[translations are my own, or from Greek and Latin New Testament, Vol. 1 of 2; edn. by Jason Powell]
I have the intention of writing a book named ‘Becoming the Son of God’. It would be a philosophical work, and a manual of instructions. I want to do this because it is my view, that the truth or the meaning of existence as a whole is, that one must become a self, and make the self. I think this is a neglected or even a new idea, which needs exposition. Additionally, I think that becoming a self is the message of the Gospels and of Jesus, which has made me a Christian; and reciprocally, that latter fact has confirmed my thoughts about the inner meaning of our existence.
The search for the meaning of existence as a whole is what philosophy is. Deriving the meaning of life from a set of commands and facts, is what religion is.
My most fundamental statement, which I provide at the outset, in this short essay, would therefore be: unless we are sceptical about making any sense at all, and denying that it has any ultimate purpose that we can know, then that meaning must be found in our individual self; and the religion of the individual and perfect self is Christianity. Therefore, the Christian religion must give rise to the perfect individual self, and the meaning of life can be framed in purely Christian terms.
Philosophy differs from religion; they were both originally separated by the Greeks, in this way: philosophy should be something which proposes truths that other people can understand and argue with or disagree with. While religion proposes what are thought of as truths, but it does not need to explain them to other people, and it can survive with total respectability, as a silent matter of practice before God; it can therefore go deeper, and also make deeper mistakes, of course, because it does not need to justify itself with reasons and explanations for things which might be true, but cannot be reasoned. The religious person only needs, in public, to explain what he believes, but does not need to justify it with arguments. And, we say that the explanation of the faith is theology, not philosophy.
But any explanation of what is going on inside your own self, is necessarily private anyway, in the same way as religion is. And if what is private is also what is most true and meaningful, then philosophy cannot deal with the final truth of existence, because it cannot deal with what is absolutely private. For instance, if one knows simply and immediately, God, then this cannot be explained to other people. But if the truth is, that you are building a self and meditating on it, then this also is private and cannot be explained to other people. Philosophy comes to an end when the meaning of life is, that the self is the very centre of existence, because this is by its nature, a truth which nobody else can share, because the evidence for it is private.
Philosophy comes to an end at the boundaries of selfhood, which is why in the last century, where this kind of self-awareness philosophy was developed, they used to say that the history of metaphysics was at an end. The public attempt to speak the absolute truth about things, if it rested in the single individual’s life, became impossible. If the living person includes his own life in his account of what the world is, then the truth can only be told by a single person, and cannot be made consensual and public, with experience and facts which can be shared.
This is how it is with religion, or specifically, Christianity, too. And I feel that the truest and maybe the impossible philosophy, is also Christian. To discuss this, would take me a book length essay. I would propose in such an essay, that the meaning of life is, to become a self, and to become the Son of God. But I have no intention of giving the grounds for my beliefs here, and this essay is concerned with a small beginning to that book, namely with one of the Gospels, and what it seems to me to mean, in the perspective of my larger task.
It would be necessary to also look at the records of Christ in the Gospels, as part of this work named ‘Becoming the Son of God’. That is what I will make a start at here. I will look at St Matthew’s telling of the life of Christ. When I now look at Matthew’s Gospel, one of four accepted biographies of Christ, I am trying to discern who Christ was, and what he meant to achieve in his life.
I must also say, that I write for my own times, where faith is lacking or is rare, and when understanding of my interests is poor, because it seems to me to be a time when there is little widespread faith. So, I am not only explaining my views, and advancing a thesis; I am also trying to correct prejudices and illusions prevalent in English culture, about Christ. It is my view, that Christ’s message is one of becoming a self, and that it is no help at all in political matters or social projects, with which our age is so obsessed; he preached the kingdom of heaven, and invited people to become sons of God. He taught inner peace.
I think that my time, in an England which is as Low Church as it can be, rather assumes that Christ is on the side of our society and our morality. It assumes this and makes an error, and is erroneous in a number of ways, both in its general cultural understanding of its self, and of the Gospels and Christ. Our morality is a rather totalitarian one, by and large, and the state has become rather Christian, in its giving, its methods of justice, its assumptions about what is right and wrong, in its character as a sort of surrogate God, and so on. In a sense, the regular British person has nationalised his conscience, and turned the state into a Christian agent. The contemporary British state is open, welcoming, loving of the poor, and so on. While the individual neglects God, refuses to go to Church, and does not pray, and perhaps above all, has forgotten who Christ is, and how he is described in the Gospels.
