth of experience. In fact, in the spiritual life the rule seems to be that less is more. There is almost no correlation between the amount of options and the amount of truth or goodness that one attains.

The saints usually seek to understimulate themselves, lessen their options, choose lives of poverty and flourish quite well in situations of imprisonment, persecution and opposition.

It is commonly said that Jesus, and most of the New Testament authors, believed that the end of the world was right around the corner. Many passages in Paul and the Gospels would lead you to believe that this was their expectation. It was, but not in the way we think. It would be much closer to the truth to say that because the old order of the world (cultures built on money, power and mere religiosity) had now been so clearly exposed and defeated by the Jesus event, they thought it was only a matter of time until everybody would see through it all! I do suppose that both Jesus and Paul are still more than a little disappointed that it has taken so long to defeat the lie. I guess they were optimists about our capacity and desire for great truth.

But we need more and more of what does not work. This addiction is clearly the nature of economic cultures.

A political culture tries to eliminate all opposition and obstacle, as if life were attained by obliterating enemies and differences. Even the Church often descends to this pagan level, as Jesus calls it (see Matthew 20:25), when it resorts to dominative power and even punitive means to enforce its will. At that point, prayerful people know that there is little real trust in the presence of the Risen Jesus in history. He never relied upon enforcement in his lifetime; I do not know why he would change his strategy now.

A religious culture is one that is trapped in such a confusion. It mixes up belief in God with cultural order and institutional stability. It needs and wants a great policeman in the sky to keep everything in line.

We need religious cultures that are not afraid to speak of God, but we do not need religious cultures that use and misquote God for their own purposes, or become ends in themselves.

Near the end of the Old Testament, the Prophet Zechariah says that when God’s day comes, there will be no distinction between sacred and profane, temple and marketplace: Even the horse bells will be inscribed with the word “sacred,” and in the Temple of Yahweh the very cooking pots will be as fine as the sprinkling bowls at the altar (see 14:20). The Reign of God is not about churchiness at all. It has everything to do with everything. In fact, as we listen to Jesus’ images and examples, it appears that it is the world of house and field and job and marriage where we are converted to right relationship. The secular has become the place where we encounter the True Sacred.

It is much more, it seems, than the world of stipends, sermons and sacristies, which tend to become their own industry.

Francis switched sides from the upper class to the lower class, because he knew that only from the side of powerlessness could one be entrusted with the gospel. Those who stay on the side of power have consistently misused and misinterpreted the gospel.

They all took the vow of poverty as an essential part of the gospel life. The vow clearly was a choice by a community and by an individual to opt out of the economic system.

Jesus was undercutting the system of human society, refusing to take it seriously—while continuing to love and serve it.

All is impermanent, socially constructed and, in that sense, illusory.

As Dorothy Day often said in her perfect Kingdom style, “Nothing is going to change until we stop accepting this dirty, rotten system!”

But we need to be honest about the impact—or lack of impact—of the gospel on Western civilization, on the world. That which has become standard and normative must first be called into serious question.

One can make a strong case for the Christian nations being the most militaristic ones on earth—the most greedy, the most untrue to the teacher they claim to follow.

In honesty, the European nations that call themselves Christian base their society, as we all do, entirely upon structures of domination and control: racism, sexism, class, power and money. They’re built on all the things Jesus told us not to build on.

We used to draw upon an immense treasure house of right-brain, nonrational, translucent images. We used incense a lot more then, for example, with its intense aroma and mystifying visual presence. We had music—Gregorian chant—that hauntingly emphasized the otherworldly aspects of life.

If we had had an image of God as the great mother who is giving birth—as in Romans 8:22—I think history as process, pain, patience, guided destiny would have come more naturally. As it is, we have seen history as a linear obstacle course, something to be conquered, exploited and won.

It’s interesting to note Jesus’ style here. He doesn’t quote Scripture; that’s why his authority is not like the authority of the scribes and the Pharisees (see Matthew 7:29). He doesn’t quote “papal encyclicals.” He most often uses nature as an authority. He points to clouds, sunsets, sparrows, lilies, corn in the field, leaves unfolding, several kinds of seeds, oxen in a ditch! Nature instructs us everywhere. Look and learn how to see. Look and see the rhythm, the seasons, the life and death of things. That’s your teaching, that’s creation’s plan in front of you. The new world is constantly coming into being as the old world passes. Nothing lives in nature unless something else dies, and it often happens slowly and is unseen—unless you learn how to see.

