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The Sermon rests on the theological assumption that if the preacher can first enable us to see whom God blesses, we shall be well on the road to blessedness ourselves. We can only act within a world we can see. Vision is the necessary prerequisite for ethics.
Jesus repeatedly cites an older command, already tough enough to keep in itself, and then radically deepens its significance, not to lay some gigantic ethical burden on the backs of potential ethical heroes, but rather to illustrate what is happening in our midst. This instance is not a law from which deductions can be casuistically drawn; rather, it is an imaginative metaphor, which hopes to produce a shock within our imaginations so that the hearer comes to see his or her life in a radical new way.
What if all this is not new and more stringent rules for us to observe but rather a picture of the way God is?
the basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works but rather the way God is.
The whole Sermon is not about how to be better individual Christians, it is a picture of the way the church is to look. The Sermon is eschatological.
The church is on the long haul, living in that difficult time between one advent and the next. In such times, we are all the more dependent on a community that tells us we live between the times, that it is all too easy to lose sight of the way the world is, now that God has come.
There is no way to remove the eschatology of Christian ethics. We have learned that Jesus’ teaching was not first focused on his own status but on the proclamation of the inbreaking kingdom of God, which brought an end to other kingdoms.
Christians begin our ethics, not with anxious, self-serving questions of what we ought to do as individuals to make history come out right, because, in Christ, God has already made history come out right. The Sermon is the inauguration manifesto of how the world looks now that God in Christ has taken matters in hand. And essential to the way that God has taken matters in hand is an invitation to all people to become citizens of a new Kingdom, a messianic community where the world God is creating takes visible, practical form. Nowhere in the Sermon are believers encouraged to abandon this life
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The most interesting question about the Sermon is not, Is this really a practical way to live in the world? but rather, Is this really the way the world is? What is “practical” is related to what is real.
The question, in regard to the end, is not so much when? but, what? To what end? We cannot journey forth until we have some indication of where we are going.
So discipleship, seen through this eschatology, becomes extended training in letting go of the ways we try to preserve and give significance to the world, ways brought to an end in Jesus, and in relying on God’s definition of the direction and meaning of the world—that is, the kingdom of God.
So the first step to peace is letting go of ourselves, our things, our world.
Christians are free to work for peace in a nonviolent, hopeful way because we already know something about the end. We do not argue that the bomb is the worst thing humanity can do to itself. We have already done the worst thing we could do when we hung God’s Son on a cross.
Our hope is based not on Caesar’s missiles or Caesar’s treaties but on the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth.
The removal of eschatology from ethics may account for the suffocating moralism in our church. Moralism comes up with a list of acceptable virtues and suitable causes, the pursuit of which will give us self-fulfillment.
we inoculate the world with a mild form of Christianity so that it will be immune to the real thing.
The ethic of Jesus thus appears to be either utterly impractical or utterly burdensome unless it is set within its proper context—an eschatological, messianic community, which knows something the world does not and structures its life accordingly.
Martin Luther comments that this is the first Beatitude because, even if one feels spiritually rich at the beginning of the Sermon, one will feel terribly poor and needy by the end! How meager is our righteousness when set next to this vision of God’s kingdom! That insight would bring great despair were it not that we also believe our God forgives us. We have learned, in the colony, that it is not only difficult to forgive, it is difficult to receive forgiveness, because such an attitude reminds us of our utter dependency on God.
Here is a community in which even small, ordinary occurrences every Sunday, like eating together in Eucharist, become opportunities to have our eyes opened to what God is up to in the world and to be part of what God is doing.
Our everyday experience of life in the congregation is training in the arts of forgiveness; it is everyday, practical confirmation of the truthfulness of the Christian vision.
So there is nothing private in the demands of the Sermon. It is very public, very political, very social in that it depicts the public form by which the colony shall witness to the world that God really is busy redeeming humanity, reconciling the world to himself in Christ. All Christian ethical issues are therefore social, political, communal issues. Can we so order our life in the colony that the world might look at us and know that God is busy?
We believe that many Christians do not fully appreciate the odd way in which the church, when it is most faithful, goes about its business. We want to claim the church’s “oddness” as essential to its faithfulness.
Our assertion of the indispensability of the church for Christian living is more than the practical observation that life is difficult and thus we need a little help from our friends.
The church not only gives us the support we need in being moral, it also teaches us what being moral is.
the world needs the church because, without the church, the world does not know who it is. The only way for the world to know that it is being redeemed is for the church to point to the Redeemer by being a redeemed people. The way for the world to know that it needs redeeming, that it is broken and fallen, is for the church to enable the world to strike hard against something which is an alternative to what the world offers.
Unfortunately, an accommodationist church, so intent on running errands for the world, is giving the world less and less in which to disbelieve.
Christian theology should be preoccupied with the more biblical question, What kind of God exists?
The ethical task is not to tell you what is right or wrong but rather to train you to see. That explains why, in the church, a great deal of time and energy are spent in the act of worship: In worship, we are busy looking in the right direction.
It is here, in an episode like Matthew 18:1-4, in setting a child in the middle of disciples, that Christian ethics begin. By way of concrete examples and illustrations, the church assembles reminders of the kingdom of God in subtle, seemingly trivial and insignificant ways.
Learning to be moral is much like learning to speak a language. You do not teach someone a language (at least nowhere except in language courses at a university!) by first teaching that person rules of grammar. The way most of us learn to speak a language is by listening to others speak and then imitating them.
Ethics, as an academic discipline, is simply the task of assembling reminders that enable us to remember how to speak and to live the language of the gospel.
So the church can do nothing more “ethical” than to expose us to significant examples of Christian living. In fact, our ethical reflection, at its best, is usually nothing more than reflection on significant examples.
All you have to do to be moral, believed Kant, is to think clearly and to think for yourself, to get your basic, universally fitting principles right, and you will do the right thing. Being ethical is a matter of being more fully human, that is, more rational. Most modern people presume to be Kantian in their ethics, even if they do not know that they are Kantian.
