The Beatitudes

A Meditation on the Gospel of Matthew 5:3-12

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” —Gospel of Matthew 5:3-12

Last March, at a hospital in the small city of Hudson in upstate New York near where I live, I was checking in to have some bloodwork done as part of an elusive search to get at the root cause of a possible neurological condition. I was sitting on one side of a row of desks and a nurse was sitting across from me, tapping away at a computer keyboard to record my answers to her questions.

The hospital stands high on a hill on a choice chunk of real estate with a view to the west toward the Hudson River in the distance and the rolling, rounded shoulders of the Catskill Mountain range beyond. The hospital architects had taken advantage of this position and designed the building with large windows on the western side so you could see all of this natural splendor that often makes me think of the 19th-century Hudson River School of art. Among the school’s most renowned practitioners were Frederic Edwin Church and Thomas Cole, whose homes and studios stand today as museums little more than a stone’s throw from where I was sitting.

It was sunny outside with a few fluffy, scattered clouds that looked like real clouds, not the gauzy products of chemtrails with which the skies of this area are regularly sprayed. I was grateful for that. I wanted to be in a good mood. I don’t like hospitals or needles—or suspicious-looking clouds.

At one point in her line of questioning, the nurse asked me, from a list of possibilities, what my religious affiliation was. The question took me by surprise. When the nurse recited the final choice of “none,” I repeated “none.” I said it without really thinking about it. Click went the keyboard. I was surprised by the question. Was a simple blood draw capable of putting me in such a state that I’d need last rites?

As the nurse asked me several more questions and as I sometimes glanced out the wall of glass at the vast expanse of beauty outside, I thought about what I’d just done. We are at war, I thought. And, as the saying goes, there are no atheists in foxholes, I thought. And I thought I’d better come clean and do whatever I could to get right with God right then and there and not waver for another second longer. For who knows when or where or how the evil ones in high places will strike next? Or how bad it will be? The presidential election was still months away and there was no telling then what was going to happen between then and November or how the election was going to play out, if the grotesque nightmare we’ve been living under since the stolen 2020 election was going to continue for yet another four years—or not.

That first, automatic response of mine had little to do with any irresolution on my part. I said “none” because I thought that my religious affiliation was no one’s business but my own. But then I thought, no. Why hide anything about that? What was I afraid of? I remembered Jesus telling his followers early in his ministry about how no one lights a lamp and then covers it up; you put it on a lampstand and it gives light to all of the house. In the same way, he said, let your light shine before others. And I also thought of one of Jesus’ disciples, Peter, denying that he ever knew Jesus as Jesus was being tortured in the hours before his execution. I do not, I thought, want to be that guy.

“Can we go back and change my religious affiliation?” I asked.

“Sure,” the nurse said.

“Make it Christian.”

She nodded, clicked on the keyboard. And there it was, on my official medical record. There was no priest to witness this unexpected turn of events. No baptism. No holy water. No visible water of any sort anywhere except in the slow-moving Hudson River maybe a mile away and in a nearly empty water cooler by the door. No confession of sins. No recital of the Nicene Creed. The heavens did not open. I saw no angels or doves. It was all just between me and the nurse. And God.

***

Jesus was not a Christian, of course. He was Jewish. And, of course, no one was called a “Christian” in the earliest days of what we call Christianity today. Those who came to follow Jesus were Jewish men and women who felt disenfranchised and subjugated by both their corrupt religious overlords—the Sadducees and the Pharisees—and the Roman occupiers of Palestine.

They came to believe Jesus knew something important about life (and death) that they did not, and he made no bones about it. They were drawn to him at first because of his miraculous healings of “every disease and every sickness among the people” (Matthew 4:23). And while those healings continued, what ultimately drew people to him were the words he spoke. Because he spoke his mind. And because he spoke to a transcendent reality that is always with us and toward which, through thick and thin, we can always aspire. We know this today because we have written records from eyewitnesses of some of the things he said back then, some of which are collected in the New Testament. We can see for ourselves that Jesus did not mince words.

And, to be sure, his followers must have found solace and support in his words. Jesus had no intention of creating a new religion or a church. He wanted to put people in touch with a sense of their own divinity and the holiness of their existence in the eyes of God without the intercessions of legalistic customs and insignificant rules, as had been the order of the day.

I imagine that being in his presence must have felt like a breath of fresh air. He spoke of forgiveness, compassion, respect, and love—the higher ideals of human behavior to which we can aim for to lead a more perfected life. He must have made people feel seen and understood, inviting them into a new community of both transcendence and belonging as opposed to the harsh realities with which they felt at odds, out of place, and hounded.

The healing of the lepers; the stilling of the storm on the Sea of Galilee; the casting out of demons; the parables; the feeding of the thousands; the walking on water; the transfiguration; the cleansing of the temple; the betrayal by Judas; the so-called Last Supper; Jesus’ trial; crucifixion, death, resurrection; and the unstoppable movement of the long-suffering Jewish people that emerged as a result—all of that which we read about in the Gospel of Matthew—would come much later. But what really drew people to Jesus while he was alive was what he said and how he said it—with courage and conviction. He apparently feared nothing and no one but God. And he showed others how to be the same. As we might say today, what’s not to like? He was a superstar.

***

Among his words are what we now call the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount is the first of five of what are known as the “great discourses” in the Gospel of Matthew (which most sources say was composed between 80 and 90 C.E.). And the opening lines of the sermon are what we now call the Beatitudes, of which there are nine in the Gospel of Matthew. In this gospel, the Beatitudes appear as his first teaching. And the Beatitudes were also revealing something new to which people were also drawn. It was what I learned in seminary to call the “transvaluation of suffering.”

This message stood over and against the way the world was or was perceived to be. Jesus spoke to the pain of spiritual poverty, of grief, and of persecution—and said that if you suffered under any of these conditions you were blessed. And you were blessed because in your suffering you were offered the unconditional promise of salvation, not just in the world to come, but in this life—here and now. It was, as far as we know, the first time anyone had spoken publicly in such a manner.

“And beyond this, silence reigns—doubtless a strategy of self-defense in view of their absolute powerlessness politically, a strategy also adopted later by the rabbis,” writes Hans Dieter Betz in his 1985 book, Essays on the Sermon on the Mount. “Despite such conditions, it is noteworthy that the SM [Sermon on the Mount] betrays no sign of defeatism, despair, or apocalyptic panic.” What’s more, Betz writes, the community who heard and lived by the ideals Jesus spoke of in the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount “lived in unbroken confidence that it would endure and prevail against the storms of history and the hardships of human life. Seen in this way, the SM can almost be called a ‘manual for survival.’”

During the first several months of the COVID-19 psyop, many of us felt like we were being forced into silence. I remember when nothing I wrote in social media or said in person to my newly captured old friends and colleagues about what we were truly up against could get through to them. Worse, I was sometimes attacked for being a “conspiracy theorist.” It was beyond frustrating; it was ominous. What had happened to all of them? I wondered—and still wonder. Among the swarms of the willing, the compliant, and the villainous jab devotees, I felt like an army of one in a battle to bring those I know and love back from their insanity. And it was a battle I was losing.

At that point, the only way onward, for me, was inward. I will not say that I surrendered but I can say that I retreated. I did so to rearrange much of my life in ways I had never anticipated I would have to do. But I reconciled myself with the conclusion that this is what happens when you are living in a nation at war and you are among the small resistance. This involved finding new friends where I live—even when the government mandated us not to gather—and connecting to new people on social media—people who saw what I saw, believed what I believed. Who knew, in short, that what we were up against was not good, far from it. I also changed my mind about what I liked to read. And last year, I started writing this column, based on the new things I was reading, and now I can also include in my emergent community the subscribers to Underlined Sentences, for whom I am profoundly grateful.

Biblical scholars quibble over the sources of the Beatitudes and speculate as to whether Jesus actually said them in the order in which they appear in the gospels of Matthew (Matthew 5:3-12) and Luke (6:20-23), where they are part of what is known as the Sermon on the Plain (this sermon does not appear in the gospels or Mark or John), or if they were put there by the writers of these gospels to compose a cohesive whole. There is, however, enough agreement that the Beatitudes are rooted in Jesus’ ministry, represent his teaching faithfully, and exemplify what would become a venerable Christian tradition.