This awful upside down situation needs fixing. Our state is not Christian, because that is impossible. Christ came to save and teach individuals, not the government. The state cannot be Christian. Christianity has no political application whatsoever. If we were to look at what law Christ says one must follow, then it remains the Old Testament law, which is a law followed by all organised societies. He did not come to reform the law.
Rather, his innovation was, to take individual believers to perfection, in their inner life and as individuals. “You will be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5 : 48). That is, his concern was to show the higher commands of God, once the political and social aspect was already established and taken for granted. Christ specifically came to life, so as to save individuals, not so as to set up societies and advise governments about utopia.
I do not intend to stress this point again, and will deal with it here, as a suggestion. The Sermon of the Mount is addressed to the individual in his privacy and his relation to God. It is not a set of rules about how to arrange a welfare state or a totalitarian government of kindness. Christ tells the people: do your alms in private, and do them so that you personally will be rewarded by God in heaven. Do not do public good works, which other men can see. And do not set out to provision yourself with money, because God will look after that.
Christ’s appeal to men, and his appeal as a religious leader, and his meaning as the Son of God on earth, was to save individual men; and the mystery of how to communicate this individuality is what we must explain. All faith is a miracle, Hume pointed out, in what some people take to be an atheistic joke, but he was right; just as much as any healing miracle of Christ was a one off, and inexplicable. So, any faith in Christ is also a miracle, and against nature.
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I am no theologian. That is, I have not devoted years of continuous study to the Bible, sources of the texts, and interpretations made over the two thousand years. I understand that there were other accounts of Christ’s life made after his death, in the so called Gnostic Gospels, and the like. I am aware that St Matthew’s Gospel was written around 40 or 50 years after the crucifixion, and so on. There are better sources than I, where you can find out about scholarship on the texts. The Gospel canon was established by Ireneaus (d. 180), and, there is obviously no single account of Christ’s life, since we canonically accept four of them.
Traditionally, St Matthew is presumed to be that same Matthew who was a disciple of Christ’s; he was a tax collector before he followed Christ. When he wrote his Gospel, he was also familiar with St Mark’s version, it is clear from any comparison. St Mark himself is believed to have recorded what another disciple of Christ’s, St Peter, told him. So, we do assume that Matthew wrote down his memories of Christ at first hand, with some help from the Mark Gospel, which is based on St Peter’s first-hand memories.
These men did not write down the life of Christ as soon as he had died; there was no book trade, or market for new books and biographies, so, their books about Christ and his life, were transmitted in public and in secret, by word of mouth at first, and only later when the eye-witnesses were extremely old, were the stories and memories written down; the stories would have been collated from the community of Christians which certainly did start to grow immediately after Christ’s departure for the other world.
So, Matthew’s biography is partly first hand, and partly a collection of word of mouth, and partly from Mark’s existing biography. Matthew wrote it in his own way. There was no printing press, and writing a new book was as good as copying an old one, perhaps, which would be one of the reasons why he made his own version. And Matthew has described Christ as would be fitting for an educated Jew of the time; it was written for Jews in the way Mark’s gospel was not. We can also allow, that to some extent, the Holy Spirit had some input on Mattew’s work; but in the nature of things, where there are at least for Gospels, nobody can claim that his work is the actual definitive word of God.
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If I now give me view of the Gospel of Matthew, it is unapologetically my own interpretation. These works are not to be treated lightly, I know, and I do not treat them lightly. But I also rather ignore any resort to superior authority about what I should think. I get the impression that reading the Gospels from cover to cover, as I have done in my research for this, is not something which happens as often as you would think. Personally, I can recall reading St Matthew in this way only once in my life, when I made the decision to read the English bible from start to finish nearly twenty years ago. Otherwise, we simply assume we know the story of Christ’s life, and fail to make frequent readings of these important and short works.
I recently read the four Gospels in their original language of Greek, and in St Jerome’s Latin translation, in part to keep up my familiarity with the basics of those languages. But also because as a church going Orthodox Christian, I think it is my duty to do so. It is rewarding to have these primary sources at hand, I now think, and to read them more often. I will now make a summary of the first seven chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, and make some remarks which are to my broader purpose.
