Jesus is teaching that right relationship is the ultimate and daily criterion. If a social order allows and encourages, and even mandates, good connectedness between people and creation, people and events, people and people, people and God, then we have a truly sacred culture: the Reign of God. The world as it would be if God were directly in charge would be a world of right relationship. It would not be a world without pain or mystery, but simply a world where we would be in good contact with all things, where we would be connected and in communion. Conversely, the work of the Evil One is always to separate, divide, and throw apart (dia-bolical).
Right relationship is all about union and communion, it seems, which means that it is also about forgiveness, letting go, service, and lives of patience and simplicity. Who can doubt that this is the sum and substance of Jesus’ teaching? He makes right relationship desirable, possible, and the philosopher’s stone by which everything else is to be weighed and judged.
—from the book Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount
by Richard Rohr, OFM
