"One Day Someone Should Start a Religion Based on the Teachings of Jesus"

The Mount of the Beatitudes, northwest of the Sea of Galilee.

Today's blog title comes from a tongue in cheek "tweet from God" I ran across recently, the point being that Jesus's role as a greater-than-Moses Prophet, or Teacher, is often underplayed in current Christian circles. This is in contrast to most  church leaders in the first and second centuries, to St. Francis of Assisi of the 13th century, and to later reformers like Menno Simons, who once once wrote, “Jesus is the perfect teacher, and his sacrifice is the perfect sacrifice.”

Ironically, some non-Christians like Mahatma Ghandi in the past century have more fully appreciated Jesus’s words and have tried to live by them. Ghandi read some part of the "Sermon on the Mount" (Matthew 5, 6 and 7), on an almost daily basis, and marveled at why so many Christians seemingly ignored it, or saw Jesus’s teachings as impractical and impossible. He once famously said,“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” This was in the context of an India that was then ruled with an oppressive iron hand by a supposedly Christian Great Britain.

According to Matthew 5, 6, and 7, Jesus clearly envisioned a worldwide God-movement in which there would be unconditional love shown to neighbor and stranger alike, even enemies, where generous sharing replaced the hoarding of possession, and where the love of money was replaced by a love of justice and compassion for all.

In his last words to his followers, spoken from what is almost surely the same place, the Mount of the Beatitudes, Jesus gave what is known as the Great Commission to his followers, urging them to  recruit disciples of people of all nations, teaching them all to observe all of the things he had taught them.

What a difference it would have made if even half of all baptized Christians, now numbering some 2.4 billion of the 7.8 billion of the earth's inhabitants, had been consistently trained to share instead of hoard possessions, do good for enemies instead of exacting revenge, live lives of sexual faithfulness instead of infidelity and promiscuity, and practiced consistent truth-telling instead of defending and promoting blatant lies and falsehoods? What a peaceful, safe, sustainable and just world that could have created. 

Meanwhile, our families and faith communities can strive to commit to become, by the grace of God, little colonies of heaven on earth, communities of shalom where there is "not a needy person among them." 

In one of Richard Rohr’s recent Daily Meditations he writes of Christians:

Our religion is not working well: suffering, fear, violence, injustice, greed, and meaninglessness still abound. This is not even close to the reign of God that Jesus taught. And we must be frank: in their behavior and impact upon the world, Christians are not much different than other people. Many Christians are not highly transformed people; instead, they tend to reflect their own culture more than they operate as any kind of leaven within it...We must rediscover what St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) called the “marrow of the Gospel.” It’s time to rebuild from the bottom up. If the foundation is not solid and sure, everything we try to build on top of it is weak and ineffective. 

May God help us do just that.