A Teaching to Be Lived Out
CENTER FOR ACTION AND CONTEMPLATION
Father Richard considers how challenging it is to live out Jesus’ teaching on the Sermon on the Mount:
I am told that the Sermon on the Mount—the essence of Jesus’ teaching—is the least quoted Scripture in official Catholic Church documents. We must be honest and admit that most of Christianity has focused very little on what Jesus himself taught and spent most of his time doing: healing people, doing acts of justice and inclusion, embodying compassionate and nonviolent ways of living.
I’m grateful that my spiritual father, St. Francis of Assisi, took the Sermon on the Mount seriously and spent his life trying to imitate Jesus. Likewise, Francis’ followers, especially in the beginning, tried to imitate Francis. At its best, Franciscanism offers a simple return to the gospel as an alternative lifestyle more than an orthodox belief system. That example continues to be lived out by the Quakers, Amish, Mennonites, the Catholic Worker Movement, and others. For these groups, the Sermon on the Mount is not just words! At their best, they include the outsider, prefer the margins to the center, are committed to nonviolence, and choose social poverty and divine union over any private perfection or sense of moral superiority.
At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives us this short but effective image so we will know that we are to act on his words and live the teachings, instead of only believing things about God:
Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise person who built a house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. But it did not collapse; it had been set solidly on rock. And everyone who listens to these words of mine but does not act on them will be like a fool who built a house on sand. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. And it collapsed and was completely ruined (Matthew 7:24–27; Richard’s emphasis).
Dorothy Day, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker Movement, understood the Sermon on the Mount as the foundational plan for following Jesus: “Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be peacemakers.” [1] She observed that “we are trying to lead a good life. We are trying to talk about and write about the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, the social principles of the church, and it is most astounding, the things that happen when you start trying to live this way. To perform the works of mercy becomes a dangerous practice.” [2]
Jesus taught an alternative wisdom that shakes the social order instead of upholding the conventional wisdom that maintains it. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is not about preserving the status quo! It’s about living here on earth as if the reign of God has already begun (see Luke 17:21). In this reign, the Sermon tells us, the poor are blessed, the hungry are filled, the grieving are filled with joy, and enemies are loved.
References:
[1] Dorothy Day, Selected Writings, ed. Robert Ellsberg (Orbis Books, 2002), 262.
[2] Dorothy Day, All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day, ed. Robert Ellsberg (Marquette University Press, 2010), 166.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Scripture as Liberation, (Center for Action and Contemplation, 2002). Available as MP3 audio download.
Image credit and inspiration: Rachel Spina, untitled (detail), 2023, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. The woman watches the child marvel at the flowers—each of them practicing the Beatitudes by noticing and honoring what is small and vulnerable.
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