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	May 2004
		A Quick Word by Paul Grayston
			Luke 6:17-49: The Sermon on the Plain We really should give Christianity a try It used to be said - during the Cold War stand-off that many of us lived through for all those years - that Communism was a good thing: it's just that it had never actually been tried. This throw-away line suggested that there was something in it that had been corrupted along the way, a loss which no amount of proletarian rhetoric and calling everyone 'comrade' could make up for. Some aspects of Jesus' teaching can leave us, if we allow ourselves to be open to what he is really saying, with similar concerns for Christianity. Has it ever actually been tried? Troubling In the Sermon on the Plain recorded in the Sixth Chapter of Luke's Gospel, our Lord confronts us with some of this radical teaching. He declares that those discarded and injured by society and regarded as failures are to see themselves as honoured (vv. 20-23), while those who have made a good life for themselves (the kind of life most of us are bent on creating) are cursed (vv. 24-26). It gets even more troubling as we read the more specific commands which follow. When someone causes us harm we are to 'turn the other cheek' and go back for more. When robbed and wronged and abused we are to aid those who are doing these things to us. Painful diagnosis What are we to do with this impractical ethic? What does this upside-down teaching mean? How does this beautiful but troubling sermon speak to us today? Jesus' words confront us with a painful diagnosis. We are, most of us, and probably even more so than the original disciples, hopelessly sold-out to the values and priorities of the world. Our life decisions are shaped by our society's idolatrous materialism and individualism which we generally take utterly for granted. Our anxieties, frustrations and resentments, if we will take the time to consider them sincerely, betray a deep-down worship of wealth, power, esteem, status and self. Utter repudiation Jesus outlines a revolution for human behaviour and society which leaves Castro's or Lenin's looking terribly tame: it is nothing less that the utter repudiation of all we have been brought up with; a radical questioning of the values and securities we have built up around ourselves. To live for God we must die to self. No wonder it has seldom been tried. Jesus lived out this new way of life he taught us and took it all the way to the cross. In the Sermon on the Plain he says to us and all his disciples, 'Why do you call me "Lord, Lord," and yet do not do what I say?' (v. 46). For this question I do not have an adequate answer. Do you?