Today’s readings: Eccl. 15, 15-20; 1 Cor. 2, 6-10; Matthew 5, 17-37.
The battleground between Christianity and culture is the ethics of discipleship that characterises followers of Jesus. When we speak of love, caring or justice it’s easy to find common ground with non-believers.
Many dismiss God but still like what Christianity stands for. But when it comes to choices that demand the wisdom of the inner spirit, or that sound as non-reasoned to the wisdom of the age, it becomes difficult and probably conflictual.
We ignore that probably the most significant thing about the Sermon on the Mount is that it is situated on a mount. There is a ‘mountain’ spirituality in the Scriptures.
The opposite to the mount is level ground, but when we discuss the ethics of discipleship on the terms and conditions of Jesus, we are never on level ground with mainstream culture and with many who have never experienced depth with Jesus.
Our major problem as Christians today is that there is no longer a cultural framework that is commonly upheld by society and which protects the values we’ve always believed to be universally valid.
We have to venture in a world which seems to be completely alien to the ethics of discipleship that always marked the life of Christians. At times the world is also hostile in the name of political correctness.
Often we overemphasise the difference between the Old Testament teachings and the new Law Jesus promulgated. Christ came not to abolish but to fulfil the Law and the prophets, and it is important for us to grasp what that fulfilment entails.
We may even erroneously come to conclusions that in the new covenant we’ve gone beyond the need of laws.
Jesus is aiming higher, towards maturity. The more mature we become, the less we need the Law. The gist of today’s gospel, with its antitheses or contrasts between the old and the new Law, is when Jesus says: “For I tell you, if your virtue goes no deeper than that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven.”
Jesus makes these contrasts not to deny or abolish the old, but to urge his followers to go deeper than just the demands of the commandments. He wants to shift talk about discipleship from mere observance of the Law to virtue, which means ‘moral excellence’ or ‘goodness’.
The scribes and Pharisees told people what they must or must not do. Jesus here is teaching the way to goodness, which, he implies, does not necessarily flow from observance of the Law. Morality was once about virtues, not commandments; about seeking to be good on a journey towards God, not about what we are obliged or forbidden to do.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is raising to a higher level the demands of the Kingdom. In his time, he was a sort of whistleblower for something rotten in the heart of religion as it was being transmitted.
He was only heeded to by some. Many others joined the crowd and opted for tradition as it stood. It made them comfortable with their institutions and even with their consciences. Like the latter, many of us still struggle to hand over a parody of what Christianity in truth is.
But many believe that Christinaity, in spite of its apparent failures or setbacks, still holds its ground, and that it can still survive as a vision and a path-finder for many, even if its privileged days as a way of reasoning seem to be over.
Our culture and condition still need spiritual guides and a discipline to help us live with the irony and contingency. We are chronically prey to the manipulative power of advertising, which creates cravings and foments personal instability.
The satirist Don Delillo deals with this in his novel White Noise, where life is seen as a supermarket full of bright distractions where the human need for religion and meaning is met by the stock of nonsense-filled tabloids which divert the customers in their wait for the final checkout.
I presume we all want to aim higher than that.