Taking on an analysis of any passage in the Bible is a daunting task. There are libraries of hefty tomes and entire lives of Biblical scholars dedicated to the critical examination of every word in the Bible. What I want to do in this essay is to offer a glimpse into how I believe the Jesus movement began. I have chosen the Beatitudes as a window into the entire Jesus movement, because the unconditional salvation spoken of in the Beatitudes epitomized Jesus’ “good news” of God’s deliverance. I don’t want to get into the weeds and “unpack” the text, as it was said of exegetical examinations when I was a seminarian. Rather, I want to unpack—very briefly—the time in which Jesus spoke these words and explore why they appealed to certain people at the time of Jesus’ earthly life.

I also want explore some striking similarities between that time and the times we’ve been living in the past five years. Because I have found—and some of my awakened friends have found—that among the many writers we follow on Substack, as well as people who host video interviews and writers of other blogs we follow, either seem to be revealing their Christian leanings little by little or have confessed outright, loudly, and proudly their conversion to the faith. I am including myself among them. And we’ve all wondered why this is and why now?

***

The Jewish men and women of Jesus’ day would have generally understood salvation as both material and national prosperity. We read in The Anchor Bible Dictionary: “Salvation involves being delivered from slavery (Deut 24:18), separation from one’s family, and the threat of death. It means victory in battle, the freedom to marry, the gift of descendants, a long life, and the protection needed to enjoy one’s rightful patrimony.”

True, there is a spiritual, other-worldly dimension to Jewish salvation, especially in the Jewish apocalyptic teachings. But it is not akin to what Jesus uniquely espoused in the Beatitudes. This was that new thing. We read in the Life Application Study Bible:

“With Jesus’ announcement that the kingdom was near (4:17), people were naturally asking, ‘How do I qualify to be in God’s kingdom?’ Jesus said that God’s kingdom is organized differently from worldly kingdoms. In the kingdom of heaven, wealth and power and authority are unimportant. Kingdom people seek different blessings and benefits, and they have different attitudes.”

The Oxford Companion to the Bible tells us that the Beatitudes speak to “those who stand before God empty-handed, vulnerable, seeking a right relationship with him and others, open to receive and express his mercy and forgiveness with integrity, ready to experience and to establish peace.”

Jesus’ kingdom is not just another place in time and space; Jesus’ kingdom is in this world. This is also what distinguishes Jesus from Judaism. This is a dual feature that emerged early in Jesus’ ministry. Robert Guelich, in his 1982 book, The Sermon on the Mount: A Foundation for Understanding, writes: “In Jesus’ person and ministry the good news about God’s promise-fulfilling, redemptive activity is announced.” We read in the old English translation of the Geneva Bible of the Gospel of Luke that Jesus tells the Pharisees that “the kingdome of God is within you” (17:21).

Ultimately, the growth and success of the Jesus movement, even before the existence of any written documents, was not going to depend on any of the prevailing traditions of the day—wisdom, prophecy, miracle-healer, wonder-worker. The growth and success of the movement was going to depend upon building communities around the idea that suffering is a good thing. For what greater (and timeless) suffering is there than when the individual is pitted against the state? This struggle is the signature of aligning our personal will with the will of God, and of this we can ask for no higher a calling. “If my heart is in accord with God’s heart, I am blessed, and I can experience the great peace, even in the midst of suffering,” writes John S. Dunne in his 2000 book, Reading the Gospel.

***

In the Gospel of Matthew there’s an episode in which Jesus retreats to the desert, where he is tempted by the devil. The devil tempts him three times. In the last temptation, the devil takes Jesus to a high mountain—perhaps replicating Moses’ climb up Mount Sinai where he encounters God—and shows him all the kingdoms of the world. There, perhaps with a sweep of his hand, the devil tells Jesus that all of it would be his if he fell down and worshipped the devil. Jesus tells the devil to worship and serve “the Lord your God,” whereupon the devil fled.

Jacques Ellul, a French philosopher and lay theologian, in his 1991 book, Anarchy and Christianity, offers this exposition on the meaning of that exchange:

“Jesus does not say to the devil: It is not true. You do not have power over kingdoms and states. He does not dispute this claim. He refuses the offer of power because the devil demands that he should fall down before him and worship him…. We may thus say that among Jesus’ immediate followers and in the first Christian generation, political authorities—what we call the state—belonged to the devil and those who held power received it from him.”

The four canonical gospels that we have today in the New Testament were so intentionally written and designed that it can likely be no accident that in the Gospel of Matthew, right after this confrontation with the devil, was when Jesus began his ministry by teaching, preaching, and healing to both Jews and Gentiles alike. It is as if out in the desert with the devil he’d had his ultimate trial—a come-to-Jesus moment, if you will—from which he came away enlightened and enthused to share with others what he’d learned from his own agonizing personal experience—the one way to learn that nobody can refute or fact check.

At first, he spoke in synagogues, where he preached the gospel, the good news—that the kingdom of heaven has come, that God is with us and that he cares for us. “Enormous crowds were following Jesus—he was the talk of the town, and everyone wanted to see him,” we read in the Life Application Study Bible. “The disciples, who were the closest associates of this popular man, were certainly tempted to feel important, proud, and possessive. Being with Jesus gave them not only prestige, but also opportunity for receiving money and power.”

This was when Jesus pulled his disciples aside—at this point it was just Peter, Andrew, James, and John (a crowd might have gathered later because at the end of his sermon in the Gospel of Matthew (7:28) we’re told that the crowds were “astounded at his teaching”)—to have a talk with them as if to warn them not to feel too important about themselves and let their teacher’s popularity get to their heads. When Jesus was alone with these disciples, they gathered on a hillside near Capernaum for a private audience with their beloved teacher. There, in a kind of initiation, he delivered his Sermon on the Mount (some say this occurred over several days) and spoke those now-renowned words that make up the Beatitudes. I find it hard to imagine that these four men who’d left behind their domestic lives and livelihoods as fishermen that this message was anything close to “good news,” that this was what they had signed up for.

The Life Application Study Bible again:

“Jesus began his sermon with words that seem to contradict each other. But God’s way of living usually contradicts the world’s. If you want to live for God you must be ready to say and do what seems strange to the world. You must be willing to give when others take, to love when others hate, to help when others abuse. By giving up your own rights in order to serve others, you will one day receive everything God has in store for you….

“Each beatitude tells how to be blessed. ‘Blessed’ means more than happiness. It implies the fortunate or enviable state of those who are in God’s kingdom. The Beatitudes don’t promise laughter, pleasure, or earthly prosperity. To Jesus, ‘blessed’ means the experience of hope and joy, independent of outward circumstances.”

What’s also particularly striking about this movement is that the oppressive environment in which Jesus lived and taught brought on what the rulers of the day could not have anticipated. Individuals were thrown back upon themselves to reconsider the world in which they lived, the traditions in which they were formed and raised. History tells us that back then there were people who felt so squeezed and traumatized that Jesus’ appearance in their lives forced them to question the old and established ways of being and to form something new and apart from the everything they’d believed in before. What they all had in common was the idea that the world was not right.

Although I don’t want to dissect any words or phrases in the Beatitudes, I will say this: much depends on translation and historical context. For example, the terms “the meek” or “the poor” refer “to those who stand empty-handed before God in total dependence upon him,” writes Guelich. “The term in no way connotes weakness or softness, an attitude rather than a condition.” I think of it as having the strength of a willow tree, to bend and not break, in the storms waged against us.

Then and now, the best way to understand religion and society is to see religion in terms of two different functions: religion can support the order of things or it can serve as an ideological fortress to stand up against the status quo. Religion is either a state-sanctioned movement or it is “other.” The early Christians associated themselves with the latter. And this is what would eventually get them into a lot of trouble.

