Book 1: An Illumination of Matthew      
Part 2: The Thesis of Jesus
Chapter 6: Trouble for Today (Righteousness II: the Present)
      
This episode continues Part 2: The Thesis of Jesus.  Jake and I continue to discuss the 1st discourse of Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount, looking at chapter 6 of Matthew’s Gospel. 

This chapter contains the heart of Jesus’ Thesis on Righteousness, or Ethics.  It is devoted to the question of the Present, and the power of the Present - which is the Eternal.  We discuss the difference between performative ethics and the ethical mysticism advocated by Jesus. 

In this episode:

0:00 - Outlining the territory to be covered today

2:30 - The Lord’s Prayer as Jesus’ poetry

4:30 - Paul Tillich’s religious analysis of the present

6:20 - On Martin Buber’s dialogical conception of the eternal 

10:10 - Dimensions of psychic experience and existential modes

14:40 - True Relation vs. Fusion to nondifference

17:30 - The 4th Beattitude: hunger and thirst for righteousness

18:05 - Reading of Matthew 6:1-18

21:25 - The principle: Being Seen vs. Being in Secret

25:45 - Mysticism and the closed realm of the secret place

28:50 - Illustration of the principle in alms, prayer, & fasting

31:20 - The Poor Face of Christ and the Christic Descent 

37:05 - The central deception of performative ethics

39:25 - Analysis of the structure of The Lord’s Prayer

43:15 - The distinctive of Christian mysticism: “On earth as it is in heaven”

55:35 - The elements of the earthly: Bread, Debts, Temptations

1:00:35 - Reading of Matthew 6:19-34

1:03:45 - Why you can’t serve both God and money

1:06:15 - The link between value and perception

1:11:35 - Anxiety vs. Presence

1:15:25 - Existential anxiety vs. pathological anxiety