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Getting to the mountaintop, one hill at a time
In therapy, one frequently given piece of advice is “Don’t focus on the mountaintop, just focus on the next hill (or step).” It’s great advice, particularly when the going is hard. Focus on what you can do right now, today. Be realistic – not unambitious, but realistic – and hit your targets. That gives you the confidence to carry on. But if you aim straight for the mountaintop, then you are more easily discouraged, you more easily get knocked off course and give up.
However, in today’s gospel reading from St Luke – the so-called Sermon on the Plain (a shorter distillation of St Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount) – Jesus appears firmly focused on the mountaintop. We are given a series of difficult to near-impossible objectives to achieve, and it’s possible to feel set up for failure. Why can’t Jesus be a little more reasonable?
The answer is that in life we actually need both hill and mountaintop. Both realism and inspiration. We can only get through life one day at a time, but we also need the knowledge, understanding, and hope for the ultimate objective. Jesus is not trying to put us off here. He’s offering us the view from the mountaintop, but makes clear in many other places in the Gospels that he’s with us day by day, right alongside us, as we just try to trudge up the next hill.
Jesus is telling us to hold the mountaintop as the ideal that we will eventually reach. An aspiration, a goal, that is not meant to demean or discourage us, but rather to inspire us on a daily basis to move forward with each small goal in the knowledge that – at the end – we too will stand on that mountaintop and see the Promised Land.
Will Morris
Assisting Priest for Engaging Local Communities
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