I’m coming around to thinking that we’ve found ourselves in a similar situation these 2,000 years later. Over the past five years, many of us had become the unwitting heirs of this “other” movement and have likewise found ourselves getting into a lot of trouble with the ruling cabal who wanted us to shut up by censoring us in all forms of media, and goading us to just go away.

Curiously, it was not so much the religion of those in the Jesus movement that threatened the rulers back then. From its earliest days under the Roman empire, the movement was seen not as a religious problem but a political one. Jesus began preaching and teaching and healing in public, but the movement would later be forced underground, to meet in private homes and even in catacombs of the dead. And it was this that disturbed the authorities. It was the movement’s meeting in private and the authority’s inability to control them. And I don’t believe it is much of a stretch to say that much the same can be said of many of us in the past five years, particularly in the early days of the COVID-19 psyop.

***

Many of us celebrated Donald Trump’s return to the United States presidency on January 20. But the war that’s been waged against humanity the past five years is far from over. And although many of us may feel we’re on the winning team for the time being, like Jesus’ disciples must have felt at the beginning of their movement, being on any team has nothing to do with being right with God. Circumstances are always changing and, now, are especially volatile. Evil, when threatened, can become ever more destructive, for one thing. So, I am wary about the idea that we have seen the end of the massive evil that’s infiltrated our nation since 2020. And although many of us believe Trump is leading our nation in a healthy direction, there’s no telling where exactly we are going. We might be going in a direction that, in the end, we don’t want to go in at all. Trump’s recent advocating for the development of an AI-assisted, individually tailored mRNA cancer vaccine is especially menacing. So, I am also wary of the idea that any of us are being saved from our nation’s malfeasant politics by any politician of any stripe.

The Beatitudes teach us, if nothing else, the importance of having humility in the midst of any struggle we’re wrestling with at any time. Humility amidst the vast unknowing of existence. Humility in our efforts to determine what is right and good for ourselves first and foremost and, secondly, for others. Humility, above all, as sovereign individuals before God. Although I rarely acknowledged it to myself, no less among others, the Beatitudes have helped me cope with the past five years, and especially the past four, living under the boot of the grotesque and depraved Biden administration that spared nothing in its campaign of ruin, not just of our nation but also of the sanctity of individual sovereignty and of our sacred worth. The Beatitudes teach us how to inhabit a nation defiled with corruption and chaos, no matter who’s supposedly at the helm.

The Beatitudes are not hard and fast rules for living. They suggest a more fragile and uncertain grip on our limited perceptions of the world around us. The Beatitudes draw us to the center of our being and to God, as opposed to being drawn or pushed to the atomized realms of fear, doubt, and insecurity—always guessing how to fit in and obey the rules and regulations of the hour, which is how the state and its attendant fanatical mobs corner us with their perpetual distractions and crises and provocations and wars so that we live at their mercy and whims. The Beatitudes show us how to manifest the impossible in the limited world of possibility. Thomas Merton, the renowned 20th-century Trappist monk, once said, “Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.” The impossible is the direction in which the Eternal invites us to direct our lives if we want to be true to ourselves and to God. They remind us that the search for self and the search for God are one and the same thing. And the search is never easy or to be taken lightly.

The Jesus movement was, at its heart, a nonviolent, anarchic movement and the Beatitudes teach us the same kind of anarchy, which is not based on violence but on nonviolence to advance social, political, and cultural change. If any government at any time rules with fear, then what powers of persuasion can it hold over anyone who is not afraid? This is what the Beatitudes teach me; they teach me how not to be afraid. And to trust in that transcendent reality governed by God.

It’s finally become clear to me that the sovereignty of the individual (good) and the over-reaching power of the state (evil) is a battle of evermore. I don’t know why I didn’t grok this lesson earlier. Maybe it was willful blindness. Maybe it was the many years I’d spent in silent meditation observing—without judgment, of course—the dark machinations of my own mind when I should have been looking at the dark machinations of the world outside of the meditation hall. Had I been duped? Led astray? Perhaps not. Perhaps by looking deeply within, my eyes had been opened to the deep state without. Why so few of my brothers and sisters on that introspective path of awakening did not become savvy to the COVID-19 psyop when I did remains to me a mystery of the ages.

***

To be sure, one does not have to seek solace, understanding, and support in what Jesus said, how he lived his life, and how he died. There are other ways to stand your ground, to resist the over-reaching state. But for me, and for many others, it helps to see that humanity has been through this before time and again, that there is indeed nothing new under the sun. I don’t see this as a reason to resign myself to the fate of some sort of eternal return; rather, I see it as point of departure to resist the evil machinations of the beast once again. And in returning to the teachings of Jesus in the early days of his movement, I find the necessary roots with which to stand my own ground. And to feel good about doing so in spite of all the individual and collective attacks against me and the rest of us who dared to say no to the innumerable crimes in which the cabal would have us participate.

It helps me, and I think it helps many others, to align ourselves with a way of being in the world that recognizes our affinities with others who struggled under repressive regimes going back centuries and to see how they not only coped but also were able to raise their browbeaten heads and live and die with their humanity and sacredness intact. I find in particular the solace and support of Jesus’ final beatitude: “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

With these words we know we stand at the head of a long line of those who tried to warn humanity, going back to the Hebrew prophets of old, about those who do not have our health or well-being or spiritual unfoldment uppermost in their agenda. Over the past five years, we have not put our faith in anything that the overlords would have us idolize like a heinous golden calf to which billions sacrificed their very own souls—to the jabs, masks, social distancing—some in trusting compliance and others who reveled in that momentary orgiastic adulation. Rather, we’d put our faith in a way of being in the world that is both transcendent and grounded for all time, fully aware of the consequences of what it would cost us in terms of having any sort of relationship with those who had failed to see the urgency of our situation.

To be sure, great evil has been—and is—committed in the name of Christ. This is far from how the entire movement began. M. Scott Peck, whom I wrote about in my previous column on his book, People of the Lie, and who called himself a Christian, has this to say:

“Crusades and inquisitions have nothing to do with Christ. War, torture, and persecution have nothing to do with Christ. Arrogance and revenge have nothing to do with Christ. When he gave his one recorded sermon, the first words out of Jesus’ mouth were, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit.’ Not the arrogant. And as he was dying he asked that his murderers be forgiven.

“In a letter to her sister, Saint Theresa of Lysieux wrote, ‘If you are willing to serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to yourself, then you will be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter.’ To define a ‘true Christian’ is a risky business. But if I had to, my definition would be that a true Christian is anyone who is ‘for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter.’ There are hundreds of thousands who go to Christian churches every Sunday who are not the least bit willing to be displeasing to themselves, serenely or otherwise, and who are not, therefore, for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter. Conversely, there are millions of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, atheists, and agnostics who are willing to bear that trial.”

***

One final note: My connection to Christianity is not new. As I was cleaning up and organizing some papers a few days ago, I found the personal statement I had written for my application to the seminary I ended up attending and graduating from in 2000. I read it through and was surprised about what had gotten me to that point in my life, but had forgotten. “One day in the spring of 1982,” I began, “I went to the local municipal library near my home then and borrowed a cassette of Paul Tillich speaking on the future of religion. I had never heard of Paul Tillich then, but the tape drew my attention because for many years I had been thinking that religion had no future.”

I had been raised as a Congregationalist, although my father’s side of the family was Lutheran and my mother’s side of the family was among the earliest Mennonites who’d fled Switzerland and had come to Pennsylvania in the 1700s. I’d stopped regularly attending church services when I was a teenager and rarely attended any church services until soon after I listened to that Paul Tillich recording—and then bought the 1965 book, The Future of Religions, on which the recording was based—when I was in my 20s. I soon dropped in on the services of several local denominations, looking for a spiritual home. I began to spend occasional weekends at a Benedictine monastery in central New York State. I applied to, and was accepted to study at Drew Theological Seminary near my home at the time, but dropped out after a year because of financial and time constraints—I was working full-time and not making much money—and not for a lack of interest. So, it was no surprise to me or to those who knew me well that, some 15 years later and now in midlife, I would apply and get accepted to study at another seminary, Union Theological Seminary. The course of study was so thorough in its critical examination of the Bible that, although I graduated with a Master of Divinity degree, I would come away from my years of scholarship less a believer than I had been when I began.

Now, here I am some 20 years later, coming round to Christianity again, like a prodigal son. I never gave up on the faith; never really turned my back on it. On my own, I continued to read the Bible and books about Christianity, even during my serious if not devotional foray into Buddhism, from which I learned invaluable lessons that I still draw upon about how to live a saner existence. Yet, I never found in Buddhism anything that spoke to evil as a real and present danger among us here, now, and always.

In fact, all my esteemed Buddhist teachers, and everyone I know who considered themselves Buddhists, fell right under the demonic COVID-19 psyop that had consumed much of the world. I wonder if it was because they did not have the necessary internal framework and gifts of discernment to perceive the evil that had come so brutally and, to me and many others, as obviously as hail stones raining down upon us. Yet, many Christians, too, fell under this spell and complied with the government mandates to close their churches and pathetically attempted to continue to gather on Zoom. Jesus could not have anticipated the degree and the spread of evil we’ve witnessed the past five years, but it’s apparent to me that he never underestimated the power, craftiness, and allure of evil that exists throughout time.

I have claimed my alliance with Jesus and am calling myself a Christian as a way to thank God for giving me not only this life of mine, but also the discernment to know and to seek to know what’s really going on in our world and to tap into the spiritual reserves imparted to us by Jesus to resist the demonic deceptions always at the door.

That is a treasure that no one can ever take away from me. And for that I am blessed indeed.

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Art at top: Sermon on the Mount (1877) by Carl Heinrich Bloch (1834-1890) in the Frederiksborg Hillerod museum in Denmark.

Art above: Christ's Sermon on the Mount: The Parable of the Lily (1866) by Currier and Ives. Library of Congress.

Selected Bibliography

Scripture quotations unless otherwise noted are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible. Meeks, Wayne A., et al. eds. The HarperCollins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version, with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books. New York, New York. HarperCollins, Publishers, Inc. 1993.

Betz, Hans Dieter. Essays on the Sermon on the Mount. Minneapolis, Minnesota. Fortress Press, 1985.

Collins, Raymond E. “Beatitudes.” The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Edited by David Noel Freeman, Vol. I, 629-631. New York, New York. Doubleday, 1992.

Dunne, John S. Reading the Gospel. Notre Dame, Indiana. University of Notre Dame Press, 2000.

Ellul, Jacques. Anarchy and Christianity. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Eugene, Oregon. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1991.

Guelich, Robert. The Sermon on the Mount: A Foundation for Understanding. Dallas, Texas. Word Publishing, 1982.

Guelich, Robert A. “Sermon on the Mount.” In The Oxford Companion to the Bible. Edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan, 687-689. New York, New York. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Life Application Study Bible. New International Version. Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. Wheaton, Illinois and Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids Michigan, 1991

O’Collins, Gerald G. “Salvation.” The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Edited by David Noel Freeman, Vol. V, 907-914. New York, New York. Doubleday, 1992.

Peck, M. Scott. People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil. New York, New York. Simon & Schuster, 1983.

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This is the sixth edition of Underlined Sentences. If you missed any of the five previous editions, you can read them here, here, here, here, and here.

My goal with this column is to offer thoroughly researched, informative, and insightful observations on the “underlined sentences” of both timely and timeless books or other written documents that I feature. I offer a brief sketch of the writers and place their texts—books, essays, poems, scripture—in the context in which they were written.

I also explore how they are relevant to our lives today. And I reflect on how they have challenged me to think about my life and how I can tap into their wisdom to get to the heart of the difficult matters that increasingly plague us, and to help guide us through them, if only by holding each other in an emotional and intellectual embrace. These columns take a considerable amount of time to research and write, so I’m posting them once every few weeks.

Please comment, share, and subscribe (see link below). Subscriptions are free, although there is a paying option. Or you can make a one-time contribution by clicking on the “Buy me a coffee” button below for other options. And, as always, thank you for reading. I would love to hear from you. If you’d like to contact me, email me: jimkullander@gmail.com