FAST FOOD (2018): Thirty-Second Helping

Is Jesus just filling in time for 33 years until the stage is set for the only important event of His earthly life, namely, His death? Did He have anything essential to communicate about salvation and the Way to salvation before His death? Does Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount—which concludes with two paragraphs specifically structured around Jesus’ words, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven“—communicate anything crucial about eternal salvation and the Way to the Kingdom of God for those who call Him “Lord?”

Are Jesus teachings, e.g., “Love your enemies,” “Put up your sword,” “Love one another as I have loved you,” etc., essential to the salvation process, to knowing and doing the will of our Father on earth as it is done in heaven? If these teaching of Jesus are not essential to the salvation process, then which teachings of Jesus, the Word of God “made flesh,” have eternal consequences—positive or negative— for the individual person and/or for all humanity? And why those and not the aforementioned teachings? Ask your bishop. Then, assuming he will even speak to you on the subject, see if you can say with moral certainty before God that the answer you are given by him is the truth that Jesus teaches in the Gospels or is logically consistent with the truth that Jesus teaches in the Gospels

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy