May/June 2002 Religion & Theology Features

ARTICLE TOOLS

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It occasionally happens that a passage of Scripture comfortably familiar from youth comes back much later to haunt us with an unfamiliar severity. This can especially be so when rereading those teachings of Jesus typically cashed out in childhood as "sword drill" verses and Sunday school songs.

"The wise man built his house upon the rock … The foolish man built his house upon the sand … "—I can still hear the rollicking pentameter and anticipate the final, thunderous clap and clomp which nearly shook down the lights of our Baptist church when "the house on the sand went flat (splat)."

But before me now, in a somewhat more tentative middle age, is the whole text, the concluding sentences of the toughest teaching in the Sermon on the Mount:

"Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!' Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; And it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock. But everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell. And great was its fall."

Now, the cheerful singing of my childhood notwithstanding, I have to admit that I have been one of those who from the ...