Spirituality is about being ready. All the spiritual disciplines of your life—prayer, study, meditation or ritual, religious vows—are there so you can break through to the eternal. Spirituality is about awakening the eyes, the ears, the heart so you can see what’s always happening right in front of you.

Most of us live in the past, carrying our hurts, guilts and fears. We have to face the pain we carry, lest we spend the rest of our lives running away from it or letting it run us. But the only place you’ll ever meet the real is now-here. It’s the hardest place for us to live, the place where we’re most afraid to live, because it feels so empty and boring. Now-here almost always feels like nowhere, and that’s precisely where we must go. Silence is what allows the old world order to become unnecessary, and you really don’t know that until you are silent.

Jesus becomes a hermit when he goes off to the desert. John the Baptist lives in the desert. The desert is where you go apart from the world order as it is. It’s where you simply stop being trapped in the world’s addictive patterns. If you are addicted to the world’s or your own patterns, you really need to go apart; otherwise you’ll never stop sleepwalking.

makes me wonder how many people today are going to get out of the trap. With earphones playing music all day and billboards in front of us all the time, will we ever know what the real is?

They both miss almost everything Jesus says about social justice, and about all the other issues that most concerned Jesus himself.

We in our time have to find our way to disestablish ourselves, to identify with our powerlessness instead of our power, our dependence instead of our independence, our communion instead of our individualism.

As soon as people are comfortable, they don’t want any truth beyond their comfort zone. People who are at the top of the system normally will vote “conservative” because once you’re at the top of a system you want to conserve the system as it is. You’re enjoying its fruits; why would you want to change it? Yet those who are not enjoying the fruits of the system are always longing and thirsting for the coming of the Kingdom, for something more. They are not as likely to vote for the status quo, which is invariably built on those bottom lines of money, power and God-talk.

Bridge-builders, including Jesus, usually start building a bridge from one side. You can’t build a bridge from the middle, as even an engineer will tell you. You must choose a starting point. What the gospel is saying, pure and simple, is that wherever you’re going to start building your bridge, you better start from the side of powerlessness, not power.

We must pay the price in our body for building those bridges (see Colossians 1:24) and know we’ll be abused and misquoted from both sides. But the necessary starting point for building the bridge of the gospel is from the side of powerlessness, either political powerlessness or your personal powerlessness, preferably both.

If you want to see the import of any of Jesus’ miracles, read who he’s talking to at the beginning and who’s upset at the end. Normally the people who are upset at the end have just seen their job made unnecessary.

Jesus truly was dangerous: He was creating a following with a kind of thinking that was much more on the side of inclusiveness than exclusiveness. That tension between exclusiveness and inclusiveness is one of the central themes of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus is always moving the boundaries out while still respecting the center. That’s the key to wisdom: being grounded in the center and still, from that deep foundation, knowing how to move out.

The danger of post-modern liberal society is that most people have no place to stand. Post-modern life is like a movable feast (or famine!): Everything is relative, in question and in constant motion. Jesus will give his followers a clear place to stand—the tradition of Judaism—but he reinterprets the tradition. He moves the boundaries out from a stable and secure center.

In our social setup family isn’t first—as we are becoming painfully aware—nor is religion, nor even politics. What drives the institutions (government, social policy and the like) in our culture is money. Some people say politics is the driving institution, but people often are naive politically, ignorant of the power and reality of politics. The dominant institution in our society is the system of production and consumption.

Commercialism is invading everything because the entire system is built on the commandments, “Thou shalt produce” and “Thou shalt consume.”

I’ll bet you’ve heard your friends talk this way, as if to consume is a religious act. How did we turn reality around to make consumption and buying a virtue? If you listen to peoples’ conversation you can hear it. You might hear someone say, “I bought a new car even though my old one worked fine. It’s good for the economy.” It could only happen in a culture where economics is the number one institution and the other three (family, religion and politics) are subservient to it.

It is not religious ideology as in a religious culture, or party authority, as in a political culture. Quite simply, it is wealth. Status in our society is attained by having money and the freedom to use it.

