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

by Richard Rohr

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

I’m afraid that the cry of the French Revolution, “Liberty, equality and fraternity,” has formed us much more than the Jesus Revolution. His cry might instead be “Identity, justice and community.” Think about the difference.

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.

An economic culture is trying to eliminate as much inconvenience and discomfort as possible. It encourages increase in one tiny area, money, as the answer to all other areas.

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.

Along with their subservient position in most societies, women have a symbolic head start in understanding the Paschal Mystery of death and resurrection.

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.

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

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.

That doesn’t make it wrong. The point in studying the New Testament is this: The story is always true—and sometimes it really happened! That is the nature of all sacred Scriptures.

The Gospels are about telling the meaning of Jesus, and his effect on their lives. This is personal testimony, “good news” more than empirical facts.

John Dominic Crossan and his book The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (HarperCollins, 1991)

Table fellowship or commensalism is not the same as almsgiving; almsgiving is not table fellowship. Generous almsgiving may even be conscience’s last great refuge against the terror of open table fellowship!

Religion is all the things you normally go through to meet God. The gospel is the way you will see and think after you have met God! The gospel is the effect of the God-encounter; religion, though it often stirs desire, is also the most common and disguised way of avoiding the encounter! The parable ends on an ominous note: “…[N]ot one of those who were invited shall have a taste of my banquet” (Luke 14:24). Religion is the invite; the gospel is the banquet.

The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It’s not the gathering of the saved.

Jesus redefines reality in terms of who-God-is—not little people’s moral categories about what makes me good and you bad.

It’s never either/or for Jesus; it’s a matter of sequence, priority and motivation: Get the center point clear and then the rituals are OK. Rituals are not to be idolized; they are only rituals.

But Jesus never throws them out, either (liberals, take heed!). People need to have a symbolic and celebrated universe. There is no healthy religion without metaphor, symbol or ritual. Without some creed, code and cult a group will make no impact on the world or themselves as a community. The temptation today is to revert to private enlightenment with no accountability systems or community base.

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.”

“Repent [which means ‘turn around’],

You cannot break through to the spiritual except through metaphor.

Someone once said all great truths must be veiled: To look at truth directly blinds you. That’s why religion has much more to do with poetry, song and imagery than with academics.

Grace cannot be created or manufactured from beneath; it always comes from beyond, from no certain place. Otherwise it isn’t grace. Try as we might, we cannot manufacture grace. It will always come from nowhere for certain, like a dove coming out of the sky.

the need to see the fruits of your own action and to meet people’s needs.

It’s the need to use God, to stand on religion for your own purposes.

Matthew is showing that you can use religion for diabolical purposes.

The third temptation is the need for power or control, symbolized by the devil showing Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour” (4:8b).

At very best, wars are a necessary evil, which we can never celebrate or romanticize.

In today’s world, we are pressed to give our loyalty to the Stars and Stripes, to the navy, to General Motors or whatever company employs us. The Kingdom person can’t do that anymore. That’s what we mean by the Lordship of Jesus Christ: If God is Lord, then the other systems of this world do not exercise first or final voice in my decisions.

Ever since Constantine, the Church has been coddling the powers that be, hoping to win their favor for the new Catholic high school fund drive.

I always wondered why we had feast days and institutions named in honor of Christ the King, many statues and crosses of Christ the Priest, but I have never in all the Catholic world met a celebration or picture in honor of Christ the Prophet.

That’s the malaise of Western Christianity today. People keep up the external observance of reliance upon God; underneath they depend only on themselves.

All the right words and ideas are there—the person goes to Church, is born again or whatever—but beneath it all there is the sense of an indifferent universe and an indifferent, distant God.

But if their dads were hostile, if their mothers were inconsistent or they felt they could not trust either one of them—basically that all gets transferred to God. Either way, child-parent relationships become foundations for our relationship with God.

Faith for Jesus is the opposite of anxiety. If you are anxious, if you are trying to control everything, if you are worried about many things, you don’t have faith, according to Jesus. You do not trust that God is good and on your side. You’re trying to do it all yourself, lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.

But people into the hot sins are often the ones who really hunger and thirst for justice. In the Gospels, these are the people who really seem to come around and get the truth. But the conventional wisdom people, who are trying to control it all and trying to be nice and proper, don’t realize that they need to hunger and thirst for anything.

We have not been very good students of Jesus concerning personal transformation, emphasizing instead a kind of stoic “grin and bear it.”