Recently I have been thinking about Jesus and his relationship to Christianity. I came across a quote that stated that Jesus was not a Christian. Here is the whole statement: “Buddha was not a Buddhist. Jesus was not a Christian. Muhammad was not a Muslim. They were teachers who taught love. Love was their religion.” Is that true? In this episode I explore that statement, focusing on the idea that Jesus was not a Christian, and why that matters today.

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This episode explores the final section of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus ends his longest and most famous teaching by warning us to be careful of those who would misinterpret his teachings to promote their own agenda. In other words he advises us to use discernment when it comes to spiritual teachers. 

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In the last part of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus focuses on how to enter the Kingdom of God. From a Buddhist perspective this question would be expressed as how to enter Nirvana or how to be enlightened. The Hindu might ask how to be liberated. Different spiritual traditions have different terms for this, but it is the same spiritual reality. 

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The section of the Sermon on the Mount that I am looking at today has to be one of the best, as well as the most neglected and misused portions of the teachings of Jesus. It is about not judging. “Judge not, that you be not judged.” I will show how it has its roots in Jesus’ teaching of nonduality. 

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https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

I am continuing my journey through the Sermon on the Mount, interpreting it from a nondual perspective. Today I look at one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible in my opinion, sometimes known as the “lilies of the field” passage. 

The topic of the section is worry or anxiety. I did an episode entitled “Beyond Anxiety and Fear” immediately before I started this series about the Sermon on the Mount. So I do not want to repeat myself. I will talk about worry, since that is the subject Jesus is addressing. But I am more interested in what Jesus points to in order to help us overcome worry and anxiety. 

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Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God, which is his term for the awareness of the Presence of the Divine. His message was the omnipresence of God, not as a doctrine to be believed but a reality to be experienced. That was the gospel of Jesus. But that is not the gospel that has been historically proclaimed by the Christian church. When one looks for evidence of this message throughout church history it is difficult to find. One only spots glimpses of it sticking up like flowers growing between the cracks in a sidewalk, but it is rare.

Christianity could have been a movement that preached and lived the firsthand direct awareness of the presence of God. Instead it became a religion of doctrines, a legalistic and hierarchical institution that replaced experience with dogma and replaced direct awareness of God with faith in the authority of the Church. The gospel of the historical Jesus very quickly became a gospel about the Christ of faith, invented by men who did not know Jesus, did not hear him preach and did not experience or understand what Jesus was talking about. 

Christianity lost its way. How did this happen?

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Today I will finish the section of the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus dedicates to nondual spiritual practices. Here he deals with fasting and possessions. 

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Last time I started the section of the Sermon on the Mount that deals with Spiritual Practices, but I only got as far as almsgiving and prayer. I did not even get all the way through what Jesus says about prayer. I wanted to devote a whole episode to the Lord’s Prayer, because it holds such an important place in Christian tradition. So today I am giving a nondual interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer.

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Today I continue the interpretation of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount from a nondual perspective. Last time it was the nondual ethics of Jesus. From there Jesus goes on to talk about spiritual practices. So I am calling this episode “the nondual spiritual practices of Jesus.”

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https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

In this episode I will show how nonduality underlies Jesus’ ethics. His ethical teachings in the Sermon on the Mount have a pattern. First Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said…” and then he quotes a passage from the Torah. Then he adds, “but I say to you.” Then he give his teaching. In other words he says, “The Bible says this, but I say this.” He was not negating what the Bible said. He was building upon it and completing it. He was fulfilling it. 

I am going to take each of these sayings in his section of the Sermon on the Mount and see how his teachings reflect a nondual ethic that goes beyond dualistic understandings of right and wrong, us and them. Living in nonduality is entirely different than living by moral rules and laws. When one is aware of the nondual Reality that unites everything, we live naturally out of this nondual nature rather than trying to figure out with our heads what we should do. Paul calls this walking in the Spirit as opposed to obeying the Law. 

View Marshall's books here:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU