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

by Richard Rohr

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. That’s not to say our ancestors didn’t have faith, that Grandma and Grandpa were not good people. But by and large we did not produce a Christian culture. We produced some wonderfully liberated saints and Christian individuals.

It might be a little cynical, but you could almost figure out what Jesus said by looking at our history and naming the opposite of what we did! We keep worshiping the messenger, keeping Jesus up on statues and images, so we can avoid what Jesus said.

As Carl Jung, the ground-breaking Swiss psychiatrist, said, transformation only takes place in the presence of images, not concepts.

Until we reimagine our God, ourselves, our world, nothing ever happens.

In order to understand our Scriptures, we must be willing to look for the symbols, to treat sacred stories as powerful, truth-bearing stories, not historical reporting.

The disciples are still rooted in the entire system the Temple represents. They’re still marveling at the Temple structure. And Jesus’ reply is, “You see all these [stones]? In truth I tell you, not a single stone here will be left on another” (Matthew 24:2b). It’s all going to fall apart. Will you stop putting your trust in it?

‘Tell us, when is this going to happen, and what sign will there be of your coming and of the end of the world?’ ” (24:3). Again there is a clever juxtaposition of phrases: when Christ’s presence (parousia) is experienced, it is the end of the world as we have known it!

If you’ve ever gotten to a point in your life when you let go of a world, you understand this text. We cannot welcome the presence, the parousia, the full coming of Christ until we’ve let go of the old.

We could idolatrously worship this world order and at the same time say, “Thy Kingdom come.” Yet we can’t say, “Thy Kingdom come” unless we’re willing to say, “My kingdom go.”

Unless you’re willing to let go of your self-created ego worlds, you will not see the Kingdom in your midst. The ego, by nature, is conservative. It strives to conserve, to maintain itself. That translates into seeking a comfort zone to live within and staying there. Once we find that place where we feel secure, we may do anything to maintain it!

For the person—or the Church or the society—caught in the trap of denial, security becomes an idol. We become incapable of loving and incapable of truth.

That world of denial and false security is the old world order Jesus is undercutting. Jesus talks about this undercutting in terms of salt and leaven.

Do you think if we’d had a more feminine image of God that we would have understood creation as labor and giving birth? Much of patriarchal Christian interpretation has been trying to avoid pain, trying to avoid being poor, trying to avoid powerlessness.

Why were most tribal initiation rites for men?

It seems that men, in particular, must be taught that life is hard, that humans are not in control, that death is a reality.

One could cook up evidence every three years that now is the time for the apocalypse. We’ll see at the end of Matthew 24 that we shouldn’t waste our time trying to figure that out: That isn’t the point. The end is all the time, and it never stops.

It’s almost like a mythological description of depression. Have you ever had a day when it all doesn’t make any sense? Emptiness has to precede fullness.

Spirituality is always about letting go—not just in Christianity, but in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism. All the great world religions at their higher levels teach the mystery and the art of letting go. You let go, and hopefully collapse back into your true self, into who you really are. The work of religion is to guide us on the path of the fall and onto the path of the return.

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.

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.

Jesus uses Temple imagery, but the reason it’s going to happen before this generation passes away is because it happens in every generation.

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.

Don’t even go search for the door you’re supposed to go through. Just ask that when the door shows itself, you’ll have the eyes to recognize it and the courage to walk through it. Other times I tell them, “Don’t push the river. Just remain in the flow.”

Often we do God’s work for our own ego purposes. In reality we probably all start there, and the wondrous truth is that God even uses such things to good purpose.

The only way the truth gets into any of our lives is by God’s trickery, when our guard is down.

The God of Jesus is clearly much more than a stern moralist or divine policeman. Daringly, Jesus puts God “outside the law” as one who comes into our lives by stealth and cunning, the burglar who comes in the night and steals our soul in spite of ourselves!

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.

It’s very hard for us to understand our world without a philosophy of progress. Yet I think Jesus lives in such a world. Jesus realizes that what he’s talking about is going to come rather modestly.

Men and women all have been loaded with expectations to grow up and become certain things, whether domestic or professional. We are what we do, we think. Fortunately our inherent Christ nature is not a goal to be achieved, but an inheritance.

He says only two things about the mustard plant: It’s medicinal, so it did have some value. But he said not to plant it because it tends to take over the entire garden. It is a weed that cannot be stopped. Those would have been the two images that Jesus was clearly building on: What I’m describing for you is therapeutic—it’s life, it’s healing, it’s medicinal—but it’s like a weed.

I’m going to talk about stupid things like nonviolence and simple life, but they’re planted and they’re going to take over; the old world is over. I don’t know if it’s going to take two thousand years or four thousand years before you get the point, but I’ve planted what I know is eternal truth in the world and it’s going to take over.

That’s Jesus’ hope, but do you see what patient hope that is?

And remember, from the beginning Jesus proclaimed this Kingdom—the Real—in a world where ninety-eight percent of people were poor. They were all, except for the Romans, an occupied people. The vast majority of them were enslaved. Religion was highly corrupt. And still in the midst of that he dared to announce the present Reign of God! He dared to say, “You can live the new reality right now.” Now that’s most extraordinary.

Forget for the moment about believing in the Immaculate Conception or the pope. Those are fine, but they’re not what Jesus is talking about. He’s talking about the grace and the freedom to live God’s dream for the world now—while not rejecting the world as it is.

Remember this: There are always two worlds. The world as it operates is power; the world as it should be is love. The secret of Kingdom life is how can you live in both—simultaneously.

Leaven actually evokes an image of corruption! (Thus the bread of the Passover had to be new and unleavened.) You set sourdough in the corner until it gets bubbly and smelly.

Jesus is content, it seems, not to be the whole loaf but instead the smelly leaven that you put inside.

The kingdom is hidden and yet available. God is perfectly hidden and perfectly revealed in every moment. The Kingdom is an open secret.

Physical creation is both the hiding place and the revealing place of God!

In the Parabolic Discourse, Jesus tells us to withdraw our allegiance from a world of bigness, clarity, immediacy, looking good and security (the old order) and to see life instead as smallness, patience, humility, inner wisdom and risk-taking (always new and rare).

Our faith as Christians is in Jesus Christ, the historical man Jesus and the cosmic Lord who is Christ.

You keep creating fantasy Jesuses—who can be molded to whomever we want Jesus to be. We’ve got to go back to the historical Jesus to rebuild our foundations. What did Jesus really teach and what are the later developments from the tradition and from the Church?

There is no such thing as an entirely objective viewpoint on anything. Every viewpoint is a view from a point! Intelligent and faith-filled reading of inspired texts merely takes that point seriously so it can better understand what Jesus was trying to say in that original context. His story is also our story.

Almost none of John’s Gospel is considered by mainstream scholars today to be directly from Jesus. Most of what Jesus says in John’s Gospel are words put in Jesus’ mouth by this community around the year 100 or 110.

The story is always true—and sometimes it really happened!

The Jesus story was remembered and passed on verbally over a period of thirty to seventy years before the Gospels were written. This early preaching is called the kerygma. It was the first language used by believers to describe their faith experience of Jesus. For almost thirty years it was largely oral.

Put yourself in the sandals of an apostle. You’re standing up there, you’re presenting Jesus, you’ve got to make this Jesus fit this crowd and so you sort of embroider the words a little. That’s certainly been the way of preachers throughout history, including this one! When I preach, I’ve got to make it so twentieth-century Americans coming from our background can understand Jesus.

There is no such thing as uninterpreted fact in ...

That’s not to put down Luther; that’s just to recognize you can’t be sola scriptura. It’s impossible.

As much as he says he’s only appealing to the authority of Scripture, it’s obvious in hindsight that many of the things he chooses to notice in Scripture were responding to his own issues.