"Fear, the Enemy of Faith"
"Fear, the Enemy of Faith"
(Recorded at the Mount of the Beatitudes) The greatest enemy of faith is not doubt; the greatest enemy of faith is fear. Most of the world is controlled by fear, petty and big. Petty fears control people; great fears control nations. We could feed all the people in this world if we would stop building arms, but we are afraid. So the great peacemaker sat on this hill and preached to the world. In the Beatitudes he said those of you who make peace will be happy (Matthew 5:9). You will be God’s own. Yet even we Christian people are preoccupied with fear and protecting ourselves because we don’t believe what Jesus said here. We read the Beatitudes in church once a year on the Feast of All Saints. But we don’t base our lives on it. Jesus preached the Beatitudes here as the inaugural sermon of all of his teachings. Teachers know how crucial your first sentence is. What is Jesus’ opener? “Happy the poor in spirit.” We don’t understand Jesus at all until we understand the absolute centrality of that line and the rest of the sermon he gave here. Yet I could make a strong case that the Sermon on the Mount has been and is the most neglected and rejected part of his teaching, even by the Church. The Sermon on the Mount is an antidote to fear. But we have never seen fear as the crucial issue, only “doubt.”
from On Pilgrimage With Father Richard Rohr
(Recorded at the Mount of the Beatitudes) The greatest enemy of faith is not doubt; the greatest enemy of faith is fear. Most of the world is controlled by fear, petty and big. Petty fears control people; great fears control nations. We could feed all the people in this world if we would stop building arms, but we are afraid. So the great peacemaker sat on this hill and preached to the world. In the Beatitudes he said those of you who make peace will be happy (Matthew 5:9). You will be God’s own. Yet even we Christian people are preoccupied with fear and protecting ourselves because we don’t believe what Jesus said here. We read the Beatitudes in church once a year on the Feast of All Saints. But we don’t base our lives on it. Jesus preached the Beatitudes here as the inaugural sermon of all of his teachings. Teachers know how crucial your first sentence is. What is Jesus’ opener? “Happy the poor in spirit.” We don’t understand Jesus at all until we understand the absolute centrality of that line and the rest of the sermon he gave here. Yet I could make a strong case that the Sermon on the Mount has been and is the most neglected and rejected part of his teaching, even by the Church. The Sermon on the Mount is an antidote to fear. But we have never seen fear as the crucial issue, only “doubt.”
from On Pilgrimage With Father Richard Rohr
posted by LuisVelasco @ 8:43 PM
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