Sermon on the Mount – The Nonviolent Revolution

The Sermon on the Mount is one of the most revolutionary works ever spoken or written. In this message, Jesus overturned a millennium of human thinking in areas like wealth, divorce, war, and revenge. The Sermon on the Mount was the beginning of the nonviolent revolution. The words are found in the Bible in Matthew, chapters five through seven.

Sermon on the Mount: a new vision of war

Before the Sermon on the Mount, it had never occurred to anyone that there was anything wrong with war. Certainly the Romans and Greeks saw nothing wrong with it. In fact, they regularly offered sacrifices to Mars (in Greece, Ares), the god of war. Similarly, the Jews certainly did not see war as a bad thing. The Old Testament is full of battles that the Jews fought with God’s blessing.

So it was nothing short of revolutionary when Jesus spoke the words in the Sermon on the Mount: “Do not resist him who is evil; rather, turn the other also to him who slaps you on the right cheek… a mile, go with him two”. (Mt. 5:39,41). Taken to its logical conclusion, this meant that war was no longer to be seen as something glorious and the way to defeat evil.

Early Christians and war

Early Christians before the time of Constantine took Jesus’ words to their obvious conclusion. They refused to take up arms or fight in the Roman or Jewish armies. However, they did not equate Jesus’ words with passivity. No, they bravely faced the full might of Rome, without earthly weapons, and won! It took three centuries, but the hitherto invincible Roman empire finally gave up trying to beat the Christians into submission. Instead, he eventually embraced Christianity.

The nonviolent revolution: books that have exposed

Over the past two thousand years since Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount, spiritual men and women have written numerous books that embrace Jesus’ gentle revolution of love, not swords. One of the most enduring of these books has been that of Francois Fenelon. we go. In it, Fenelon teaches us how to embrace peace and defeat evil with good, not more evil. The text of Fenelon’s popular classic is available for free online at Let Go.

The famous author, Leo Tolstoy, radically embraced Jesus’ teachings of peace and nonviolence. His writings, along with the Sermon on the Mount itself, had a great influence on Gandhi. Gandhi was able to win India’s independence from the British without using any violence. In turn, Gandhi’s methods influenced Martin Luther King. This is not to say that Jesus intended his words to be used to espouse political causes. However, his revolutionary teachings in the Sermon on the Mount have had an enormous influence on human societies throughout the world.