What on Earth?

Considering the Social Implications of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount

Barney Wiget

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781666736731, 9781666795486
• eBook ISBN: 9781666795493
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In his most famous Sermon, Jesus announces a Kingdom so counterintuitive that it appears upside down in contrast to conventional wisdom. By prescribing both a revolutionary personal piety and a radical social possibility he teaches us how to become better people who in turn make the world better. His vision for a countercultural Kingdom challenges our engagement with contemporary culture morally, socially, and even politically. The impact of this Kingdom "on the earth as it is in heaven, " with a view to partnering with Jesus in his venture to nudge the world toward its intended design is the focus of this compelling treatment of the Sermon. By a lifestyle of holy nonconformity shaped by the "Blessed Attitudes" (Beatitudes), Jesus commissions his prophetic community to embody a social alternative that the world cannot imagine on its own and to foment a humble and loving cultural shift where the privileged and powerless flourish together in peace and justice. As previews of the coming attractions when Christ will return and reign as King over a new heaven and earth, Kingdom citizens work toward initiating such a world on earth as it is in heaven today.

Part One

What’s the Big Idea?

Christ, who preached this message twenty centuries ago, knew that he was sowing a long-term moral revolution in which we human beings come to change ourselves from worldly thinking.

—Oscar Romero

I’ve been trying to be like Jesus for nearly fifty years now. He’s been kneading the shapeless dough of my heart into something that still only remotely resembles his. I’m coming along, albeit in a halting sort of way. I love him more than anything in the world but the way I think, speak, and act is still lightyears away from where I want to be.

I have two mantras that frame my efforts to live christianly. The first is this: “The Christian life isn’t hard to live. It’s impossible! Only Jesus can do it!”

Our jumble of human and divine natures has a lot to do with the impossibility of emulating him perfectly, not to mention the Grand Canyon-sized gap between our American way of life and his. Christianity, in contrast to the way of the world, seems like a totally upside-down approach to life.

Authentic faith is countercultural and therefore revolutionary. If you’re shopping for one, you can find a shallow version of the faith that is substantially inferior to the Jesus version. Readily available is a Christianity whose “hands are the hands of Esau, but whose voice is the voice of Jacob.”1 This sort of flimsy faith is more palatable and therefore more accessible to people that prefer to be “spiritual” on their own terms. The Jesus version is not that.

The good news is that he doesn’t expect us to rely on a superhuman ability of our own. His way is nothing if not supernatural, a life reliant on divine power from the inside out, which leads me to my second mantra:“The Christian life is the life Jesus lived then, lived now by him in us.”

The likeness of Jesus is not something you tack onto your exterior. It’s an inside job. His way of transforming us into his likeness is from the inside out. The white-knuckle approach to Christianity only leads to frustration and failure. We can only hope to live out the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount in the power of the Savior on the Mount!

The zeitgeist of today’s evangelicalism is more dissimilar to the church we read about in the New Testament than I’d like to admit. Sometimes it bears little resemblance at all. With supposed Jesus followers drifting further and further away from our roots in biblical ethics, we need to take another serious look at his teaching on the hill that day, which radiates a blaze of light in every word.

E. Stanley Jones calls the Sermon “A working philosophy of life,”2 wherein Jesus presents a new social possibility for the church and the world. The “Big Idea” of this book is this new social possibility found in these three chapters of Matthew’s Gospel.

Most of the teaching I’ve heard (and personally given) focuses exclusively on the personal piety applications of these chapters. Don’t lie or lust or leave your wife. Forgive your boss for bullying and treat your coworkers with kindness. While those applications are still as necessary as ever, if not much more, I intend to focus this particular writing on the ways Jesus challenges how we interact with contemporary culture morally, socially, economically, and yes, even politically. Viewed rightly, his revolutionary address proposes a countercultural kingdom that subverts conventional wisdom regarding how this world works.

“Martin Luther applied all the Beatitudes to the public sphere. For him, the Beatitudes concerned not only the Christian’s life before God but the Christian’s life before their neighbor.”3 The typical gospel of the contemporary evangelical narrative is predominantly individualistic. It’s about how your sins are forgiven and how you become more spiritual. As biblical and magnificent as this is, apart from a vision to make the world a better place, that good, yet partial gospel truncates the vision of God for the advance of his kingdom on earth. His vision is to make better people who in turn, with his supernatural potency, make a better world.

The metamorphosis of caterpillar to butterfly mirrors the radical change that Christ makes in those who receive him. The caterpillar is a consumer. Its day consists of eating its own leafy environment. When it “converts” into its ultimate form, it abandons its leaf and flutters from flower to flower, pollinating. Jesus didn’t rise from the dead in order to create consumers but pollinators that effect change and bring beauty into the world. Besides, whoever hung a painting or photo on their wall of a chubby green caterpillar chowing down on a shrub, in place of an actual exquisitely decorated butterfly?4

At one point, Martin Luther King Jr.’s colleagues in the civil rights movement challenged him to stop speaking out on the Vietnam war. They wanted him to stick exclusively to the civil rights message. He rejected their advice and told them he refused to “segregate [his] moral concerns” between one mandate and another. It’s all part of the same gospel of the kingdom and we should be able to hold these things in tension. For example, Pandita Ramabai fought for women’s rights in India and at the same time, translated the entire Bible into her native tongue so those women cou...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Part One: What’s the Big Idea?
• Part Two: Utterly Upside-Down Attitudes
• Part Three: What on Earth?
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography