When we turn the Sermon on the Mount—or any of Jesus’s teachings, really—into a handy compendium of pick-me-ups for spiritual go-getters, it proves we don’t get it. It proves we don’t get the gospel. What is discipleship, then, but following Jesus not on some religious quest to become bigger, better, or faster but to become more trusting of his mercy toward our total inability to become those things? When Jesus calls you a dog, in other words, you don’t argue with him—you own your dog-ness.