St Matthew’s version of Christ’s life is demonstrably aimed at Jews, and with its frequent references to the Old Testament prophets, it was written with the intention of showing how Christ was the fulfilment of the ancient prophecies, and thereby showing that he was the Messiah the Jews had been waiting for.
Chapter one of the book provides Christ’s genealogy from Abraham, and shows the exact pathway of Christ from the father of all the Jews. Accordingly, there were fourteen generations from Abraham to David; fourteen from David to the Captivity; and fourteen from the Captivity to Christ. This assumes that the captivity is itself a generation, and that Christ is one of those generations. If we allow a generation to be on average 30 years, then from the time of Abraham to the time of Christ, is roughly 1260 years. The genealogy ends with Joseph, the husband of Mary, which is strange, since Joseph was not his biological father, and the geneaology seems in some respect pointless, since the entire sequence went from father to son. But then, God was Christ’s biological father; and so, what Matthew had in mind to say was, that Joseph was his Jewish or cultural father, and that the culture gave rise to Christ and educated him, even though his true genetic father was not Jewish but rather, God.
Matthew, who is traditionally first in the line of gospel writers, also provided us with the most encyclopaedic version of Christ’s life, I would say. It is the account with the universally known biographical facts: the story begins when Mary is found to be pregnant before her marriage, and her betrothed, Joseph, is therefore obliged to denounce her, or, to put her somewhere secret to hide her from public knowledge. But an angel appears in a dream to Joseph, and advises him. Angels also appear to men in dreams in various other places: to the magi, and to Joseph while he is Egypt. When the child is born, the family is in Bethlehem, which was part of the old southern kingdom of Judah, rather than in the north, where Nazareth is located, where Christ spent his childhood.
When the angel first appears to Joseph, he gives him the basics of Christ’s mission: “What has happened to Mary is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a boy: and you will give him the name Jesus: he will rescue (save) his people from their failures (sins)” (Matt 1 : 20-1).
While the family are in Bethlehem, the three magi from the east inform Herod, the king of Judah, that a new king of the Jews has been born. The magi find the child, and do not go back through Jerusalem to inform Herod of the child’s location. So, Herod orders all the new borns of Bethlehem and surrounding area to be killed, and, on the instructions of an angel appearing during sleep, Joseph takes the family to Egypt, to remain there until Herod’s death. Matthew says that when they returned to Judah, they went to a village in the north, to stay out of the way of Herod, who ruled Jerusalem and the south. The flight to Egypt, and the relevance of Nazareth, in the area of the sea of Galilea, and the murder of the innocents, are each referenced to the prophets. Matthew is also quite scrupulous in saying that Archelaus succeeded Herod as king.
Matthew misses out the next thirty years, and resumes the story with John the Baptist, who has taken up residence in the desert, his clothes from camel hide, and asses skin around his waist, who eats honey and locusts. John the Baptist has amassed a large following, baptising and stirring the conscience of the Jews, who live under a Roman protectorate, and are governed in their daily lives by two types of Jewish priest, the Pharisees and Sadducees. People travel to see John from around the Jordan river in Judah, and from the capital. John’s intention seems to have been, to make the individual confess his sins, and have himself washed of them in the Jordan, in the name of God. Matthew points out that John speaks to the Pharisaic and Sadducean priestly groups as ‘the children of vipers’, and asks them who has warned them about the approaching danger?
‘Then came Jesus from Galilea in the Jordan to John, to be baptised by him’ (3 : 13). When John baptises Christ, the Holy Spirit descends in the shape of a dove, and a voice from heaven: ‘Here is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased’ (3 : 17). After which, Jesus goes straight to the wilderness, and stays there for ‘forty days’, which is the common way of referring a long time in the Bible, where he is tempted by Satan. The temptations are indicative of what Christ’s mission is about: he is asked to make stones into bread; to throw himself from a cliff edge so as to prove God can save him; and he is offered the government of the entire human race. Christ’s responses, which are discussed at length in Milton’s Paradise Regained, and for Milton do represent the spiritual meaning of Christ’s life, are all in the negative. He does not need wealth and goods (bread), he does not want to force God to intervene in nature, by making God intervene with a miracle; and he does not seek power or influence and fame. That is, everything about the meaning of existence takes place in the individual alone, as it were. The single individual who has faith in God, and an inner relationship with God, is already wealthy, protected, and in control of the world. That Satan or the enemy of Christ, is able to offer these things, is noteworthy. Angels tend to him when he passes the test (4 : 11).
