On Monday I was moved to tears by the reports I heard out of Tahrir Square in Cairo. I was listening to Sharif Abdel Kouddous, an American radio producer who comes from a culturally- and politically-prominent Egyptian family, who had returned to Cairo at the beginning of the week. He described landing at the airport to find that he was in a different country from the one he had visited so many times before. A people who had been mute under 30 years of dictatorial rule had suddenly found its voice. Kouddous found a way to work around the information blackout imposed by the regime and was sending out live video, audio, and Twitter reports from the streets. In the background was the sound of a million people intoxicated with joy to discover that they were the power in Egypt, that they were Egypt.
With this knowledge, that had been systematically stolen and concealed from them by the state, came the hope that the awakening was irreversible. The people, Muslims and Christians, young and old, women and men, rich, poor, and middle class, had turned to each other and said “we have nothing left to lose,” and had gone out into streets together, and in that moment a spell had been broken. The legitimacy of the regime crumbled in an instant, and the Egyptians gasped in a full breath of freedom, a taste that will never leave them.
The public career of Jesus had the potential to be such a revolutionary moment. When I think of the crowds surging into Tahrir square, I think of Matthew’s gospel, and the passage that comes right before the chapter we heard from this morning:
Jesus went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease among the people. So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted, and he cured them. And great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan.
When Jesus goes up onto the mountain to give instruction to his new disciples he does so with the crowd in view. But the teaching he gives is not political advice about how to lead and direct this mass movement. The so-called “Sermon on the Mount” begins, as we heard last week, with Jesus proclaiming God’s blessing. Blessed are the ones who have a spirit of radical dependence on God, and a willingness to suffer for God’s cause. They are blessed because God will vindicate that cause, even though it looks like a fool’s errand to the conventional wisdom of the day.
In the Gospels, Jesus has a decidedly ambivalent relationship with the crowd. He leads them on a merry chase around Galilee, sometimes teaching them, or feeding them, and other times fleeing away from them into foreign territory or into the wilderness. And the crowd is not sure what to make of Jesus, whether to acclaim him as king, or lynch him as an impostor. As we know, they follow him into Jerusalem shouting “Hosanna in the highest!” But when the revolutionary moment doesn’t come, they turn against him, shouting “Crucify him!” And his disciples, the ones he called to be his inner circle and sent out to be his messengers, find themselves caught in the middle of that ambiguity, not sure what to hope for. In the teaching we hear today, Jesus is telling his disciples that God’s blessedness is not for them only.
“You are the light of the world,” says Jesus. “A city built on a hill cannot be hidden.” The crowd that has gathered has not come only for the healing of their private ills—they have been drawn by the public proclamation of a kingdom. Jesus will manifest that kingdom, and in the process he will challenge the regime, confront its corruption and hypocrisy, and expose its violence and indifference to human needs. But bringing down the powers-that-be is not the essential purpose of Jesus mission. What matters to him most is waking people up to the reality of the alternative. What matters is the deep breath of freedom, the breakthrough to a new identity, a new belonging to the real sustaining and governing power of the world, which is the Kingdom of God.
And the disciples are to be the continuing manifestation of that alternative. “You are the salt of the earth,” says Jesus, implying that without people alive with the hope of God’s blessing, the world is a bland place. But salt is more than just a flavoring, it is a preservative. In a time before refrigeration, food without salt will simply decay. The mission of Jesus is completed, not by bringing about regime change, but by creating a community to carry on his work of preserving and illuminating the world. All that he does is in some sense directed to that purpose, and yet the disciples won’t really get it until they abandon him to the crowd, to his shameful public death. It is only after that, when the revolutionary moment has been utterly lost and they are hiding away in fear and despair, that he comes to them again, and they taste, more clearly and distinctively than ever before, the unique and indescribable savor of his person, that they begin to really understand.
The people of Egypt are at a critical moment. The jubilation of Monday and Tuesday has now settled into the grim determination as the inevitable violent backlash has come. From the dizzying height of imagining a new Egyptian people, reborn in the spirit of unity, democracy and human rights, they must now come down and reckon with the force of the past, including revolutions in 1919 and 1956 that never lived up to their promise. Should they somehow succeed not only in getting their President to resign, but in truly dismantling the regime of corruption, torture, and repression that he oversees, how will they maintain the vision and discipline to make a lasting change in their political culture?
The sayings of Jesus that Matthew assembled into the Sermon on the Mount have been the church’s answer to a similar question. As Christians we are sent down the mountain, into the crowd, to be salt for the earth and light for the world. But this doesn’t mean that we have some special entitlement. Our mission must be grounded in the law and the prophets, that is, in the ethical commitment and moral discipline that is the noble legacy of our Jewish ancestors in faith. It is clearly spelled out in passages like the one we heard from Isaiah this morning:
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them?
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them?
“Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” So says Jesus, and the point he’s making is not that we should curry favor with others, or try to get a good reputation. His point is to use the gifts God has given us and in so doing point beyond ourselves to the One who gave them. Take bold action for the sake of the world. Go to Tahrir Square if that is how the Spirit directs you, and stand with your fellow citizens and chant to break the spell of the dictator.
But understand that the ultimate goal cannot be found in any national identity. It is not summed up in any political ideal or religious dogma. It is not to found in any human concept, however noble or elegant or liberating, and it will not be possessed in a revolutionary moment, no matter how powerful. It is hidden in the depths of God, in that mysterious wisdom that only God’s own gift of the Spirit can plumb. Our faith is that this wisdom came to us in Jesus, was revealed to us in his words and deeds. But it became effective for us in his cross. That’s a strange way to start a revolution. But maybe that’s why this revolution is still going after all these years.
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