The Sermon on the Mount is a text which is definitive of Hauewas’ entire theological and ethical project. Jesus is not simply teaching an ethical code, but incarnating the Kingdom, which when lived, looks something like the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon is addressed, not primarily to individuals, but to the community of Jesus who as disciples, are called into a Kingdom where Jesus Rules, OK!
I like his emphasis on the communal intentions of the Sermon – not each lonely struggling individual disciple struggling to live up to each Beatitude. No, but a supportive community of the gladly needful and willingly dependent, in all their diversity, discovering and displaying and disseminating – peace, comfort, hunger for justice and so on. The Beatitudes are about us rather than me; about grace given rather than virtue achieved.
Hauewas’ take on virtue ethics, as they come into conversation with the Sermon is this: ‘For Christians the virtues, the kind of virtues suggested by the Beaititudes, are names for the shared life made possible through Christ’.
Virtue – community – Christ – a community of virtue whose resource and motivation is the presence, example and gift of Jesus. And when it comes to anger and lust, the corrosive antitheses of forgiveness and generosity, the obstacles to peace and gift, Hauerwas’ hard headed spirituality says just what’s needed:
Alone we cannot conceive of an alternative to lust, but Jesus offers us participation in a kingdom that is so demanding we discover we have better things to do than concentrate on our lust. If we are people committed to peace in a world of war, if we are a people committed to faithfulness in a world of distrust, then we will be consumed by a way to live that offers freedom from being dominated by anger or lust…. (Page 69).
Consumed by a way to live – that seems to encapsulate what Hauerwas, and his conversation partners Bonhoeffer and Yoder, are so serious about. Christian discipleship is walking a way in such a way, that it leads to the cross, where God is most fully revealed, and from which the community of Jesus takes it moral and spiritual, and therefore political bearings.
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