When Christ learns that John has been arrested, he makes his way to Capernaum on the shore of the sea of Galilea. There, he begins teaching and healing, and his first sermons consist of this message: ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ He gathers four followers, men working at fishing the lake, making them this offer: ‘Come with me, and I will make you fishers of men’.
Matthew then introduces the first sermon, the Sermon of the Mount, by saying that Christ had attracted a large following, having spent his time in Galilea teaching at synagogues, and healing the local people of their various illnesses. ‘Across all Syria his fame grew, and they brought to him anyone with an illness, with various sicknesses, and with serious torments, and who had demons, and lunatics, people who could not walk, and he healed them’ (4 : 24). One day, surrounded by a huge crowd from Galilea, Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and beyond the Jordan, and ‘seeing the confused crowd, Jesus ascended a mountain, and when he had sat down, his disciples approached him, then he opened his mouth and taught them as follows’ (5 : 1). Such is the scene for the Sermon on the Mount.
The sermon takes up three chapters, and is perhaps the most frequently cited collection of what are taken to be Christ’s rules of practical morality and behaviour. It is my contention that they have nothing to do with activity in the world. Nietzsche has said of Christ, that he was the first Christian, and the only Christian, since nobody else could be like him. Nietzsche also said that Christ was entirely interior, and thought of the outside world in parables and images, because he could not touch or bear to suffer it in itself. I say this, in order to give a striking statement of what Christ was teaching in his Sermon of the Mount, and how it is not properly understood by our Protestant culture. His sermon is about the inner life, and it is delivered in analogies or metaphors, which it has been too easy to understand as practical aphorisms for temporal life. It is a mistake to treat the Sermon as if it were a set of practical rules for conduct. They are clearly rules for inner composure and encouragement for spiritual exercises.
It is possible to see how absurd it would be, to treat Christ’s sayings as instructions for general law, when he says: ‘If your eye offends you, if what you see is bad, then pluck it (your eye) out, and throw it away’ (5 : 29). The other instructions are of the same type, including that you should love your enemies (5 : 44); or that if anyone strikes you, then you should offer him the other cheek so that he can strike that, too (5 : 39). The entire sermon is better understood, not as an extension of a suicidal plan to destroy your body and to give away any personal status or property, but as a way of describing in analogies and external images, the attainment of peace and inner life with God. The misreading of the Sermon by literal minded people is not only harmful to the naïve individual, and makes impossible demands on him; it also discredits Christ by making him seem foolish; furthermore, if I am right, then misreading the Gospel in this way contradicts Christ’s meaning, and therefore is anti-Christian; and finally, in the wrong hands, namely in the hands of bureaucrats and government ministers, such as misreading can give licence to men who want to ruin countries, and to be wasteful with the communal funds and labour; I think that modern governments justify their utopian and atheistic plans, in large part, because they are the heirs of Protestant institutions, by reference to a misreading of the Sermon.
What is more proper to the spirit of the Sermon is something like a routine of private devotion, and spiritual exercises, which can bring about a sense of self, and entry into the kingdom of heaven. I would say, that the practice of personal cleanliness of mind and self, rather than extravagantly public displays of Christian principle, is its meaning; men should focus more on personal education and salvation, by control of the mind, than on acts of communal self-harm.
I will now look at some of the commands of the Sermon, but I should not hold back, but rather state from the beginning, that Christ’s intention for us, is that we engage more in a form of training of the mind and body, much more, than that we engage in public politics of charitable giving, of surrender to enemies, and so on, so characteristic of the modern age in so-called Christian countries.
The Philokalia of Ss Nikodemos and Makarios of Corinth, was specifically put together to instruct monks on Athos, about how to do a form of Christian mental and physical purity. The instructions are very specific about breathing and posture, from the C11th onward, and the texts from the C4th onward are an instruction in meditation. To my mind, not all people can benefit from meditative prayer, and the repetition of the Jesus Prayer. However, resistance to it signifies a serious and angry resistance to the heart of Christianity, and the meaning of Christ's birth and resurrection.
I am so convinced that the Gospels tell us of a Christ who was interested in mental and bodily perfection, that I intend, later, to advise what they today call ‘breathwork’, and meditation, which some claim is a sort of ‘yoga’. How else can we explain this: "And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost" (John 20, 22). If you are not concerned with the silent prayer, attention to the breath, and going alone to your closet, then you are something other what the saints were. But we digress.
