Cause and Effect

As inspiring as the message of the Sermon on the Mount is, we are at last forced to consider why the crowd came to hear it. We should also consider its lasting effect. Neither will cheer us on this bright Sunday morning.

The disciples came because it was their duty. The Galilean had chosen and assembled them soon after he withstood his temptations. It seemed their duty, more or less, to sit near him on that Judean hill. Followers follow.

As for the crowd, we don’t know. Their motives may not have withstood detailed scrutiny. Matthew reports that, after choosing his disciples, the Galilean:

“… went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them. Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him.” (4:23-25 NIV)

There’s the rub. Even in today’s society, it wouldn’t be hard to draw a crowd by performing miracles, especially ones aimed at curing medical malformities. Sadly, one can draw crowds in modern society by simply promising miracles. Our most intriguing example is of one who expands this theory to the maximum. He promises miracles, fails to perform them, and uses lies (false witness) to disguise the failure to his true believers. Further, when science offers a miracle-like solution to an epic problem, he disparages the very actions need to make it work. His followers make disobedience to truth a bedrock act of acquiescence. Paraphrasing a line from an epic American film, they scream, “We don’t need no stinkin’ facts.”

That brings us to the question of loyalty. As for the Galilean, it seems to have been, at least in contemporary measure, what some describe as “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Some of the same folks who gathered with great hope on the Mount, may have been in the crowd that screamed for the Galilean’s blood when it appeared that his miracle-performing days were over.

Contrast that with our modern example whose followers seem not only unphased by his shortcomings but virtually emboldened by them.

“What does it mean” we might ask ourselves. Is there some hidden genetic trigger that guides us more fervently to greet, avarice, hate, and destruction than to the opposite attractions of love, peace, forgiveness, and righteousness?

Does it mean the virtues expressed in The Sermon are no longer pertinent in American life? After all, those prophets who call themselves “evangelicals” never mention The Sermon and seem, by all their actions, to eschew the very notions expressed in the Beatitudes. They turn instead to the cruel dictates of the older biblical texts. They even form cruel nicknames for the dwindling group of believers who still find “The Blessings” exalting.

What would we say if, somehow, the Galilean were to ask us, in modern parlance, to “review” his most famous sermon?

Perhaps it would be a good idea for each of us raised in a Christian culture to spend some time pondering that question.