This is the first of two posts summarizing our recent Sunday teaching series, The Spiritual Life of Jesus. In this post, we focus on understanding the Sermon on the Mount. In the next post, we will unpack Jesus’ spiritual method, which is at the center of his sermon.
Hello OSC family,
For the past 8 weeks, on Sunday mornings, we have embarked on a journey to answer what I think are the two most important questions many people in the U.S. are asking about Christianity at this time:
Why is Christianity so often on the wrong side of society's biggest social problems?
Why do Christians so often turn out to be hypocrites?
I think every church must directly or indirectly answer these questions. To do so, we have focused on exploring Jesus' central teachings in the “Sermon on the Mount,” found in Matthew chapters 5-7. This has been a broad overview intended to help us understand the big picture of Jesus’ core message. I think it’s true to say that if you don’t understand the Sermon on the Mount, you don’t really know what it means to be a student of Jesus.
Understanding the Sermon on the Mount
Jesus’ sermon can be broken down into three sections to help us understand the general flow and bigger picture of his core teaching: An introduction, where he sets up the religious problem of his day (which, it turns out, is similar to our own), the main body of his teaching, where he outlines his spiritual method, and the conclusion, where he frames his sermon in terms of wisdom. Below is my brief interpretive summary of the whole sermon broken down by topic.
Introduction: The problem
The Problem With Religion (Matt 5:1-11)
Jesus begins with the Beatitudes, through which he critiques those who have used religion to oppress the poor, sick, and meek in society. Jesus shockingly claims that God is closest to the poor, sick, & meek, not the rich, healthy, & dominant. In this way, Jesus points out something we all know to be true: religion is easily and ironically co-opted by powerful people, thereby becoming another source of human suffering.
The Whole Point of Spirituality (Matt 5:12-20)
Jesus then claims that this co-opting of religion by the powerful is a problem because the whole point of religion and spirituality is to make genuinely good people, or “salt and light” in the world, which is to say, people who repair the brokenness of the world (5:13-14). He goes on to say that this was always the intention of the Hebrew Torah, which is good (5:17-20). This is important to note because Jesus is often characterized as refuting Judaism. But Jesus was a Jewish rabbi! He plainly states that he is teaching his followers how to fulfill the Torah.
Jesus’ Solution & Spiritual Method
Diagnosing Humanity (Matt 5:21-42)
Next, Jesus offers his diagnosis of the core problem. Oppression, it turns out, is not the cause; it is a symptom. So what is the problem? In a series of memorable “antitheses,” (“You have heard it said, but I say…”) Jesus shows that religious rules often fail to address the root causes of human suffering. The root causes are the broken internal drives and desires of humanity that lead to harmful behaviors. This brokenness most commonly manifests as anger and contempt (5:21-26), sexual & gender violence (5:27-32), and the drive for control, power, and vengeance over and against others (5:33-42). Throughout these antitheses, Jesus illustrates better alternatives to escalating cycles of dominance and retribution. He prioritizes reconciliation over anger and contempt (5:24-25); he directs men to take responsibility for their harmful treatment of women (5:29-30, 32); he rejects the use of clever loopholes to avoid fulfilling our commitments (5:37); and he shows how the oppressed can assert their dignity while subverting oppressive power without resorting to violence (5:39, 42).
A Better Way to Live (Matt 5:43-48)
In this final, summative antithesis, Jesus makes it clear that all of these alternatives to fear, dominance, and violence are not forms of passivity but rather various expressions of love. And love is so utterly, radically different from fear, that it is willing to do what is good even for one’s enemies (5:43-48). Ultimately, love means growing up, becoming mature, and fully developing as healthy humans. This is what Jesus means by “perfection."
Redeeming Religious Practice (Matt 6:1-17)
Having illustrated that love is a better way to live, Jesus next teaches us his spiritual method for replacing the fear in our hearts with love. But there is a warning accompanying this as well. The three primary spiritual practices of Judaism — giving, prayer, and fasting — can either be used to serve our fears or grow us in love. Religion is a social ecosystem that can be used to either systematically produce goodness or, when governed by fear, systematically advance oppression. Therefore, spiritual practices are actually harmful when used to center our ego, which only feeds our fears (6:1-2, 5, 7, 16). But spiritual practices are incredibly helpful when we use them to starve our fears and feed the growth of love (6:3, 6, 17-18). So giving, prayer, and fasting are the primary means of cultivating love. But they must be done in a way that refuses the temptations of power and status that so easily corrupt our religious practices.
Becoming Spiritually Whole (Matt 6:18 - 7:11)
Next, Jesus teaches us how to nurture & regulate our spiritual growth by reflecting on seven spiritual milestones. These milestones represent progressive steps toward becoming spiritually stronger and healthier. The milestones can be incredibly helpful for generating self-insight and developing spiritual health and strength. The seven milestones are: 1) Learning to value God’s goodness above all else (6:19-21), 2) Learning to give our attention to what feeds love (6:22-23), 3) Learning to be free of the obsession with wealth and status (6:24), 4) Learning to let go of what we cannot control (6:25-43), 5) Learning to stop judging others as a form of control or as a distraction from our insecurities (7:1-5), 6) Learning not to impose our own ways of knowing, sensing, and being on others, (7:6), and 7) Learning to persevere through difficulty because we trust in the goodness of God (7:7-11).
