We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known;
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing;
Sing praises to His Name; He forgets not His own.

Beside us to guide us, our God with us joining,
Ordaining, maintaining His kingdom divine;
So from the beginning the fight we were winning;
Thou, Lord, were at our side, all glory be Thine!

We all do extol Thee, Thou Leader triumphant,
And pray that Thou still our Defender will be;
Let Thy congregation escape tribulation;
Thy Name be ever praised! O Lord, make us free!
– Adrianus Valerius (1575-1625), from “We Gather Together” (1597)

With Chapter 7 of the Gospel Book of Matthew, which constitutes the core of our post today, Jesus closes His Sermon on the Mount. Of course, we know that Jesus didn’t speak in discreet Gospel chapters, and nor does it seem very likely to me that these words were first spoken all together by Jesus in such a tidily organized way. Yet, the Bible is considered to be a holy book. So for all of its history, there has been no other truth than that God spoke, and this sacred Book was received from God and from God’s Son, Jesus, just as we have it now. But in truth, we know as a historical fact that the parts of what became the Christian Bible, which were in main part the Hebrew Torah; the scrolls of the Prophets; the various versions of the words of Jesus plus the story of His life; and also the letters of Paul to the first communities of Jesus’s followers: all the pieces arrived at the Roman Emperor Constantine’s First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE. There the Councilors set about assembling from these materials their first Christian Bible for what would become the very first followers of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s new Christian religion. What seems likely is that those Councilors received as a part of this trove a whole pile of sayings of Jesus that had been carefully passed down within families and groups for decades, then written down after sixty to eighty years, and thereafter preserved by Apostles and Teachers, with probably no precise circumstances any longer attached to many of these bits of sayings. So, I assume that the Councilors did the sensible thing. They organized some of Jesus’s sayings by topic and by type, and then they cut them into three chapters of the Book of Matthew, since one chapter would have been overlong, et voila! They had The Sermon on the Mount.

My Thomas tells me that he and Jesus were present as disembodied Beings at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE; and critically, in significant ways, they influenced the minds of the Councilors who were putting together the first Christian Bible. He tells me that, yes, at Constantine’s instruction, those Counselors did add some nonsense about hell and Armageddon to the Gospels, but he and Jesus were able to mind-influence them to put such religion-inspired errors mostly at the backs of each Gospel book, where they could influence other minds in much later generations to find and pluck such errors out again. So, then I also have asked my dear Thomas, well, and of course The Sermon on the Mount is a compilation of Jesus’s sayings, right? Jesus didn’t just give The Sermon on the Mount all at the same time, on an actual hill, as perfect as that Sermon is? But Thomas won’t answer my question! All he will tell me is that Jesus did actually say all that is said in The Sermon on the Mount. These are all His teachings, so it doesn’t matter when or where He gave us these teachings.

Chapter 7 is especially full of wonderful sermon-fodder for far-future preachers! It nicely pulls together themes from the earlier parts of The Sermon on the Mount, and it gives us these teachings straight from the Lord in such a beautiful, colloquial way that if you have read the previous three posts in this series, there is little more that Thomas and I can add here. These words sing from Jesus’s heart to our own hearts.   

And for me, whenever I read the beautiful Sermon on the Mount, the soft tone of Chapter 7 somehow shifts me from sitting on that hill and listening directly to Jesus, and lets me feel that I also am seeing into the room where they likely put it all together. You almost can see those First Nicaean Councilors, quill-pens in hand and busily bent to their work, and of course working efficiently, because their Emperor himself is stalking around their big planked table impatiently, already wearing his armor and requiring them to produce his finished religion right away so he can be out there and be about his conquering! A great many sayings of Jesus here! What to do? What to do? When you envision The Sermon on the Mount having been put together this way at the First Council of Nicaea, from many sayings of Jesus collected and then organized roughly by topic and by type, then it all makes a lot of sense. It is hard to envision, though, even the Son of God simply sitting down on a rock on the side of a hill one day and randomly giving such a lengthy, well-organized, and beautiful speech, entirely without any notes.

(Again, these headings are not from the speech, but they appear in the Bible for our ease of reading. And in this first section, note that to the Hebrews of Jesus’s day, dogs were not pets, but they were herding and guard animals; and swine were unclean and never eaten.)

Judging Others

7 “Do not judge so that you will not be judged. ² For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you. ³ Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? ⁴ Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and behold, the log is in your own eye? ⁵ You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.

⁶ “Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.

(My dear ones, the first two sentences below have guided my entire life! They were the touchstone of my fifty years of afterlife research, and they have been what I have put before Jesus in supplication whenever I have needed information as I have been doing this work.)

(And notice how Jesus tells us below that “treat people the same way you want them to treat you” literally replaces all the religious rules of the entire Old Testament, including all Ten Commandments!)

Prayer and the Golden Rule

⁷ “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. ⁸ For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. ⁹ Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? ¹⁰ Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? ¹¹ If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!

¹² “In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

(Jesus gives us below the reason why so many people make so little spiritual progress in each earth-lifetime! That “narrow gate” is devoid of earthly distractions and composed of love alone; the “wide gate”, on the other hand, is composed of all this world’s often pretty distractions.)

The Narrow and Wide Gates

¹³ “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. ¹⁴ For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.

(When I was young, the second paragraph below distressed me very much. How could someone cast out demons and perform miracles in Jesus’s name, and yet be rejected and called lawless by Jesus? For the answer to that question, we are told that we must look to the first paragraph below. Jesus is telling us that it is not enough to simply appear to be a true prophet, to look like one, but we must be able to produce the fruit of a prophet, which is perfect lovingkindness. He is comparing a flashy TV preacher who is out for money to a true servant of God seeking just to do God’s work.)

(Do you see how Chapter 7 pulls so much of the rest of the earlier parts of The Sermon on the Mount together?)

A Tree and Its Fruit

¹⁵ “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. ¹⁶ You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? ¹⁷ So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. ¹⁸ A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. ¹⁹ Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. ²⁰ So then, you will know them by their fruits.

²¹ “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. ²² Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ ²³ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’

(So here just below Jesus summarizes the whole reason why His listeners really must take all of what He has been saying in His Sermon on the Mount to heart! Enter through that narrow gate of pure lovingkindness; build using just solid stones of truth and forgiveness and rightness, and the strong cedar logs of spiritual certitude, and your house will be on a foundation that can withstand any possible storm that life might throw at it. His way is the only right way to Life.  

The Two Foundations

²⁴ “Therefore everyone who hears these un of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. ²⁵ And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. ²⁶ Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. ²⁷ The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and great was its fall.”

²⁸ When Jesus had finished these words, the crowds were amazed at His teaching; ²⁹ for He was teaching them as one having authority, and not as their scribes (MT 7:1-29).

The sun is setting beyond the fringe of trees growing along the top of that long-ago Galilean hill. Jesus has completed His Sermon on the Mount. Water jugs have been passed around all day long among the thousands of people who have been listening, sitting in groups below us on the hill and strung all down the valley; but everyone is hungry now. Jesus is growing hoarse. And we who had traveled here briefly from the far future are relieved to remember that we can simply turn around twice, close our eyes and open them again, and we are home! My beloved friends, this post concludes our walk together through The Sermon on the Mount, which is arguably the centerpiece of Jesus’s teachings. I urge you to read it often. Doing that takes little time, simply reading the Gospel Book of Matthew, Chapters 5-7. And I have found that often reading it brings you much closer to the living Jesus. 

We all do extol Thee, Thou Leader triumphant,
And pray that Thou still our Defender will be;
Let Thy congregation escape tribulation;
Thy Name be ever praised! O Lord, make us free!
– Adrianus Valerius (1575-1625), from “We Gather Together” (1597)

 (Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.

I looked over Jordan, and what did I see,
Comin’ for to carry me home?
A band of angels comin’ after me,
Comin’ for to carry me home.

Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.

If you get there before I do,
Comin’ for to carry me home,
Just tell my friends that I’m a comin’ too!
Comin’ for to carry me home.
– Wallace Willis, former slave (ca 1820-1880), from “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (1863)

Just listening passively to the words of Jesus is a far different matter from truly and deeply, actually hearing what Jesus is saying as He speaks directly from His heart to our hearts! After all, many of the sayings of Jesus are famous. And when you hear His words used, and even misused often enough, they begin to lose their deep significance in your mind. Especially since the religion that carries Jesus’s name has in some cases distorted what seem to have been the Lord’s intended meanings for some of the things that He said, this can be a very big problem!  This is why Thomas and I have asked you to imagine for our series of blog posts about The Sermon on The Mount that you are quite literally sitting with us now on that Galilean hill. We urge you to stretch your mind to believe that you are listening to the itinerant preacher who is Jesus Himself, and hearing His words literally the very first time that they were spoken. Think of these words as not tied to any religion at all just yet, but as instead coming directly from God to you by way of God’s living Son and True Messenger.

The Gospel Book of Matthew, Chapter 6, comes next in The Sermon on the Mount, and it deals with our personal relationship with God, and also with some of the more mundane-seeming aspects of our internal lives. Jesus is gently trying to wake us up to the notions that what we are thinking about, and the way that we think, both are really all-important! For us to talk to God every day is important as well. Jesus teaches us in this Gospel Chapter how best to handle these most private aspects of our lives, and even our most intimate daily thoughts. It may surprise you to learn that some scholars now believe that in Jesus’s day, a lot of these ideas in Chapter 6 which seem only normal to us may actually have been heard by their first listeners as brand-new, and even as radical!  Back then, all these people were farmers and laborers, and most of them were illiterate; so for nearly all of them, and throughout nearly all of human history, there was pretty much nothing going on upstairs. And this was a more complete nothing going on than anything that we can imagine today: we are told that before electronics, before even literacy, it is suspected now that these people literally did not think much at all, when compared to the way that we think today. I can recall seminar discussions about this problem in college. Our modern minds are encyclopedias chock-full of interesting stuff to think about in every moment of our lives, when compared to the empty minds of those ten thousand people around us, sitting and listening to the words of Jesus on that Galilean hill.

So listening to Jesus is, for the very simple people of His day, even that much richer and more amazing as a life-experience than anything that you and I can imagine. No wonder so many of them would follow Him for days, eager to hear even much more of what He was saying! It would have been for them almost as if an alien from space had landed in your city and started spouting some truly amazing things. So after that wake-up jolt of the second part of Chapter 5, now we move into the comforting and love-filled spiritual guidance that makes up Jesus’s Chapter 6 of The Sermon on the Mount:

(Quick aside as you begin your reading of Chapter 6: there is a wonderful story in the early-twentieth-century afterlife literature about a woman who had obviously read The Sermon on the Mount, and she had taken to heart Jesus’s command that we be secretive in our charity and not let our left hand know what our right hand is doing [see MT 6:3 below]. This woman made a practice of secretly doing something good for someone else every day of her adult life; and if a kindness of hers was discovered, then she made herself do some other secret kindness to replace it, that same day. When this woman died, she was given a gigantic celebration and parade in the afterlife which was said to be like nothing else ever seen there! We know about it only because a man who had died around the same time described it to his family through deep trance medium Gladys Osborne Leonard, and it was preserved in a contemporary book written about that medium.)  

6 “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven.

² “So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. ³ But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, ⁴ so that your giving will be in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

⁵ “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. ⁶ But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

⁷ “And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words. ⁸ So do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.

(As we can see, a lot of this is about transforming what was the simple and outward-focused very public religious life that prevailed prior to Jesus’s day and was managed by the smug and dominant clergy into a more personal and individual spiritual life that is inward-focused and private, since our relationship with God is meant to be internal. It is no wonder that the clergy soon came to hate Jesus, and were always testing Him!)

