Category: Christian Spirituality

  Anger is not a victimless crime. Anger is aggressive. To have someone’s anger turned on you—especially when it’s “without cause,” not your fault or out of proportion to your fault—is emotionally and physically traumatizing. At first glance, Jesus’s moral teachings in Matthew 5 can look almost trite or arbitrary. Given a chance to address…

Most of us can justify anger pretty easily. It’s bad, but not that bad. Anger isn’t murder. Except that it is. In Jesus’s first moral teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes the outrageous equivocation of anger with murder. You have heard that it was said to our ancestors, Do not murder, and…

According to Jesus, people don’t make you angry. You do. And if you want to be free, you have to take responsibility for it. Last post, I talked about the three principles of morality as Jesus teaches it: it’s transcendent and therefore absolute; it’s internal; and it’s individual. As such, it’s demanding. Jesus doesn’t pull…

“Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual,” Friedrich Nietzche wrote. Einstein said, “A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs.” Morality, in other words, is determined by our surroundings: by the needs, expectations, and ties of the people around us. MORALITY IS … Nietzche and Einstein got…

Jesus came to change our lives in an actual, practical, daily sense. This doesn’t happen without our participation. But it doesn’t happen by our own power, either. The story so far is this: Jesus came to give us a kingdom. He didn’t come to destroy the law of Moses, but to accomplish what it couldn’t.…

What does the law of God have to do with being a Christian? This might be one of the biggest points of confusion in Christendom today. Do we need rules? If not, why did Jesus give us rules? Was it just to teach us that we can’t keep rules? Will the law free us? Judge…

Righteousness is not what you think it is. When it comes to righteousness, most of us think like Pharisees. We see it as a position we must earn or else a quality we must create within ourselves through our actions. We’re wrong on both counts. (Explore this further in Part 1 of this discussion here.)…

  We don’t say it, but most of us understand the Sermon on the Mount as one giant losing proposition. We cannot possibly be as righteous as it calls us to be. It’s the law squared and compounded. But that understanding only proves we’re reading it with the eyes of a Pharisee. This week, forget…

The Sermon on the Mount begins with a charter: the eight blessings of the kingdom. That’s followed by a purpose statement: that we might be salt and light. Next comes Jesus’s discourse on the law. He says: Don’t assume that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy…

In the progression of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus begins with the offer of the kingdom. The kingdom is a gift of grace, given to the empty-handed, the poor in spirit. It is a blessing, a gift empowered with the quality of fruitfulness and the capacity to bring forth life. This gift is transformational,…