Jesus’ Simple Rule of Life (Matt 7:12)
At this point, Jesus has covered tremendous philosophical, psychological, and theological territory. He has revealed that religion is easily and pervasively co-opted and abused as a means of gaining power. Contrary to this state of affairs, he claims that the purpose of religion and spirituality is to cultivate good people who repair the world's brokenness. He has shown that the brokenness of the world is a result of anger, contempt, sexual and gender violence, and the desire for control, dominance, and power, which are all manifestations of our deepest fears and insecurities. He has shown that spiritual practices done wrongly not only mask but stoke our fears, leading to more harm and oppression. However, done rightly, spiritual practices are indispensable for starving our fears and feeding the growth of courageous, dignifying, and reconciling love. And he has given us a practical method for progressing through seven milestones of spiritual health, growth, and development. This is a great deal of information to process! So, to make it simple and memorable, Jesus summarizes his whole teaching in one elegant rule of life: “Treat others the way you want to be treated” (7:12). Learn to do that, and you will fulfill the Torah and perfect God’s goodness.
Conclusion: the WISDOM of love
Choosing a Life of Wisdom (Matt 7:13-27)
But if it’s so simple, why is it so uncommon? Why, two thousand years after Jesus taught this sermon, does the world remain so utterly broken? Why do Christian churches and individuals so often fail to treat others how they would want to be treated? Jesus’ answer is that few people will follow his teachings because it is a hard road (7:13-14). Much like exercising and eating well, it requires focus, commitment, discernment, and self-discipline. Just like other kinds of fitness, you can know who lives this way by the outcomes of their life: do their lives generally produce harmfulness or goodness for others (7:15-20)? One sure indicator is whether or not their spiritual lives reflect an obsession with power rather than a singular focus on the simple goodness of love (7:21-23). Jesus characterizes this in terms consistent with classic Hebrew wisdom literature: Building one’s life on these teachings may seem hard now, but failing to do so will ultimately lead to ruin (7:24-27). In the long run, living a life of fear is far more costly than living a life of love.
The Problem With Religion, Revisited (Matt 7:28)
After the sermon, Matthew tells us people were amazed by Jesus’ authority, which seemed altogether different than the religious elites. In Jesus, we see that true spiritual authority is the credibility gained from having mastered the work of becoming a person characterized by love, not fear. False spiritual authority relies on coercion, manipulation, and abuse because it isn’t interested in doing the work of love; it is only interested in a shortcut to power. In this brief closing comment, we are reminded of the Beatitudes: religion is easily corrupted by the pursuit of power.
Revisiting our two questions:
So then, what are the answers to our two questions above?
1) Why is Christianity so often on the wrong side of the biggest social problems facing society?
Because much of Christianity has been co-opted by people who are obsessed with gaining power and privilege. As Jesus repeatedly points out, religion is an effective way to gain and keep power over others. This is not unique to religion — it is true of all collaborative human endeavors, especially those, like authoritarian expressions of religion, that emphasize competition. But religion has been and continues to be a particularly useful way to stoke fear, dominate, manipulate, control, and perpetuate violence. We see this in the way it is used to harm the poor, women, Queer people, people of color, indigenous communities, and people of other religions and cultures. The is a colonizing power at the heart of any religious creed that imagines their God(s) to be domineering and violent. That is not Jesus’ God.
2) Why do Christians themselves so often turn out to be hypocritical?
Because following Jesus’ spiritual method takes genuine, sustained, disciplined effort. It involves interrogating and confronting our fears and insecurities and replacing those with the vulnerable work of love. Many people — perhaps most people — prefer either the false authority of dominance or the false security of compliance. As G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
None of this, of course, has anything to do with going to heaven or hell after you die. Jesus is teaching wisdom for our lives, not a magic formula for getting into heaven. You can’t rightly understand the Sermon on the Mount (or any of Jesus’ teachings) if you can’t make that mental shift. Besides, if, as Jesus claims, love is the opposite of violent domination, then there is no place for a loving God who is domineering or violent.
For Jesus, then, “salvation” is liberation from fear, oppression, and violence at every conceivable particular and systemic level of existence: psychological, physical, interpersonal, sexual, familial, communal, social, political, ethnic, cultural, ecological, and cosmic. To be stuck in escalating cycles of fear, oppression, and violence in this life is hell enough for anyone. And if God truly is love — the kind of love that loves one’s enemies — then we can trust Them to do right by our souls after we die without worry or anxiety of any kind.
Comments are open if you have thoughts to add or questions to ask. In the next post we will visit Jesus’ practical spiritual method in more detail.