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

by Richard Rohr

This book is about the Sermon on the Mount, considered the blueprint of the Christian life-style, pronounced by Jesus himself. But the secret to understanding the Sermon on the Mount is to understand what Jesus was about when he preached it. So this book is as much about getting ready to hear the Sermon as it is about the Sermon itself.

One of the problems in reading the Bible is that most of us Christians preconceive Jesus as “the divine savior of our divine Church,” which prematurely settles all the dust and struggle. Such a predisposition does not open us to enlightenment by Christ, but in fact, deadens and numbs our perception. A part of us reads the Bible in order to prove this understanding of Jesus.

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.

I am told that there are three kinds of cultures today, each with its own “bottom line": political cultures based on the manipulation of power, economic cultures based on the manipulation of money, and religious cultures based on the manipulation of some theory about God.

Jesus announced, lived and inaugurated for history a new social order that is an actual alternative to each of the above—and an alternative that he said (with greater authority than Karl Marx) is inevitable—not inevitable by reason of scientific determinism, but by the promise and grace of God. He called it the Reign or Kingdom of God.

When we Christians accept that Jesus was killed for the same reasons that people have been killed in all of human history (and not because he walked around saying “I am God”), we will have turned an important corner on our Jesus quest.

This now and not-yet Reign of God is the foundation for our personal hope and our cosmic optimism, but it is also the source of our deepest alienation from the world as it is.

Jesus believes that God is a Person to be imitated, enjoyed and loved. We only seem to know God by relating to God, almost as if God refuses to be known apart from love. It is all about relationship. As Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher mystic, put it, “All real living is meeting.” That simple and totally available experience makes all the difference “in the world.”

The insecure and false self seems to need an enemy to scapegoat so that it can feel superior and saved. False gods, by definition, must be appeased. The true God needs nothing. The true God invites us into an unthinkable communion.

Remember the American camaraderie for the twenty-some years following World War II? Our evil lay unrecognized on the heads of Germans, Japanese and Communists. They were the bad losers, and we were the good victors.

When there is no experience of the True Sacred, we will always fall into the worship of the false sacred. The false sacred will invariably become a pretext and even a holy justification for prejudice, marginalization of others, scapegoating and violence.

One will not, of course, turn away from what seems like the only game in town (political, economic or religious) unless one has glimpsed a more attractive alternative. Jesus is a living parable, an audiovisual icon of that more attractive alternative. We cannot even imagine it, much less imitate it, unless we see one human being do it first.

The most unsettling of his alternative wisdom, and perhaps the most consistent, is that the outcast is in the head-start position, precisely because he or she has been excluded from the false sacred system—“the only game in town.”

Why would the “first be last” (one of his most common one-liners) unless there is something essentially mistaken about the system that we are all trying to be first in, especially if we have tried really hard?

Jesus is teaching that right relationship is the ultimate and daily criterion. If a social order allows and encourages, and even mandates, good connectedness between people and creation, people and events, people and people, people and God, then you have a truly sacred culture: the Reign of God.

The world as it would be if God were directly in charge would be a world of right relationship. It would not be a world without pain or mystery but simply a world where we would be in good contact with all things, where we would be connected and in communion. Conversely, the work of the Evil One is always to separate, divide and throw apart (dia-bolical).

Probably the imagery of Jesus as scapegoat is one of the more undeveloped themes in New Testament studies. Recent investigations of the Mishnah and other extra-biblical sources have helped us make a series of connections that were probably natural for first-century Judaism: The striking with the reed, the spitting on the scapegoat, the crowning, the entanglement with thorns, the scarlet cloak were all ways that the scapegoat was sent out into the desert.

Perhaps we needed to see how universal and basic the scapegoating mechanism is for human culture before we could see the importance of Jesus’ replacement of it.

The gospel is much more a process than a product, a style more than a structure, a person more than a production. It is a way of being in the world that will always feel like compassion, mercy and spaciousness—at least to honest and healthy people.

I do not think that Jesus ever expected that the whole world would become formally Christian, but I do believe that his truth about right relationship, his proclamation of the power of powerlessness, is the message that will save the world from self-destruction and for an eternal truth.

There is no way to peace. Peace is the way. There is no path toward love except by practicing love. War will always produce more war. Violence can never bring about true peace.

Much of the content of the Sermon on the Mount has to do with this agreement between means and ends. (It is one of the most ignored aspects of Jesus’ teaching, and I am convinced it explains the attraction of many former Christians to Buddhism and nonviolent teaching. They had to leave home to find out what was hidden in their own closets.)

Freedom is not the capacity to be what you are not, but the capacity to be fully who you already are, to develop your inherent self as much as God allows.

Free to just be, none of the trappings of the world matter.

Our addictive society has to do what it wants to do. The freedom offered by all great spiritual traditions is quite different: spiritual and true freedom is wanting to do what you have to do to become who you are.

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!

It’s all over can be understood in two very different ways: either it is all going to hell, or it is all becoming heaven. In either case, you stop taking the status quo as the final state of affairs.

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.

In fact, when a Christian needs to ensure outcomes, you know they are outside the realm of faith. When we do not need to control the future, we are in a very creative and liminal space where God is most free to act in our lives. Faith seems to be the attitude that Jesus most praises in people, maybe because it makes hope and love possible.

A political culture, like the former Soviet Union, will always use power in totalitarian ways to achieve its purposes. We can never expect Caesar to do Christ’s work.

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.

A religious culture has much to recommend it, sort of like John the Baptist in his early stages. He baptized in water, enforced some needed moralities, and, according to Jesus, neither ate nor drank (see Matthew 11:18). He was a good and religious man, as far as that goes, yet Jesus makes a most amazing statement that we have usually glossed over: “[Of] all the children born to women, there has never been anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of Heaven is greater than he” (Matthew 11:11)

One of the major weaknesses of the Christian understanding of Jesus is that we really do not understand what it was that made Jesus worth killing. It was not because he walked around saying “I am God.”

There are four principal areas of conventional wisdom that Jesus seems to either ignore, oppose or even subvert: family, possessions, status and the very nature of sacrificial religion. We will see that these were enough to get him killed.

Jesus says it’s not blood that makes family; it’s trust, union and commitment. He has redefined family in a kinship-based culture (which is often the shape of religious cultures). From that point, after Matthew 12, everything turns to those outside—who are, of course, invited “inside” (where Mary and Jesus’ “brothers” surely are).

Looking back two thousand years later, how many wars have been justified by kinship? Jesus broke that addiction to false patriotism, loyalty and nationality.

The third area in which Jesus assaults conventional wisdom is in the area of social and religious recognition, the whole honor/shame system. He refuses to abide by it. He refuses to live up to what is considered honorable and refuses to shame what people consider shameful. (If that is not apparent in your reading of the Gospels, read them again.) This does not gain him many friends. It’s perhaps the thing that most bothers the priests and the elders. In response to his ignoring the debt codes and purity codes, they decided to kill him (see Mark 3:6, 11:18; Matthew 12:14; Luke 19:47; John 11:53). Even his family thought he was crazy (see Mark 3:21)!

When Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God, he was talking about an utterly different way of relating with one another than human society as we know it.

My point is this: For all the talk of a new world order, it’s simply the old world order. The politicians had no right to steal that phrase, especially when there is nothing new about it! The new world order—the Reign of God—is the heart of the New Testament, and it’s a phrase to be taken seriously. Yet we have failed to understand the coming of Jesus as the dawn of a new age. For most Christians, life in the new age has been business as usual.

He just assumes that things can be and will be constructed differently. Such a vision seems to be his starting point—even more than his practical goal. One has to share the “dream of God” before we know how to live and where to look for the truth.

“When all is made new” in the original Greek phrase of the New Testament authors includes the word palingenesia—a unique word. It’s rendered literally as “regeneration, a new genesis, an utterly new beginning,” or, perhaps best, “a totally new birth in a totally new world.” It’s the only time the word is used in the Gospels.

What we will discover in the New Testament text, especially in Matthew’s Gospel, is this new world order, a new age, a promised hope. This new age was not something the early Christians first understood as happening at the end of history; rather, it was ushered in by the teaching of Jesus. Jesus was undercutting the system of human society, refusing to take it seriously—while continuing to love and serve it.

When we read all of the apocalyptic announcements of Jesus, how everything is going to fall apart, how the sun will fall from the heavens, we’re reading that the world as we know it must and will end. We speak here not so much of a final end of history but an end to our own personally constructed worlds.

That’s an experience that must first happen spiritually. It must happen in our psyche, in our relationships and in our culture. One day it just happens. It’s the moment of conversion, when all of a sudden you realize—not just in your head but also in your guts—that everything in this world is passing away.

Whether you vote for Democrats, Republicans or Independents, don’t really think any of them can usher in the Kingdom of God (even when the newly elected Bill Clinton spoke of a “New Covenant!”). And if you think, “Who could be that naive?” don’t forget that Americans have come very close to that kind of naiveté for most of their history.

Americans, like few other peoples, have known two hundred years of massive cultural idolatry. We think that our country, our form of government, our way of doing things fell straight from heaven, as if it were God’s plan for the world. If everyone would live like Americans the world would be happy, we think. Maybe people don’t say it that way, but believe me, I know as a preacher the shock on people’s faces when I dare to question it! That tells me they believe it. It is a cultural myth, which means it is unquestioned: It’s a way of thinking, written between the lines and in the margins.

Idols, like cultural myths, are always disguised, if not totally invisible to the worshiper. If we could see their falsity, we would, of course, know that they are not God. So false gods, idols, must always dress up as a cultural virtue like success, love of country or hard work. These loyalties, either hidden or expressed, must be exposed for the gods that the...

Jesus’ new world order is utterly subverting the old world order. This is what makes people so furious: Jesus simply ignores the systems of values and righteousness that are so important to them. That is much more subversive than it might seem on the surface. For example, by Jesus’ reckoning, why would anyone try to become rich? It doesn’t make a bit of sense once you know the really real.

We have traditionally tried to preach a gospel largely of words, attitudes and inner salvation experiences. People say they are saved, they’re “born again,” yet how do we really know if someone is saved? Do they love the poor? Are they free from their egos? Are they patient in the face of persecution? Those might be real indicators.

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