When the economic institution is our primary lens, religion tends to be diluted by pragmatic, win/lose and power attitudes. God is bought and sold more than loved, waited for or surrendered to. Those of us from economic cultures need to meditate hard and long about why Jesus’ one clear act of anger was aimed at those selling and buying in the Temple (see Matthew 21:12).

We Americans have this dangerous illusion that we’re a religious people. Yet it’s evident to anybody who can see that God is not on the pedestal here. Clearly our consumer system is on the pedestal and everything else is subservient: market morality, marketing of politicians, families revolving around mass consumption.

Here it comes, I thought, the lecture on the “bottom line” that I hear from time to time from upset businessmen. “Father,” he said, putting his hands on my shoulders, “I’ve got something to tell you. Not only is what you said true, but it’s much truer then you even imagine.” Then he explained to me a study documenting that the United States government’s savings and loan bailout of 1989 was the biggest transfer of money from the poor to the rich in human history.

Who you are in God is a beloved daughter or a beloved son; you are no longer dependent on culture’s or even your own estimation. Through your prayer, your awareness of God within you, you continually discover your true identity: “[T]he life you have is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3b).

Every town has the hard-to-get-to spot where the teens paint graffiti, late at night, at tremendous risk. Yet when the soul feels utterly insignificant, it writes its name where you can’t miss it.

There is tremendous symbolism connected to food. That you eat this and don’t eat that means something. Certain kinds of people eat certain kinds of food. Through our choices and behavior at table, we name and identify ourselves. For example, a vegetarian diet has been a conscious choice for some because they’ve studied the politics of food: who eats meat and who can’t eat meat; what eating meat is doing not only to our health but even to the planet.

Religious power is, for one thing, mostly exercised outside the Temple and synagogue.

When the law gets in the way of human compassion Jesus simply disregards the law. He has found its meaning. As he says most clearly about picking and eating grain on the sabbath (see Mark 2:23-28), the law is not an end in itself. It’s a means to an end. The Law was made for humanity; humanity was not made for the Law, Jesus says (see Mark 2:27). That’s cataclysmic. It undercuts most of institutional religion since the beginning of time.

(The call to the gospel life is not really a call to be moral, law-abiding and “good,” although many seem to think so. It is, rather, to follow Jesus—who keeps us on the path of letting go and rediscovering, which is very different from just “being good.” Think about that!)

The Church is never a “members-only” club. Isn’t it sad that the Church became the gathering of the saved instead of what Jesus makes it in his open table of fellowship? Jesus’ table is the gathering of the unsaved! Sometimes fellow priests tell me, “We’re preaching to the choir. We’re saving the saved. We just keep gathering the same two hundred people, sing Jesus songs and read the Bible. And we convince one another that we’re saved and that we’re holy.” That’s what happens when the Church becomes established in one place, when the people come to the Church instead of us going to them. We create the congregation of the “enlightened”—who by that very token are not enlightened at all.

We need to consider and reconsider the symbolism of food in our own lives. In retreat houses and homes across the land, people are starting to reevaluate the social, political, economic and nutritional meaning of food. America’s love affair with beef for example, and the disastrous effects that is having on the Third World, has come under question in recent years. Rain forests are being cut down, land and resources are being spent so that we can have burgers aplenty. I was staying with a cattle rancher in California recently, and to his credit he was reading a book describing the ill effects of cattle and beef production on the earth. The first day he wasn’t too happy with it. He came in the second night, troubled. (This is a very good Irish Catholic man; there is no doubt in my mind faith is first to him.) He said to me, “Richard, I have to change my life.” He saw that his livelihood could well be contributing to starvation overseas. Now that’s reconnecting the two meals: because of bread and wine we must do “bread and fish” differently. That’s one contemporary way to consider this gospel message. Food is still a way of being in solidarity with people. What you eat and what you don’t eat can be a way of saying, “I want to be in solidarity with certain people who can’t have meat three times a day.” Meat is the food of the rich. It’s the over-proteinization of people in a growing world of already six billion people.

After ten thousand eatings we begin to believe that we are what we eat, we are who we eat with, we are where we eat, we are how we eat, and for believers, we are even who we eat: We have “recognized the Body.”