Christianity in a Nutshell
Nov 21st, 2009 by Bill
The Sermon on the Mount: Christianity in a Nutshell
To listen to the audio recording please click on this link:
Early in his life, Gandhi promised a friend that he would read the Bible. He found the Jewish Scriptures very hard going, and actually developed an antipathy to certain of its books. However, when he came to the Christian Scriptures, his reaction was different. He found that he loved the figure of Jesus, and he told one of his earliest disciples, ‘The gentle figure of Christ, so patient, so kind, so loving, so full of forgiveness that he taught his followers not to retaliate when abused or struck, but to turn the other cheek, I thought it was a beautiful example of the perfect man.’ What impressed him most was the Sermon on the Mount.
The message of Jesus, as I understand it, is contained in the Sermon on the Mount …….If then I had to face only the Sermon on the Mount and my own interpretation of it, I should not hesitate to say, ‘Oh, yes, I am a Christian.’ But negatively I can tell you that in my humble opinion, what passes as Christianity is a negation of the Sermon on the Mount… I am speaking of the Christian belief, of Christianity as it is understood in the west.
Tolstoy, too, fell under the power of the Sermon on the Mount, and, after his re-conversion to Christianity when he was about fifty, he tried, not always successfully, to live the precepts contained in it. Like Gandhi, he was struck by the difference between the Christianity taught in churches – whatever the denomination – and the unadulterated version found in the teaching of Jesus. The Catholic Church taught that one would be saved by obedience to church teaching and through participating in certain rituals and sacraments. The Protestant churches taught salvation through faith – that is through believing that Christ has died for our sins. In both cases, the ethical precepts of the Gospels are downplayed in favour of an easier and more pragmatic route to salvation. Thus, said both Tolstoy and Gandhi, the churches have compromised the teaching of Jesus, considering it too elevated and impractical for mere mortals, and advocated instead more congenial and conventional modes of behaviour. Both Catholicism and Protestantism have substituted orthodoxy – right belief – for orthopraxis – right conduct.
What, then, is the Sermon on the Mount? Where can it be found? The very fact that I am asking these questions of educated people brought up in a nominally Christian culture suggests that it has not been accorded the importance that people like Gandhi and Tolstoy said that it should have been accorded. It is found in the Gospel of Matthew, chapters 5, 6, and 7. It consists of approximately 2,300 words, and it can be read through in ten minutes. The sermon you are currently listening to will have about the same number of words, and since this will take about twenty minutes to deliver, we can assume that this is how long it would have taken Jesus to deliver the Sermon on the Mount.
Now, I would imagine that a mountain is not really the place to deliver a sermon, for obvious reasons. But Matthew says that it took place on a mountain – without specifying which mountain – for a very important reason. The whole of Matthew’s Gospel presents Jesus as a new Moses, a new lawgiver; Matthew tells us that the baby Jesus was persecuted by Herod, just as the baby Moses was persecuted by Pharaoh. Moses was brought out of Egypt, and so was Jesus. And, just as Moses received the Ten Commandments from God on Mount Sinai, so Jesus delivers his most important sermon ‘on a mountain’.
It begins with the Beatitudes, which set the tone for what follows. In fact, the Beatitudes are probably as neat a summary of the general teachings of the sermon as one could make, and I have read of one religious teacher who used to tell his students that they could discard everything in the Bible except the Beatitudes and they would still have the essence of Christianity. This is probably the reason why the people who built this church gave them such prominence.
But take a look at the Beatitudes. You’ve probably looked at them a thousand times before, and each time you’ve no doubt concluded that they represent a noble but naive and unrealistic set of ideals which will never be realised. They extol the very people that the world seems either to despise or to patronise: the poor, the meek, the mourners, the merciful, the righteous, the peacemakers, and the persecuted. In short, the downtrodden of the earth. But these people are ‘happy’ says Jesus – that’s what the Greek word ‘makarios’ usually translated ‘blessed’ means; such people will be rewarded, says Jesus. ‘In your dreams,’ we respond. We know how to make people happy: give them wealth, power and influence; teach them to stand up for themselves, to fight for their rights, to inure themselves to pain, to behave in ways which will earn respect.
Jesus’ sermon goes on to be even more daringly and outrageously radical. His words on prayer, fasting, almsgiving, anger sexual morality and forgiveness, cut across the conventions of his time – indeed, of all time – and I may look at these in the coming months. But the passage which so impressed Tolstoy, and which actually motivated Gandhi’s non-violent resistance to the British in India, is the most troublesome of all, and it goes like this:
You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy’. But I tell you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. (Matthew 5:38-48)
It was to this passage that Gandhi pointed when asked by Lord Irwin, the former British Viceroy of India what he thought would solve the problems between Great Britain and India. Gandhi picked up a Bible and said: ‘When your country and mine shall get together on the teachings laid down by Christ in this Sermon on the Mount, we shall have solved the problems not only of our countries but those of the whole world.’