 “Pray, then, in this way:

‘Our Father who is in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
¹⁰ ‘Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
¹¹ ‘Give us this day our daily bread.
¹² ‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
¹³ ‘And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’

¹⁴ For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.

¹⁵ But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.

Fasting; The True Treasure; Wealth (These titles appear in the Bible only and were, of course, not spoken.)

¹⁶ “Whenever you fast, do not put on a gloomy face as the hypocrites do, for they neglect their appearance so that they will be noticed by men when they are fasting. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. ¹⁷ But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face ¹⁸ so that your fasting will not be noticed by men, but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

¹⁹ “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. ²⁰ But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; ²¹ for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

²² “The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. ²³ But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!

²⁴ “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

(This beautiful summary of what human goodness is, and what it means to put the pure love of God first in your inner life, could be read again and again, as each word sings in your heart!)

The Cure for Anxiety

²⁵ “For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ²⁶ Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? ²⁷ And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? ²⁸ And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, ²⁹ yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. ³⁰ But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! ³¹ Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ ³² For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. ³³ But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. ³⁴ “So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

(This is the most glorious exhortation and call to faith and trust in God that I have ever read! Some who have taken courses that I have given in how to rapidly raise your personal spiritual vibrations enough to make this your last necessary earth-lifetime, which essentially teach how to love and trust God enough that you can live by the beautiful paragraph just above, have told me that paragraph is perfectly true! If you completely trust God and live your whole life spiritually in the shelter of God’s perfect love, truly God does indeed provide, and miracles do happen. And my own life-experience has been amazingly the same as theirs has been.)  

The treasured wisdom of Matthew’s Chapter 6 is all so beautifully said, dear much-beloved Jesus! Thank you, Dear Heart! We look now toward Chapter 7 of the Gospel Book of Matthew, where Jesus sums up for the quiet crowd of many thousands spread sitting all along this narrow valley below us  the rest of what He has been teaching all along the way as He walked through Galilee with His disciples, while the sun begins to sink toward the farthest hills. We will complete our four-part study of The Sermon on the Mount next week.

Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.

I’m sometimes up and sometimes down,
Comin’ for to carry me home.
But still my soul feels heavenly bound!
Comin’ for to carry me home.
– Wallace Willis, former slave (ca 1820-1880), from “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (1863)

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

For the beauty of the earth,
For the splendor of the skies,
For the love which from our birth
Over and around us lies.
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.

For the wonder of each hour,
Of the day and of the night,
Hill and vale, and tree and flower,
Sun and moon, and stars of light.
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.

For the joy of human love,
Brother, sister, parent, child,
Friends on earth and friends above,
For all gentle thoughts and mild.
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.
– Folliot Sandford Pierpoint (1835-1917), from “For the Beauty of the Earth” (1864)

My beloved friends, sitting here as we still are on this tall Galilean hill, with the Master sitting just above us on the hill surrounded by His disciples, with the sun higher just beyond the trees and the day growing warm around us now, we can hear that Jesus is getting deeper into sharing with us His saintly wisdom.  Those of us here in our little group of only just a few thousand people have walked for days from the far future, just to have this chance to hear Him. To hear humankind’s greatest Teacher! But, we realize now that the valley below us is filling with many more thousands of people, to even beyond what the eye can see. So, how will we find food and water today, and even by nightfall, we are asking one another now. How will we feed and care for our children?

