The Big Picture

This parable ends the Sermon on the Mount—blessed are the peacekeepers, the meek, etc. It’s to emphasize how important it is to abide by Jesus’ statements and commands. It’s short-sighted to ignore them, to go on your own arrogant path. It’s short-sighted to think nothing of the peacemakers or the meek; to think nothing of the command not to judge others, to think nothing of the Golden Rule: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you…” To ignore these sayings of Jesus is to build your home upon shifting sand.

Some parables are meant to be taken as allegories. This is not one of them. You’re meant to imagine this literally. You’re meant to imagine a wise person building a house on a rocky, high ground, and you’re meant to imagine a foolish person building their house on sand just waiting to be taken by the tides.

Unfortunately, this is something we can imagine pretty literally. In this time of rapid climate change, we’re seeing beachfront homes washed away by storms. You know, it’s funny—when I thought of this parallel, I started doing some research on the values of beachfront property homes, things like that—I got conflicting messages. Some said values were plummeting; some said they were steady or rising. But the bottom line is, they are in danger as the seas continue to rise and the winds continue to gain strength. And for a long time, when this country was still agrarian, before the industrial revolution picked up speed, the beachfront was thought to be useless. “Imagine rushing past the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard in your haste to stake a land claim in Ohio,” columnist Francis Wilkinson wrote in an opinion piece from the New York Times a couple years ago.

But as the industrial revolution took hold, and as good became more conveniently available, the rich got in there and grabbed those ocean views—but the sands were already shifting and now those who do have those oceanfront properties are trying everything in their power to save those properties… except for working to solve the root problem, of course. Wilkinson writes of plans to shield oil, gas and petrochemical facilities threatened by rising seas and storms:

…a massive barrier across Galveston Bay, along with other coastal fortifications. Two-thirds of the total cost, currently projected at more than $30 billion, would be borne by federal taxpayers, with about a third covered by state and local taxpayers.

So instead of looking at the big picture, the plan is to protect the things that are driving the environmental crisis by building more structures on shifting sands.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this short-sightedness that seems to be rampant in our society today. People seem capable of only thinking of what can get them what they want in the short-term, what will benefit them now, without thinking of the consequences later. I was thinking of it in terms of the fiasco with the school budget—while our current system is indeed unsustainable and broken, I think a lot of folks were forgetting about the fact that the youth in our schools are the ones who will be treating their illnesses, fixing their homes, caring for them as they age, so don’t we want to be sure the youth are well educated, sociable, and kind?

And I’m sure our current political landscape has put these musings in the forefront of my mind— all the turmoil, the change, the relief, the anxiety. And regardless of what you think of his policies and his leadership, Biden did, eventually, look at the big picture and realized he would need to step aside for his party to have a chance, rather than being short-sighted and arrogant, believing he was the only one to lead. I’d like to think that as arrogant as he was being for a while, believing that he was the only one to lead this country despite his clear inadequacies and issues, he thought of the big picture—he thought of his kids and his grandkids and he wanted to make sure those future generations would have a functioning country in which to live, that they would have a world to live in—one not ravaged by extreme weather thanks to short-sighted policies and so-called solutions that make the problems worse. Staying in the race would have been him building a house upon muck and sand, thinking only of his own ambition, rather than what’s best for this country, and ultimately, the world.

The Sermon on the Mount is a lot— Jesus makes a lot of requests and commands. And all of those requests and commands involve putting faith above our own wants, and putting others above ourselves. The Sermon on the Mount is about loving our enemies. It is about prioritizing the weak and the oppressed. It is about not worrying about what our clothes look like, how other people see us; it’s about not praying publicly to make ourselves look better, it’s about not deceiving others or ourselves. All those things give us short-term, shallow happiness— the vain feeling of looking good in front of others, getting praise for how pious we are, how rich we are, how well-dressed we are. In the moment it gives you that quick endorphin high, but if that’s all we prioritize, we lose sight of what matters.

These days, when everything is driven by money or fame, people are looking for the fastest ways to gain either or both, resulting in a deeply broken world that prioritizes all the wrong things. We’re posting perfectly curated social media profiles to show off to strangers instead of acting as stewards to the real world. We’re expending our mental and physical energy protecting beachfront fossil fuel facilities instead of spending it on renewable energies, ones that will give this world and therefore the people in this world, a longer, better lease on life.

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