But it’s hard isn’t it? So hard that we choose to ignore it. When my mother and father married in the 1930s my father didn’t become a Catholic. ‘Why not?’ I heard my mother’s friend ask her when I was a little kid. ‘Because it’s a very difficult religion,’ my mother replied, not without a little pride. What she meant was that going to mass on Sundays is difficult; making your Easter Duties is difficult; going to regular confession is difficult; abstaining from meat on Fridays is difficult; saying your prayers every day is difficult. What she didn’t say – because she wasn’t really aware of it – was that turning the other cheek is difficult; refusing to take revenge is difficult; loving your enemies is difficult. Nobody had really told her about these difficulties, because the Sermon on the Mount in which they are taught was rarely mentioned in religious circles in those days.
It’s not really different today. I was amused, and saddened, a few weeks ago at the reaction of the Americans to the release of the man accused of the Lockerbie bombing, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, who is near to death and was allowed to go home on compassionate grounds, in keeping with Scottish tradition. The most Christian nation on earth seemed to have little time for compassion or forgiveness. ‘This will give the green light to terrorists throughout the world,’ said one pundit. No doubt knowing that if you are imprisoned after committing a similar atrocity you will be allowed home three months before you die, will certainly encourage acts of terrorism! Even President Obama disappointingly sided with those calling for the man to die in prison, and some commentators, unable to appreciate a simple act of kindness, have been trying to see the whole affair as part of a cynical trade agreement with Libya.
There’s no ‘turning the other cheek’ in world affairs. Not only was the ‘born-again’ George W. Bush keen to strike back at Afghanistan, he was even prepared to take pre-emptive strikes against Iraq. No politician ever got into office, or stayed in office, by acting on Christian principles.
Applying Jesus’ teaching in world affairs hardly seems practical as things stand; but what about our own personal lives . Can we as individuals turn the other cheek? Last week I had a gentle reminder that this is difficult too. On Tuesday I received an email from an American man who had visited the church with his wife a few weeks ago. When I opened it I expected it to contain some compliments about the beauty of the building and the warmness of the welcome they received, but I was sadly disappointed. Instead it contained little but criticism. He criticised the fact that we don’t have name tags, that there were so few children, that the minister’s time after the service was monopolised by one person, and, most wounding of all, that at coffee, no one spoke to them, no one greeted them. It wasn’t so much what he wrote which angered and offended me; it was his tone, which was dripping with sarcasm. ‘No doubt the conversation you had with one person after the service was necessary to his eternal salvation,’ he wrote. And, ‘We met some very friendly people in Ireland. Maybe you should try to get some of them to join your congregation.’
I replied, explaining, for example, that it was a warm summer’s day – one of the few this year – and this would explain why there were so few children; I mentioned that we had discussed having name tags, but decided against it on the grounds that it was not really in keeping with the way we do things in Ireland. I also told him how hurt I was by his comment about recruiting friendly people to the congregation, and that it was cheap and unnecessary. A few hours later I received a reply. No greeting, just four words: ‘Cheap, yes; unnecessary, no’.
At this I was very angry, but it was late and I resolved to save my reply till the morning. But as I was drifting off to sleep I was composing a reply in my head. I would send him a couple of testimonials from visitors who have found us very welcoming and friendly, and then end by saying something like: ‘Perhaps the reason why nobody spoke to you was that the sarcastic and sneering air of cultural superiority, which is so evident in your email was also written across your face that Sunday morning, and our normally friendly people instinctively shied away from you.’
Yes, that should do it, I thought. The next day, Wednesday, I wanted to find out how long it takes to read the Sermon on the Mount in preparation for today’s sermon, so I opened my Bible and began to read. Of course, I hadn’t gone very far before I came across those verses I read a few moments ago, and I realised that to respond to him in the way I was intending would be to do precisely what Jesus is telling me not to do! I must not meet anger with anger, sarcasm with sarcasm. I had to leave things as they were.
So, I didn’t write the email. Then, on Thursday, I received another email, this time from the man’s partner. She explained that they had come straight to the church immediately after landing in Ireland, and so were very tired and disorientated. She made a few positive comments about the sermon, and said that she was glad to see that Unitarianism is alive and well in Ireland. The email began with a greeting, and ended with ‘best wishes’.
Now, it would be foolish to say that the whole thing has been resolved amicably, but hostilities have been suspended, and the woman and I at least are on first name terms with each other, and both sides have had the opportunity to consider mitigating circumstances. Had I sent the email I was intending to send, I don’t think we would be at this point.
This is obviously a very trivial affair, but I think it illustrates the power of non-retaliation. Non retaliation is the essence of Christianity; this – not sacraments, not services, not metaphysics – is what makes it distinctive. And this principle, as the Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, Tolstoy and Martin Luther King all realised, difficult though it may be to put it into practice, has the power to transform our lives and our world.
September 27th 2009