I think another title for the Sermon on the Mount could be “Life Advice from Jesus for Us to Mostly Ignore.” If you had never heard these teachings from Jesus and instead heard them for the first time from someone else, you’d call that person insane. Squash anger and lust and worry out of your heart. Pluck out your eye. Cut off your hand. Love your enemies. Pray for and do a favor for the people that bully you. And when someone slaps you, give them an open invitation to slap you again.
Tell me that doesn’t sound insane on its face. If this kind of advice originated with anyone besides Jesus, we’d roll our eyes at such a person and call him crazy. But since it’s Jesus, since it’s the Bible, we don’t think to grapple with how radical and risky it is.
“Love your enemies,” Jesus says (Matthew 5:44). But we operate by a programming which dictates that we resent our enemies, and if we get the chance, repay them the trouble they’ve caused us. Won’t loving our enemies leave us vulnerable? Won’t the bad guys win if the good guys choose love instead of power? Won’t our love be perceived as simply rolling over and letting them do whatever they want? What about accountability? Come to think of it, isn’t showing love to our enemies – and thereby not holding them accountable for their wrongs – a horribly irresponsible thing to do?
This is the logic by which the power brokers of the world keep us anxious, afraid, divided, and ready to retaliate. Jesus is giving us a whole different way of thinking. He’s making us “perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect (Mt 5:48).” When Jesus says perfect, he doesn’t mean faultless like a 100% score on a quiz. To Jesus, perfection means becoming fully what God is making us to be. He is putting his love in us, so much so that all our priorities, relationships, and instincts are being changed, made like his.
Yes, the world programs us to be angry, afraid, and distrustful of those who have hurt us. But there is a deeper programming. There is the divine consciousness that God put into us. We share his DNA. We are his children (5:45). His love is also the love that abides in us, even if we don’t know it yet.
This is good news! God is making us. And he is making us so joyful, loving, generous, and forgiving that it wouldn’t even occur to us to hate or mistreat or distrust or do violence to anyone. He is making us that much like Jesus, that anger and fear are the farthest things from our hearts and minds. He is making us so secure in his presence that we cannot possibly be ripped away from it, no matter how hateful or harmful the external world is to us. And therefore, he is placing within us a peace that cannot be disturbed by any attack from any enemy.
We are going to live and move and behave in this world as if it ruled by the prince of peace, because it is. And ours shall be a Christ-centered community in which we walk with each other through hurt and anger, approaching Jesus with and for each other so that he can show us again and again how to love the way he loves. It’s the hardest thing in the world, and the happiest thing in the world. What else would we expect from him?