As we know, Matthew put together the Sermon from his own recollections of Christ; but Matthew had not at that time been one of Christ’s disciples. So, his account of that particular day must be from others who were there; also, it does resemble, like all of his Gospel, parts of St Mark’s gospel, which is derived from Peter, who was there at the time. But, written perhaps fifty years after the event, it is the creation of Matthew that we find in the Sermon. Unless we admit that the Holy Spirit inspired Matthew, then these three chapters are the result of the Christian community and its general recollection of the event, and they have only been given form and a meaning by Matthew.
The Sermon begins with the Beatitudes, each of which begins ‘Blessed are…’, nine in number. In them we find the recurrent themes, that the follower of Christ can become a son of God, and that he can attain the kingdom of heaven, and that there is a reward in heaven. His sermon then explains in figures, because words themselves fail: how to become the son of God, and to be received into the kingdom. As we have said, faith is itself contrary to nature, and it cannot have any sensible argument. God does not appear in nature in such a way that we can have certainty about him or his intentions: we have to have faith in his messengers, or in what we see as signs. And, it is not dissimilar, when we try to explain to others, how we compose our inner life in its relationship to God, or how to locate and develop the eternal in time, within the soul. Just as God is not visible in external signs or in discrete parts of nature, so the way we feel about him is also not visible, but is rather not in the world at all; so, if anyone wants to explain how to attain a relationship with God, unless he wants to stay silent, he has to use metaphors.
The phrase ‘kingdom of heaven’ is itself a metaphor; and so is the phrase ‘son of God’. For all that, the things they point to are no less real. Furthermore, as we know, the death of Christ after being betrayed and angrily accused of a crime, indicates that whatever Christ was doing, it is not of the world at all, and is at odds with it. ‘Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you’. With reference to the way in which the empirical philosophy has dealt with Christianity and this inner kingdom, we know that Hume, for instance, did revile it.
I now intend, as quickly as is reasonably possible, to go through the Sermon, and show you how I interpret it. We are most of us already familiar with many of the sayings and instructions. They are what you might call ultra-conservative in their spirit. As an indication of this, Christ says after the Beatitudes, that he has not come to set the law and the prophets aside, but to fulfil them. So, in effect, the decalogue remains entirely where he found it: with strict prohibition on theft, disrespect of parents and country, on sexual impropriety, and on disrespect for God, and a prohibition on murder and other universally criminal actions. It is not only English law which prohibits theft and murder; every law does so, including the Jewish law of the Old Testament; and Christ did not mean for anyone to, for instance, disrespect his parents, or think so little of life, that he would condone violence or crime, and allow it to go unpunished.
So, as we pointed out above, he does not expect men to suffer from one another, and for them to do nothing about it. Rather, it seems to me, and as it has worked out over the history of nations, where people have followed Christ in large numbers, the state and the law must be kept separate from the private work of the Christian in his effort to become the Son of God. The Christian must be obedient to the secular law system, which is what the Old Testament represents for us, as the expression of universal and natural law, and he must be prepared for the higher fulfilment. And what Christ brings to us with the Sermon is the fulfilment of that system, by showing men that they can reach perfection in individual instances, if they follow him, and aspire for the kingdom of heaven.
He says to the crowd, speaking to each one of them individually: “You are the light of the world”, which is: you are the centre of this world. I should say it for a last time, to confirm and then move past this: in a regular orderly society governed by the law and prophets, it is possible to become perfect, and to be the light of the world. And to do this, it is necessary to follow the new commands, which are all aimed at the individual, and which concern his inner life.
“Love your enemies”, so as to be sons of God, means: have no trace of interest in the work of people outside you, or, do not take them to heart; do not hate. By means of having a pure heart, it is possible to enter the kingdom of heaven. Do not hold any grudges against your brother (5 : 23). Control your desires, and do not desire another man’s wife (5 : 32). Do not give attention to things which will tempt you from the straight path, rather close your eyes to them – or you will end up in ‘Gehenna’, the dump outside the city where the trash and the filth were thrown. The saying ‘Do not resist evil’, does not have a practical application in the sphere of law, since, as Christ says: “You have heard that men must pay an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, do not resist evil, but that when someone strikes you on the right cheek, then offer him the other” (5 : 14); I interpret this saying in a metaphorical sense, since the law prohibits murder and violence in general. It means: if someone hates you, do not submit to hatred. Likewise, the hyperbolic instruction to cast the eye away if it causes you to lust after women, is meant as follows: Do not let your heart be disturbed and drawn away to external things.