Jesus has a very big voice. It carries, even far down across that broad valley below us. There is no word in the literature that I can recall seeing about people  having trouble ever hearing Him speaking, even though so many thousands, and sometimes even tens of thousands, would assemble to listen to Him raptly. And they would follow Him, even for days sometimes, so He often had trouble finding ways to feed them. And from our far-future modern vantage point now, we have to wonder, as we listen to Him speaking so beautifully, how He gave such a long and such an organized speech as The Sermon on the Mount, without any notes at all. Still, after all, Jesus came to us as God on earth, did He not? And although He sometimes denies that He was God on earth, He was born to us from the Godhead, so God on earth is what He truly was. And so, perhaps even more to the point, we are wondering now how such a long speech can have been remembered in such a well-organized way, even three centuries after it was given, so it could have been remembered precisely for inclusion in the First Council of Nicaea’s original Christian Bible in 325 CE. The record strongly suggests that Jesus’s words were memorized by His listeners, and were passed down orally for sixty to eighty years before they even were first written down.

The passage that follows is the second half of Chapter 5 of the Gospel Book of Matthew. It directly follows the Beatitudes that we studied last week, which begin The Sermon on the Mount; and as we did last week, we suggest that you might first read the rest of this blog post, including Thomas’s and my brief parenthetical commentary. Then after that, so you can better experience hearing Jesus directly, you might go back and read just the Gospel Beatitudes in dark print from last week, and then read Jesus’s words in dark print from this week, right after them.

To best envision that Galilean morning two thousand years ago, please understand that Jesus with His disciples had likely just been walking for days. This was what Jesus very often did, as a charismatic itinerant Teacher. He would walk for days sometimes, stopping often along the way to eat, sleep, teach, and heal people. He could see now that He had gathered a tremendous crowd of listeners along the way:  think of ten thousand people, or even more, who were following him just  to hear a lot more from Him! He noticed a likely hill that He could teach them from, so he went up the hill maybe thirty or forty feet and sat down, and He called his disciples to come and sit around Him, which was a signal for that gigantic crowd to stop walking and back up and settle down in groups onto the ground all around them and back down that long valley. It is thought that while the crowd was in the process of settling, Jesus gave to mainly his own disciples the more sophisticated teaching that is the Beatitudes, which was what we studied last week. But then, once the crowd had mostly settled, came the literal fire and brimstone that we are about to receive this week!

(What is most surprising about this week’s teaching is that in it, Jesus uses such a thoroughly modern technique. He uses the technique of argument from extremes to altogether reset His listeners’ attitudes toward our relationships with others AWAY from just the minimal standards that the old Judaic Law that they had known for their whole lives required, and TOWARD the utmost perfection that is demanded by God’s new internal Law of Love. There is nothing subtle or even literal about His words here at all, and it would probably be another fifteen hundred years, and well into what we would  much later refer to as the Middle Ages, before very much more educated people could be trusted actually to hear some of what Jesus is saying to us today with the same level of sophistication with which Jesus is saying and meaning it!  I mean, good grief, did they think he was telling them to cut off hands and pluck out eyes LITERALLY? We can have no way to know how Jesus’s very first listeners heard some of this, but to be frank, until I was maybe fifty years old and I had absolutely convinced myself with a lifetime of afterlife research that there really is no fiery hell, I was pretty alarmed by some of this!)

Personal Relationships (Again, these headings are just in the Bible, and they were of course not spoken by Jesus.)

²¹ “You have heard that the ancients were told, ‘You shall not commit murder’ and ‘Whoever commits murder shall be liable to the court.’ ²² But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to his brother, ‘You good-for-nothing,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the hell of fire. ²³ Therefore if you are presenting your offering at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, ²⁴ leave your offering there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and present your offering. ²⁵ Make friends quickly with your opponent at law while you are with him on the way, so that your opponent may not hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the officer, and you be thrown into prison. ²⁶ Truly I say to you, you will not come out of there until you have paid up the last cent.

(Gehenna was a valley just outside Jerusalem where they burned trash, so fires were always burning there. Depending upon which Biblical translation you read, that word might be translated throughout the Sermon on the mount as “hell of fire”, but I have been kind and done that only the first time it appears here! Just think “hell” each time you see “Gehenna” hereafter. You can imagine how, as a teenager who had not yet begun to do afterlife research and eventually discovered that no hell exists, I had found reading this part of The Sermon on the Mount and found Jesus here repeatedly referencing “hell” to be terrifying!)

