Sermon on the Mount

Journal

1) Before studying the Sermon on the Mount, I believed that as Christians, the only moral code we are really obligated to follow from the bible is the Ten Commandments. I knew the Beatitudes, but I treated them more as guidelines for going above and beyond the Ten Commandments. I thought of it as a sort of Extra Credit for the Christian over-achiever. After this section I learned that what actually was happening in the Sermon on the Mount (and really in all of Jesus' life) was that he was rewriting Religious doctrine and tradition. He taught us how to pray, how to love our enemies, and how to forgive. He gave us the Lord's Prayer. He gave us the Beatitudes as a code of morality not to be treated as extra but to be lived out in the same way we strive to live out the Ten Commandments. After going back over the initial questions I realized that all of my answers were good moral answers in line with the Decalogue and Jesus' teaching. They proved that I knew what the good moral choices were and I really felt like I wanted to do the right thing. However, I noticed that even though I knew what the right thing to do was , many times I did not do it. What I believe and what I did were often opposite of each other.

3) The first key idea I want to remember from this course is that Jesus' preached out against anger. Before studying the Sermon on the Mount I had no idea of this. In Matthew 5:23-26, Jesus teaches us to put away our anger and become reconciled with our brother. A possibly radical practice in his day, Jesus tells us that getting rid of our anger and reconciling our self with others should take precedence over participating in worship at the temple. This is a relatively new idea for me. I used to thing that anger was okay, possibly even a good thing. However, it seems to me that although anger is not an outright sin, Jesus still was against it, so we should strive to do away with it. As a side note one passage in the New Testament, for me, arouses some conflict with Jesus' teaching against anger: when Jesus turned over the tables in the temple (Mk 11: 15-18). In John's Gospel there is even a mention of Jesus making a whip to drive the people out. It seems to me that Jesus must have been acting out of anger here. However, this is an area that will take much more study and reflection on my part.

The second key idea I want to remember is solidarity. Solidarity means that because everyone on Earth was created in the image and likeness of God, then we share a special unity with everyone else, individually and in the world community as a whole. And because of this unity we are obligated to help our fellow man when they need it. At SLUH, our idea of solidarity is "Brotherhood," and we should strive to think as all people as our brothers and sisters and the obligations we have towards them as though they were our real brothers and sisters. If they are hungry, we feed them. If they are sick, we nurse them. If they are homeless, we give them shelter. Solidarity means we have to take care of the "least" among us, because ultimately we are unity with them and (at least) in the eyes of God we are the same.

4) I asked Trent Dardick, what does it mean to be a moral person?
He answered: Someone who concerns himself with the corectness of his actions. Someone who questions what he does and asks himself if it is right or wrong.