Sermon Meme
A common Internet meme uses the Sermon on the Mount.
What’s known as Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is found in two of the gospels of the New Testament, in Matthew chapters 5-7 and in Luke chapter 6. Jesus addressed a “great multitude” of people who had, in all likelihood, but this one opportunity to hear his “good news”. Nowhere in his sermon did he suggest that there was more they needed to know from or about him. We can presume that the Sermon on the Mount was Jesus’ “stump speech”, or at least was the essence of his message that his early followers wanted to preserve.
The Sermon on the Mount has been as much Christianity as I can handle. I’ve occupied my whole life in a stumbling attempt to live up to it. Thank God it’s short! Just his admonition to love my enemies is overwhelming.
It’s worth reading again and again, not only for what’s in it, but for what’s not. If something is missing from the Sermon on the Mount, we can presume that it didn’t matter much to Jesus.
To the end of sorting the wheat from the chaff in Christianity, I offer this list of ten things that aren’t in the Sermon on the Mount:
1) Any reference to homosexuality and abortion. The “pelvic issues” Jesus raised in the Sermon on the Mount were limited to male lust for women, heterosexual adultery, and heterosexual divorce and remarriage – all of which he lumped into the same category of sinfulness. Find a heterosexual male who has never lusted for a woman! All heterosexual males are “busted” by this passage, so those in this category would do well to refrain from throwing stones at anybody for perceived lapses in morality.
2) Anything to believe in order to gain salvation. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was focused on good works, not on faith in dogma. Do we love even those who persecute us? Do we pray with sincerity? Do we forgive those who do us wrong? Are we liberated from useless worry? He asked people to practice a life of radical compassion. “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” (Matthew 7:21)
3) Any condemnation of other religions. This didn’t make Jesus a “pluralist”, necessarily. But neither did he contradict the possibility that other religions may be as good for others as ours is for us, in leading people to a fulfilled and compassionate way of life.
4) Anything supernatural. The Sermon on the Mount made no reference to anything miraculous. Jesus didn’t ask people to believe the unbelievable. His words and his example were enough to make his case. (The real miracle would be a person who could follow the Sermon on the Mount perfectly!)
5) The doctrine of the Trinity. In the Sermon on the Mount, he taught what we now know as the Lord’s Prayer – and he didn’t tell people to pray to him, but rather to their Father in heaven. He made no reference to a Holy Spirit.
6) The doctrine of original sin or substitutionary sacrifice. He acknowledged human sins in the Sermon on the Mount. But nowhere in it did he suggest that all of us deserve eternal hellfire because we were born into sin, or that he would have to die on the cross in order to save us from it.
7) The Bible. Jesus did not say that someday there would be a Christian Bible and that we must believe every word of it literally. He made references to passages in the Hebrew scriptures, but then expanded on them, suggesting that scripture alone was not sufficient guidance for living.
8) The second coming of Christ or “the end times”. He suggested that people could encounter him one day in the kingdom of heaven, but he made no mention of ever returning to earth in any kind of “second coming” after an apocalypse.
9) His own divinity, moral perfection, or birth from a virgin. He did not exempt himself from his own admonitions. He did not suggest that he was any different of a creature than the people in his audience.
10) Any endorsement for the “free enterprise system”. On the contrary, he said “You cannot serve God and wealth” and “Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you”. Whatever you think about capitalism, you won’t find any support for it from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount or anywhere else in the Gospels.
It's absurd to suggest that a person is any less a Christian for dropping the dogma that is not to be found in the Sermon on the Mount, because this sermon is all the religion anyone could need, and more religion than anyone fully can follow.
The Rev. Jim Burklo is associate dean of religious life at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He blogs at Musings.