The mystery of how not to take such a thing to heart, lies in this: that Christ has given to man the opportunity to be like him, to be a son of God as he is. This means eternal life, resurrection of the dead, and the wisdom which belongs to God. And, when a man is filled with feelings of revenge, then he cannot become the Son of God. And it is the disciplining of his feelings and intentions which the Sermon wants to teach. It is necessary to see in each of our enemies, the eternal self, beyond or behind their evil or violent acts. And so, it is necessary to: “Love your enemies” (5 : 44). This is also why you should not judge other people (7: 1).
Chapter 6 is concerned with public displays of religion, which are directly contrary to his message, and to faith in God as a Father. So, if we give charity, it should be done in secret. If it is done publicly, then we have done it so as to receive applause and admiration. And while public admiration makes us feel proud, we feel nothing but love for God when it is done in private. He continues: when you pray, you must do it in private (6: 6). And when you pray, do not ask for anything whatsoever, because in your heart, you should know that you need nothing. To enter the kingdom of heaven, you need to control your desire and your anxiety for the future. If we pray, it is only so as to be a more perfect son of God; and the implication is, that praying improves the self, builds it up, so that it can enter the kingdom. Why else would one pray?
It is in this chapter of Matthew that Christ gives the crowd the words of the Lord’s Prayer, which, under analysis, does not seem to ask God for anything at all, except for forgiveness and a calm mind. Fasting should be done secretly (6: 18); your most important things must be intangible, and not physical riches (21); and you should have no attachment to anything in the world, nor any care for such things, since God will give you what you need anyway, so why should the heart and the mind concern itself with them (25 ff)? As for other people, do to them what you want them to do to you: with this simple message, all of the complex interactions with other people are dismissed as a simple and needless game of keeping a balance: Christ is simply not interested in other people, only in the one to whom he is talking.
At verse 22, Christ says that the eye is the light of the body, and that if the eye is simple and unified, then the whole body will be filled with light; and in this way, he advises the individual to purify himself, and that is, to unify and concentrate himself. I refer to the exercises of mind, breath, and body which I have already alluded to, above, which are exercises of concentration, and withdrawal.
By contrast, I think that the majority of people imagine that the Sermon has the intention of making them engaged in the wider society, their community, and perhaps to petition their MP for more welfare for the poor and so on. Those who advise something similar, who seem to be peaceful and to be the sheep, will be wolves in sheep’s clothing, Christ says. Where men advise some kind of conduct other than the law, and not for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, then they are false prophets. The fruit of their works will show who they are, and they will be thrown into the fire, in the end (7 : 19).
It would be appropriate to now ask, what is the point of mere calmness, of inner peace? Is that the sum content of Christ’s Sermon? And the answer should be, that the calmness is itself a preparation for the next stages, which are the Sonship and the Kingdom of heaven. If we merely followed outward commands, and did not aim at knowing God, then, Christ says, that in the days to come ‘many will come to me saying: Lord, Lord; and they will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Only those who did the will of my Father will enter the kingdom of heaven’ (7 :21). See, what this indifference and non-attachment leads to, is the chance to do the will of God, to know God’s will as our own nature. The calmness and abstraction from the world is not a mere negative emptiness: it is the chance for God to approach, and give a man the divine will. If we cannot achieve this, then Christ will say to us in future times: “I never knew you: get away from me, you who did evil” (23). The benefits of the state of dispassion are, that the self builds itself, unifies itself, is concentrated, and then is able to follow the will of God, and to enter the kingdom of heaven.
In some sense, the kingdom of heaven is the hardest thing to explain, otherwise than as follows: God will be your father, and his relationship to you will be as personal and private and unique, as his relationship to Christ is. To elaborate further is hard, and our words fail us for now. The Sermon finishes on that note, with a final parable about building your house on firm ground, and not on sand. When he finished the sermon, the crowd were amazed that he had spoken with such confidence and authority, so unlike the pharisees and scribes.
I will end this discussion here for now, and return to the rest of Matthew at a later date; I also intend to look at the other Gospels, in future times, preparatory to an investigation into the philosophical consequences of these things.
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