Video for June 11th, 2026
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video.
I used to play a bit of a game with the headteacher of a former parish when I visited her school for assemblies. My task was to say enough about Jesus that she couldn’t edit it out in her obligatory commentary to the children afterwards. I considered it a small victory if she failed to re-interpret a spiritual message as mere moralism. I’ve experienced something similar in the House of Lords. A speech which argued from a moral and spiritual perspective to a particular conclusion had the spiritual element edited out in the press reportage. A few years ago, the Archbishop of York gave a brilliant Christ centred sermon at a major civic event. He briefly used a horse racing illustration and that was the only thing reported!
There is a contemporary tendency to do exactly the opposite with Jesus’ teaching. Every culture tends to interpret Jesus’ words through their own cultural spectacles, mining them to justify existing positions and missing major points altogether. I suspect the danger in our culture is to be so fixated on the values of love and inclusion that we miss or dimmish some of Jesus more strident moral teaching. His Sermon on the Mount (or plain in Luke’s account) is profoundly counterintuitive for most cultures. The beatitudes undermine our assessments of human value and where the good life is to be found. In Jesus’ day those things that would have been interpreted as signs of Gods favour: wealth, happiness, pride, strength, and assertiveness are shown to be potential barriers to the spiritual life. The Bible most definitely doesn’t say, “God helps those who help themselves”! Jesus says the way to deeper communion lies in humility, brokenness and self-abasement. The approval of the wider culture may not be indicative of favour with God at all. Indeed, being persecuted for holding to Christian principles is a more reliable indicator.
Jesus doesn’t discount and dismiss the moral law of the Old Testament and some rabbinic interpretations of it. “Don’t think I’ve come to abolish the law or the Prophets”, he says. “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them”. He is severe in his disapproval of those who break commandments and encourage others to do the same.
But the genius of the Sermon on the Mount is to associate our external moral behaviour with the right internal character. Most murders are crimes of passion, not pre-meditated, but flowing out of an angry heart. Adultery and infidelity flow from uncontrolled sexual passion. Relationships break down when truthfulness is sacrificed for selfish ends. Feuds escalate when retribution escalates beyond the original sleight. Communities fight with each other when the narrative of superiority permits the treatment of the enemy as ‘other’. Jesus still leaves a place for justice and even just war for the restraint of violence, although the use of that argument in contemporary conflicts in the middle east is questionable.
Jesus’ message was primarily directed at transforming the heart, so the outward manifestations of immorality have no soil in which to grow. The good news is not a list of moral commands accompanied by religious duty. The Gospel speaks of forgiveness, won by Jesus on the cross that can put an end to fear and self-justification. It promises a new power within – the resurrection power of Jesus by the Holy Spirit. The Christian life is much more about working with the Spirit to allow him to transform our character. All law does is show us where the boundaries of loving action lie. Morality is no longer a means of currying God’s favour as it was with the Pharisees in Jesus day. An increasingly moral life should be evidence of the power of God working within to create the likeness of Jesus in us. The Classical Christian disciples of worship, prayer, engaging personally with scripture fasting, silence, community are similarly not a means of earning spiritual brownie points. They simply put us in a place where the Spirit is better able to work. Just as we need to eat to sustain ourselves physically, we need these things to sustain ourselves spiritually. I suppose it is true at a rudimentary level that you don’t have to go to Church to be a Christian, but from the Bible’s perspective its almost as daft as saying you don’t have to feed yourself to thrive. If you don’t you will eventually die.
Jesus’ teaching is counterintuitive, at times maddening and sometimes difficult to understand but following it, meditating on it and trying by God’s grace to put it into practice it is the only road to life in all its fullness.
+Richard