Saturday night, along with many others in my city here in Virginia, my husband and I lit candles outside our home in solidarity with the people of Minneapolis. As we stood in the falling snow and frigid cold praying for the courageous people in Minnesota, I couldn’t help but think that God was standing there too, and that the frigid cold sweeping our nation was a sign of God’s solidarity with those who are afraid right now.

Whether God controls the weather to send a message to humanity is above my pay grade, but none of us needs a sign from heaven to determine what is right and wrong.

“He has shown you, O man, what is good; And what does the LORD require of you, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8 NKJV)

The Apostle Paul put it another way:

“I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel, which is not just another account; but there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed! As we have said before, even now I say again: if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you received, he is to be accursed!” (Gal 1:6-9 NASB, emphasis mine).

What is often passing for the gospel today is not the gospel of Jesus Christ at all — it is, in the words of Paul, “a different gospel.” The Christian Nationalist gospel is selfish and completely individualistic: accept Christ and escape hell for me and my loved ones, tell others I meet so they can escape hell too. But this is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is as much about how we respond to the world around us in this life, as it is about our destination in the afterlife. Jesus made this perfectly clear:

“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (Luke 6:46)

What passes for the gospel in much of America is a pale counterfeit of the gospel that Jesus and his disciples preached. In my last essay, I wrote of how Jesus looked out over the multitudes and felt compassion on them. In response, he encourages his disciples to “pray to the Lord of the harvest” to send forth laborers, and then, immediately, he calls his twelve closest friends and sends them. (Matthew 9:36-10:42) The Luke account says that the disciples “…began going throughout the villages, preaching the gospel and healing everywhere.” (Luke 9:6b, emphasis mine).

A few months ago, when my husband Craig and I were reading through this passage, it suddenly hit me.

What were they preaching? It says they were “preaching the gospel,” but it says repeatedly before and after this passage that they had no idea that Jesus was going to die and be resurrected, so they were not preaching that… what was the “gospel” (good news) they were preaching then?

I leafed back through the book of Luke to find the content of this “gospel” since the disciples were not yet preaching of a death they did not believe would happen, nor a resurrection that had not yet entered their imaginations. What good news did they have? I found it in Luke 6 and Mathew 5. The Beatitudes, Similitudes and subsequent Sermon on the Mount are the core of the gospel message. Just before the Mathew passage it says in Matthew 4:17 that:

“From that time Jesus began to preach and say, ‘Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’”

This passage may conjure up images of bearded men in parks wearing sandwich boards, but our modern understanding of Jesus’ (and before him John the Baptist’s) message of repentance is paltry at best. The Greek word translated as “repentance” is metanoia. It means quite literally “to rethink” or to “change your mind.” With all due respect to half the evangelical preachers in America, it does not primarily mean to “turn and go in the other direction,” though that certainly could be a result!

Seeing the Beatitudes and Sermon on the Mount through the larger lens of changing our minds and rethinking our ways, opens up the passage to us. How might our minds be changed? I encourage you to read the passages for yourself, but here are a few ways Jesus himself mentions that might need rethinking:

It is not the rich who are blessed. No it is the poor in spirit.
It is not the self-satisfied who are comforted. No, it is those who mourn.
It is not the violent who inherit the earth, it is the gentle, the meek, the humble.

If people say evil against you, and lie about you, you are blessed because it means you are brothers and sisters with all who went before you who spoke out against injustice.
Don’t only love your neighbor, but love your enemy as well.

This, my friends, is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The death, burial and resurrection of Jesus is indeed a part of that message, but the Good News (gospel) is that we are empowered by the forgiveness our wrongs, and by the power of the Holy Spirit to go and live out the Sermon on the Mount — to stand with the poor, to mourn with the grieving, and to protect the oppressed. We are called not just to call him “Lord, Lord” but to also go and do what he said.

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Note: On February 18, Ash Wednesday, we will begin the third year of “40 Days of Prayer for Democracy.” It is a time to humble ourselves and pray, and for us each to seek to respond to our concerns for our neighbors, our nation, and our democracy. Your actions may be different than mine, and that’s okay. I am not your conscience, but as I speak clearly from my own conscience, I hope that yours too will be ignited to “go in the strength that you have.” With love, Margaret