²⁷ “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; ²⁸ but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. ²⁹ If your right eye makes you sin, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into Gehenna. ³⁰ If your right hand makes you sin, cut it off and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to go into Gehenna.

(President Jimmy Carter is remembered for having told us that he was troubled by this passage, because he had, he very sadly said, often looked at women other than his wife with a bit of lust!)

³¹ “It was said, ‘Whoever sends his wife away, let him give her a certificate of divorce’; ³² but I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of unchastity, makes her commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

³ “Again, you have heard that the ancients were told, ‘You shall not make false vows, but shall fulfill your vows to the Lord.’ ³⁴ But I say to you, make no oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, ³⁵ or by the earth, for it is the footstool of His feet, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. ³⁶ Nor shall you make an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. ³⁷ But let your statement be, ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘No, no’; anything beyond these is of evil.

(Some translations say here, “anything beyond these is from the evil one”, and thereby they imply the existence of an incarnate Devil. My afterlife research has never found any evidence for an incarnate Devil as such, so this is another thing that once bothered me about The Sermon on the Mount, but this more accurate translation feels more comfortable.).   

³⁸ “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ ³⁹ But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. ⁴⁰ If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. ⁴¹ Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two. ⁴² Give to him who asks of you, and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you.

(I love this! The Code of Hammurabi, or as it is sometimes called, “The Law of Retaliation” dates to about 1790 BCE, and it is said to be the base of the Torah, and therefore of both Jewish and Christian law. Jesus here replaces it with a kind of opposite law of radical peace and perfect love.)

⁴³ “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ ⁴⁴ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ⁴⁵ so that you may ^]be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. ⁴⁶ For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? ⁴⁷ If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? ⁴⁸ Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:21-48).

 (Here we learn directly from Jesus that our goal is no longer to keep just the minimal standard of righteously obeying the ancient laws handed down from God thousands of years ago. Oh, no!  Now, my dear ones, our goal must be, and it can only be nothing less than to achieve God’s Own level of pure and perfect love!)

In Chapter Five of the Gospel book of Matthew, Jesus powerfully teaches you and me a full master-class in spiritual growth toward our own personal spiritual perfection. As we go back over last week’s black letters, and then add to them this week’s powerful black letters, we are so grateful to our cherished  Elder Brother and Best Friend for the fact that He never talks down to us. No, even though we are still spiritual children, so He is speaking to us in straightforward terms, He does not hold back. He really does tell it to us precisely the way that it is! He knows that when we very soon go home, we are not going to be able to fudge things at all, but we will be able to achieve only the level of the glorious astral plane which is our true home that we have achieved in terms of our growth in love while we were here on earth. We will achieve that, but no higher. So, hold tight now. They are passing the bread and the water-jugs below us in the valley. It is barely noon on this Galilean hill, and we have two more wonderful chapters of the Gospel of Matthew still to go….

For the church, that evermore
Lifteth holy hands above,
Offering up on every shore
Her pure sacrifice of love.
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.

For Thyself, best Gift Divine.
To us all so freely given,
For that great, great love of Thine,
Peace on earth and joy in Heaven.
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.
– Folliot Sandford Pierpoint (1835-1917), from “For the Beauty of the Earth” (1864)

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Morning has broken like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning,
Praise for them springing fresh from the world.

Sweet the rains new fall, sunlit from Heaven,
Like the first dewfall on the first grass.
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden,
Sprung in completeness where His feet pass.

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning,
Born of the one light, Eden saw play.
Praise with elation, praise every morning,
God’s recreation of the new day.
– Yusuf/Cat Stevens, from “Morning Has Broken” (1971)

The thing that vexes and confounds my beloved Thomas and me most of all about modern Christianity is the fact that, while it loudly and everywhere proclaims the name of Jesus, the religion does so very little to share any of the teachings of Jesus. And this is true, even when Jesus Himself tells us that sharing God’s Word is the reason why He returned to earth from the Godhead as Jesus two thousand years ago! He was then a perfected Being, and troubled very much by the fact that so few people on earth understood why they were living on earth at all, so they learned very little in each earth-lifetime. As a result, so many of them were spending so many additional and unnecessary lifetimes, as the Buddha had said that so many people then were doing, just “turning on the wheel” unproductively. Jesus tells us that it was His purpose in being born on earth with the name of Jesus, which was then a common name, and as a simple Jewish preacher, well-educated but poor and living here dependent on the kindness of others. Jesus came as God’s messenger to the Jews, who were God’s chosen people and the world’s first true monotheists, to teach them how they could spiritually achieve the kingdom of God in this earth-lifetime.

As Jesus still insists to you and me, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32). He tells us that if we only will listen to His teachings, and if we then will follow His teachings, we can make this our last necessary earth-lifetime! But, what? You aren’t finding what you need to make rapid spiritual progress in your own open Bible? Jesus says that all you need to do then is to, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8). My darling friends, our beloved Lord, the risen Jesus Christ could not possibly make this process any simpler for us! But the problem is that none of the more than forty thousand different versions of Christianity actually makes a priority of the sharing of all of Jesus’s teachings in a way that makes them useful to us. Catholicism certainly doesn’t do it! I was a Catholic for twenty-five years, and I even was a Lector, doing formal readings as part of each week’s Mass, so I can tell you that what teaching ever was done in those Catholic churches was primarily sin- and retribution-related. Even Protestants will read brief sample passages from the whole Bible during their church services, rather than treating the important long passages of the Gospel teachings of Jesus as the pearls of great value that they are.  

Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (MT 13:44). But he bought the whole field, for heaven’s sake! Dribbling to people these few words from Jesus that we get in our churches each week is like tossing crumbs to people who are starving. Yes, we each desperately seek for ourselves that spiritual pearl of great value. But to get it, we need to buy the whole precious field. It is just not up to some church or other to decide that these few words, or those other few words from Jesus’s more than three years of teaching, are all that you or I in particular might need to read this week of Jesus’s teachings.  So, Thomas and I have thought about how we might best help you to find a sufficient way to feast on the Lord’s whole banquet of teachings, and without any more delay. As we look now toward the time of year when we will celebrate the great gift of Jesus’s birth to us, let’s pause and consider what an amazing gift all those teachings of our greatest Teacher ever born truly are!  

While Jesus’s teachings come to us throughout all four Gospels, the gift appears in its most concentrated form in what is called “The Sermon on the Mount”, in the Book of Matthew, Chapters 5-7. So it now occurs to us that what we might do is to give you The Sermon on the Mount in comfortable, sermon-length sections over the six weeks of late November and early December that remain between now and when we will celebrate the birth of Jesus, our beloved Teacher. Some of you have told us that you use our weekly blog posts as your alternative to a Sunday sermon; so for the next six weeks, we will try more seriously to live up to that responsibility for you. (Thomas has just remarked as we are writing this that we will need to add an organ processional for you, too, then. I giggled.)

When Jesus was here on earth, He was the most charismatic speaker you can imagine. He had His twelve official male Disciples, of course; but once He began His public ministry, He soon was followed by a crowd that very soon grew to thousands of people, mostly men but also women and children, too, who were mesmerized by the things that he was saying, and by the brilliant and profoundly authoritative way that He said those things! They followed him for days, more and more of them, trailing along the hillsides, stopping sometimes in little villages to eat, but mainly just following Him, until their groups amounted to crowds of followers numbering in the tens of thousands. They won’t even notice when a few thousand more of us join them now. And so, with this little prelude, let’s begin this week to read together Chapters Five through Seven of the Gospel Book of Matthew. 

(Our suggestion is that in reading these Gospel words below the first time through, you might include our parenthetical explanatory notes. But then, go back and read just Jesus’s precious words, in dark print. Literally, sit on that hillside and hear Jesus speak!)

5 When Jesus saw the crowds, He went up on the mountain (it was the side of a hill); and after He sat down, His Disciples came to Him. ² He opened His mouth and began to teach them, saying, (Envision His Disciples close around Him, and a hillside and valley full of many thousands of others, milling and then sitting down in groups around us, all listening….)

The Beatitudes (This term roughly means “blessed attitudes” in Latin. Here Jesus powerfully begins by listing nine perhaps sometimes unpleasant-seeming situations in which His listeners might find themselves, as His followers. And yet, He is telling them, and us, that in these situations we are in fact uniquely blessed, and uniquely able to find an even deeper and more joyous relationship with God. And all these organizing titles are not spoken by Jesus, but rather they are in the Bible.)

³ “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (“Blessed” in these nine Beatitudes means “fortunate” or “favored”. And “Poor in spirit” means something like “meek” or “humble”.)

⁴ “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

⁵ “Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth. (Here again, He tells us that the meek, and not the strong and powerful, will prevail.)

⁶ “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

⁷ “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

⁸ “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

⁹ “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

¹⁰ “Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (We might think of our achieving “the kingdom of heaven” as our achieving so much personal spiritual growth away from negativity and toward love in this lifetime that we never will need to incarnate on earth again.)

¹¹ “Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. ¹² Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Disciples and the World. (Jesus is speaking to the whole crowd, whoever will listen, and also to us and to the World. He is not speaking just to His Twelve Disciples.)

¹³ “You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men. (Salt was very important and valuable in that time and place, not just to enhance flavors but also to preserve food. So in calling us “the salt of the earth”, Jesus is saying something both complex and empowering.)

¹⁴ “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; ¹⁵ nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. ¹⁶ Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven. (This is such an immensely powerful statement! Jesus is saying here that YOU, my very dear one, are a literal light unto all mankind! Here you and I are, thinking that Jesus came into this world to be that light unto the world. But now He is telling us that, no, it is the people that He is speaking to now, the ones sitting on that hillside, and YOU AND I as well, my beloveds in this twenty-first century, who have come into this world to be the light of the world! And Jesus tells us that it is our task now to further glorify our Father, who is in heaven.)

¹⁷ “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. ¹⁸ For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished. ¹⁹ Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (We will have more to say about this below….)

²⁰ “For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. (Not surprising to hear. We know how low is Jesus’s opinion of the scribes and Pharisees, the clergymen of His day!) (MT 5:1-20)

…Wow! And so ends the first part of the Sermon on the Mount. Now let’s pause here for a week, still holding our place on that hill, perhaps passing around a basket of bread and a jug of water or wine as we ponder what we have heard of Jesus’s teachings today. But our best-beloved Teacher has only begun what will be a long day of sitting on that hillside and speaking, while the crowd of thousands of us listens to Him, sitting ranged along the hillside and below us in the valley, and that crowd will gradually grow ever larger as word spreads that the Teacher is teaching nearby. A few of you are looking over at Thomas and me, though, and are wondering about something. “What?” Someone now whispers to Thomas. “What was that He said about ‘The Law and The Prophets’? I thought we were going to be past those old laws?”

Thomas smiles at his questioner. He says, “Ah, but remember that the Pharisees are always listening to Him.” And Thomas points out a few of those feared clergy, close by Jesus even now, farther up on the hill from us and doing their spying. Remember what the Master has told us privately of the Law and the Prophets, which is the whole of what Christianity will one day in the far future call the entire Old Testament. Jesus has told us that there are really only two commandments, in the end. Remember that? He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). And so, our very dear ones, simply love and trust God with your whole heart, and allow Jesus now to be your wise Elder Brother and Teacher, which is what He returned to earth two thousand years ago to very gently be for us all. We’ll return together to hear Him on His hillside next week, since He has barely begun!

Morning has broken like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning,
Praise for them springing fresh from the world.
– Yusuf/Cat Stevens, from “Morning Has Broken” (1971)

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)