9/11/19 Larry (see HERE)
Have you heard the lost
sermon of Jesus?
Some of the things he
says are actually pretty shocking. Some
parts might totally change our ideas about Jesus and his message.
This “lost sermon”
isn’t in one of the alternative “gospels” that are intriguing to so many
people, like a man named Larry whom I spoke with outside a coffeeshop. Larry attends a non-denominational Bible
church with his wife and kids, but is clearly more interested in what is NOT
found in the Bible than in what is. He
is fascinated by a theory about the “lost years of Jesus” before his public
ministry in which he is said to have gone to India and returned as a
“maharishi” or great teacher, and that this accounts for the great wisdom of
his teachings in the Bible. As a result,
Larry interprets Jesus’ teachings and ministry through the lens of eastern religion
and has drifted away from a straightforward reading of the Bible, or of reading
the Bible at all, and toward eastern mysticism and pantheistic texts and ideas.
So why are alternative
writings and belief systems so attractive to many people such as Larry who have
been familiar with the Bible? The
answer, I think, has something to do with that “lost sermon” I mentioned. This lost sermon is actually found right
there in the Bible, in Matthew chapters 5-7.
It’s found as a subset of teachings within Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount”,
a very familiar passage.
But if the Sermon on
the Mount is so familiar, how could this sermon be “lost”?
I believe it is lost in
our memories. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount
is long enough that we don’t remember all of it, but only the parts we
like. Our “selective memory” only
recalls the parts we agree with, that make us feel good, or that help confirm
our biased narrative about Jesus’ teachings, whether positive or negative.
Jesus’ original sermon
was directed toward his followers, but he allowed a watching crowd to listen in
there on the mountainside, and he does that today in the pages of Matthew’s
gospel. He emphasizes several times to
those who would claim to follow him the importance of actually keeping God’s
moral commands, both in letter and in spirit.
The only way we can do so is by constant reminders of what those
commands are, and so the best way to avoid doing so is to avoid the details, to
avoid exposure to Jesus’ teachings, and to selectively remember only what we
want to.
Many people do this by
simply stating the Golden rule, to love one’s neighbor as oneself, which is
found within Jesus’ sermon. But to
follow this rule out of the context of the Sermon on the Mount is to disregard
Jesus’ specific instructions on what exactly that sort of love looks like, and
to make ourselves the authority on the subject instead.
I reminded Larry of
some of the harder teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, the ones it appeared he
was leaving out of his selective memory, so he turned to the Bible app on his
phone to see if what I said was true. He
was shocked at what he saw there when he read of Jesus’ warnings of judgment
and the punishment of hell. It was like
he was reading a sermon that had long since been lost and forgotten, which had
allowed him to seek out other teachings from outside the Bible that went along
with the parts he had chosen to hold on to.
We all need to return
now and again to those parts of the Bible we may write off as familiar, and to
be reminded of the parts we didn’t underline or commit to memory. We need to re-read the ‘lost sermons” of
Jesus!
Thanks to Larry, for allowing me to record our
conversation! It can be seen HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment