What Should Energize and Not Energize the Church

The Sermon on the Mount plays a central role in Matthew's gospel.  Matthew conceptualizes Jesus as the new Moses who has brought into being a new covenant community, the Church, in place of the old covenant between God and Israel.  The Sermon on the Mount mirrors God's revelation to Moses of the law and Moses' communication of the law to Israel.  In the same way that the law delivered by Moses to Israel defined God's covenant relationship with Israel, the Sermon on the Mount defines the new law that governs the Church, dictating how the Church should handle its business internally and externally in its dealings with the world.

The content of the Sermon on Mount has been challenging for Christian communities.  The ethical commands seem extreme and seem to cut directly against society's notions of common sense.  This is particularly true of Jesus' commands with regard to our adversaries.  Jesus says that rather than doing what seems logical and natural to us (i.e. to love our neighbor and hate our enemy), we are called to love our enemies.

 As a way of understanding Jesus' command to love our enemy, Jesus tells us at the end of the section of the Sermon on the Mount where this command is found that the Church is called to be perfect like our Father in Heaven is perfect.  We are called to love our enemies because that is what God does.  When the world was in darkness and we were enemies to God, God died for us.  God, in Jesus, even forgave the Romans who put him up on the cross and in his dying moments, petitioned for their deliverance.

What energizes God is reconciliation, service, and love for everyone, including those who are enemies to God.  We are called to do the same.  Too often the Church mirrors society in the sense of being excited and energized by hating our enemies.  If we are to be God's people, we must never be energized by hatred.  Hatred should exhaust us and make us miserable.  We should be energized and excited by what makes God energized and excited.

The Revelation of a Mystery

Our culture does not like mystery.  We want to have everything figured out, analyzed, and quantified.  If something can't be figured out, analyzed, and quantified, then it must not be real. 

This works well when it comes to airplanes, vacuum cleaners, and global temperatures, but not when it comes to God.  We will never be able to figure out, analyze, and quantify God in the same way that we can categorize the natural world.  God is, and always will be, mysterious to us.  The tragic mistake that is made both in and out of the Church is that if God cannot be figured out with the same methodology that we use to figure out the natural world, that God must not be real.  Those who do not believe in God state as their justification that they cannot see or perceive God in the way that we see or perceive natural objects.  Some Christian voices try to prove God's existence by literal interpretation of biblical stories and then attempt to align those stories with the findings of paleontologists, geologists, and biologists.

Paul said that in Christ, God revealed a holy mystery that was hidden from the foundation of the world.  Notice that Paul did not say that Christ took away the mysterious nature of God or made God comprehensible.  Rather, Christ revealed the nature of God as mysterious to us.  As the Church, this is where we theologically live and stay.  We know that God has been revealed in Jesus, that God has redeemed us in Jesus, and that the world remains lost in darkness despite the light of God that lives inside the hearts of every person in this world.  This is a holy mystery.