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| AdAzaria Mbatha, Sermon on the Mount. Linocut. |
Life-giving words from a hillside
Realising how his ministry was a magnet
to open-hearted people with hungry minds and a desire to change, Jesus takes to
the hills with the committed and the hangers-on. His extended sermon delivered
from a mount must have fired the imaginations and memories of his hearers. Of
course, aural tradition was much stronger in those days. Stories could be
handed down fairly accurately. And, scholars think, this is an example of a
strong aural tradition that was handed down by those who were close to Jesus
and circulated to gatherings of Christians in communities across the region in
the decades after Jesus' life, death and resurrection.
So here, for the first time in Matthew's
account so far, we begin to glimpse the inner workings of Jesus' mind as he
lays out his manifesto for lifelong living as followers and disciples. No
apprentice is going to be fired today, just fired up!
It is utterly counter-cultural and down
to earth. Jesus teaches about what is like to be at the bottom of the pile, at
the end of your rope and having lost everything - and how God reaches in to
each person and shifts gravitational pulls away from destructive patterns of
thought and behaviour to life-giving patterns.
He teaches about blessings of
contentedness and compassion and courage in the face of opposition or
persecution. He teaches about how, as our centre of gravity moves from
self-centredness to God-centredness, so our impact on others grows.
And by being salt and light in the
company we keep and the country we live in, we begin to draw more and more
people to God's ways. For this is God's eternal law, that God is the centre of
gravity, not us. And this will never change even if the stars burn up and the
earth wears out.
His teachings are very real about the
forces at work in the inner being. Anger, lust, lies and deceit are all tackled
head on. Become more and more aware of these inner forces and deal with them
immediately they begin to take hold, says Jesus. He seems to understand the
human psychology like a wise counsellor or therapist, yet somehow with an eye
to the bigger picture - the full panorama of human existence. If society is to
survive, it must learn to live with difference and forgive, forgive, forgive.
And to that end he says love your
enemies. Pray for those who oppose you or make your life a misery. Live
generously. No more tit-for-tat. Grow up in to the maturity God made you for.
Let a new centre of gravity rule. This is God's kingdom.
Love your enemy. How incredibly difficult. That is easier to do if my enemy is at a distance where they can no longer hurt me, but if I have to face them daily, how is that possible? What does this commandment really mean? How could I forgive someone if they hurt my children? Consider those whose children have been abused or murdered.
ReplyDeleteIf my enemy is someone like IS who does't, currently , directly affect me that is a lot easier. I can pray easily, though I struggle to help my children understand why I pray for them. They reply vehemently" We will never pray for such evil people!"
I wonder how the crowds felt, who followed Jesus when he was healing every kind of disease and sickness, but who now turns to hard teaching. They thought they knew how to live ("you have heard that it was said of old..") but Jesus changes everything ("but I say to you..") with his radical teaching. It is very challenging and hard to be a follower of Jesus when we've been hurt, when sickness is not cured, when evil abounds. We need the inner transforming work of the Holy Spirit, so why doesn't Matthew mention the Holy Spirit in this chapter?
ReplyDeleteOh, dear! We’ve got to the Sermon on the Mount! It doesn’t matter whether this was delivered as a single ‘sermon’ by Jesus or is compiled by Matthew from what Jesus taught on many occasions. We have three chapters of utter challenge to how we live our daily lives. They are both inspirational and daunting; a guide-book to Christian living with worked examples.
ReplyDeleteThey are inspirational because they show an attitude towards the people around us that expresses how God’s love can be made real in human lives. In 1 Corinthians 13 Paul wrote, "And now I will show you a better way", and wrote the famous section on love, which is the underlying theme of the Sermon on the Mount. And that 'better way' is surely the essence of the Christian message for the here and now. It is how Jesus lived on earth, and how he calls us to live on earth. These are life encounters that apply to what I should be doing day by day and hour by hour, whatever circumstances may arise and however I may be treated. The Sermon on the Mount calls for a response in love and respect in my current situation. Every Christian must be inspired when they read these chapters with hearts open to love.
So why the ‘Oh, dear!’ I started with? Well, it’s the scale of the challenge. We can all pick sections to feel smug about. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never killed anyone, so brownie points for that, but I have been known to get angry with people, often unjustifiably so. Jesus says that’s just as bad! That’s why I described these chapters as ‘daunting’. They can easily bring a sense that ‘the bar is too high’ and I can’t do this; that I haven’t lived, and can’t live, at the level Jesus describes. As the prayer of confession says, ‘we have not loved you with our whole heart, and we have not loved our neighbour as ourselves’.
That’s where the Holy Spirit within us comes in, coupled with the grace and mercy of God. Yesterday I commented that there was new hope arising from the early teaching of Jesus. Today we rely on that hope to grow and develop in our response to the challenge of the Sermon on the Mount. The loving life-style that so often we fail to achieve by our own inner strength, we can attain through the grace of God and the strength of the Spirit within us, if we make ourselves open to them. The Sermon on the Mount: Inspirational? – yes! Daunting? – yes! Fully achieved? – no! Impossible? – by the grace of God, no!
I had read chapter 5 a couple of time and oh dear, I fall a mile short.
DeleteSeveral points disturb me. I couldn't encourage anyone to stay in a violent marriage, in fact I would say to the ones in danger, "Get out and go somewhere safe." When marriages end in divorce and folk move on , I'm glad that they have at last found happiness and got their life back on track. Life is too short to be be in a relationship that destroys you...
A few weeks ago I had a few days when I was in agony with a severely painful back, I could barely move and I swore. A lot!!!
Then I picked up in the chapter about prayer, pray in private, we do, but we also pray in mass in church..... Keep your prayers simple and to the point,like this. Our Father who art in heaven ..... what do we do in church ? we lengthen and flower up our prayer time, I wish it could be simple and to the point like we are being told it should be and as far as forgiving others and turning the other cheek.... If someone hurts me deeply I can be friendly again but I can't always forget and I lose trust. I just hide my feelings.
So I'm a mile short .......