5th Sunday after the Epiphany
Texts: 1 Corinthians 2:1-12;
Matt 5:13-20; Isa 58:1-12
YouTube: https://youtu.be/5Y-kcGEV_HY
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from John Dear
MOST IMPORTANT DISCIPLE OF JESUS IN LAST CENTURY?
MAHATMA GANDHI, A HINDU MAN
I’d like to begin this morning by asking your opinion: which person in the last century has done the most to promote genuine Christian discipleship? Is it one of the popes? A famous evangelist like Billy Graham? Perhaps it’s someone like Mr. Rogers, who lived his Christian values for children on TV? Is it a certain Christian author or teacher you’ve read and benefitted greatly from? Before I give you my answer, I’d like you to think about it for a moment. Which person in the last century has done the most to promote genuine Christian discipleship? Any suggestions?
Answer from congregation: “Dr. King.” That’s certainly true, I think, especially when it comes to this country. The person I have in mind has global significance, such that Dr. King learned from him — was following his lead.
OK, here’s my answer. It’s not a huge surprise, though it is someone who was Hindu and remained so throughout his life. Yes, Mahatma Gandhi of India. I have two handouts for you this morning, which I held back so that you could think about this question of discipleship without seeing my answer first. The first handout is a page from Catholic peace activist John Dear. He wrote a recent commentary on the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and this is a page introducing the Sermon on the Mount and commenting on today’s portion of it.1 He recounts how for Gandhi, even though he was a Hindu, the centerpiece of his life was Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. He read a portion, or all of it, every day. John Dear talks about how the Sermon on the Mount had fallen into disuse by most Christians, until Gandhi helped to revive it. Dear writes about Gandhi, “For him, this was the greatest instruction on nonviolence, almost like a handbook on how to be nonviolent, how to be human. For Gandhi, it was a text worth returning to every day. It laid out the guidelines of his life.”2
In order to better understand the immense importance of Gandhi’s contribution to genuine Christian discipleship — world-changing, in fact, including other leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. — I need to tell you a bit about an important tract from the early church called the Didache. Didache. It was basically a catechism, a small booklet used to evangelize and train early Christian converts. It contains a lot of what our typical catechisms contain: the Lord’s Prayer, sections on Baptism and Holy Communion (called the Eucharist in the tract). But the opening section is on basic Christian discipleship, mapping out what it calls the “Two Ways,” the way of living that leads to life and the way of living that leads to death. And the portion of the Bible most prominently featured to map out the way of life is, you guessed it, the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew. In training the first Christians what it really means to follow Christ, the Didache centered on the loving, nonviolent politics of God’s reign in Jesus, as especially found in the Sermon on the Mount. Turn the other cheek. Love your enemies. This is what is most distinctive about following Jesus as a disciple. We might even say, it gives us our saltiness.
So a main reason why I see Gandhi’s contribution is that Christian culture, since it allied itself with the violence of nationalistic empires, has forgotten about this distinctiveness of Jesus’ teaching about nonviolent politics based on love. We lost our saltiness! Christendom culture could not allow such politics.
Martin Luther was an example. He taught that turning the other cheek and loving one’s enemies were so impossible that Jesus didn’t really mean for us to live by them. He taught that they were so impossible that Jesus’ strategy was to bring us to our knees and pray for God’s gracious forgiveness. Despite the fact, as we read in today’s Gospel, that Jesus very much emphasizes, ‘You need to do these things that I’m teaching you!” Luther is an example of how the Church for several hundred years have not taken these teachings seriously.
Until a Hindu man began to revive them and to give an example of his own life of how to follow them — not just for himself but also as the core of a nonviolent political movement to win independence from the British Empire for his people. Gandhi’s taking seriously the politics of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount is truly one of the most important events in history, one that has begun to rewrite human history since then.
Examples abound. Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer heard and read about Gandhi and planned to visit him in India twice. But he never made it because of living under the shadow of Hitler’s Nazism, who executed Bonhoeffer a month before the war ended in April 1945. The most enduring book which Bonhoeffer wrote, simply titled Discipleship, first had to respond to Luther’s downplaying of the Sermon on the Mount — famously calling this kind of discipleship “cheap grace.” and then going on to feature its largest portion, a third of the book, on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew.3 Bonhoeffer, too, came to understand the importance of Jesus’ ethics of nonviolence, especially as he lived under the shadow of Hitler’s Nazism.
Another important example is Martin Luther King, Jr., who did travel to India in 1952 to learn from Gandhi’s disciples how to be a better disciple of Jesus by learning to live by the loving, nonviolent politics of Jesus in standing against the violent, racist politics of America. King’s Civil Rights movement was centered on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
I’d like to finish this morning with some specific examples of how this works in real life, in history, but first by calling attention to a verse in our Second Reading. St. Paul shows his understanding of how the politics of nonviolence began in the cross, when he says about the seeming folly of God’s nonviolent wisdom, “none of the rulers of this age understood, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” It’s worth saying again: “None of the rulers of this age understood, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” Do you see? Nonviolent politics work precisely because violent human rulers cannot see it coming. So, as we talked about last week, they tip their hand. They reveal what they’re really about. They reveal their violent ways as nothing but violent ways of death.
I have three photos in your Sermon Notes that show how this has worked over the past century since Gandhi helped to revive the centrality of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The first is from the climax of Gandhi’s movement of independence from Great Britain, by challenging their monopoly on salt. He marched to the sea and showed people how to extract salt from the ocean. Then, after he had been thrown into prison, his movement organizers led a march on the Dharasana Salt Works controlled by the British. You can see in the photo the lines of protesters walking into police lines and then getting beaten down. Wave after wave of protesters kept coming and letting themself get beaten down. In the movie depiction of this scene, Martin Sheen plays an American newspaper reporter who calls in his story, saying, “Whatever moral ascendency the West held was lost here today. India is free. For she has taken all that steel and cruelty can give, and she has neither cringed nor retreated.”4 Do you hear echoes of Paul saying, “None of the rulers of this age understood, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory”? The British rulers didn’t understand.
The second photo is of the march on Selma. One thing I’ve read about the march is that the local leadership was divided about how to respond to the upcoming march. The Selma mayor (Joseph Smitherton) and police chief (Wilson Baker) were against using violence; but the County Sheriff Jim Clark and Gov. George Wallace were segregationists who favored using violence to put down the protest. Their view won out, but they lost the war because they failed to understand how they were exposing themselves as violent men. Again, you can hear echoes of Paul saying, “None of the rulers of this age understood, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” If Sheriff Clark and Gov. Wallace had only understood, they’d be on the right side of history.
The third photo is the history we’re in the middle of writing. A picture of ICE agents beating down a protestor in Minneapolis. Last week, we asked if the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti would reveal the administration’s anti-immigration campaign as deadly violence, like the cross. Will we hear echoes of Paul saying, “None of the rulers of this age understood, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory”? The people of Minneapolis are doing such an inspirational job of living by Jesus’ politics of loving nonviolence, I think. How can we join in solidarity with them? How might we be on the right side of history as Gandhi’s revival of the Sermon on the Mount continues to expose the violence for what it is, and to invite people into the way of peace and life? Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, February 8, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/5Y-kcGEV_HY
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from John Dear
Notes
1. John Dear, The Gospel of Peace: A Commentary on Matthew, Mark, and Luke from the Perspective of Nonviolence (Orbis, 2024). The excerpt on the handout is from pages 14-15, 21-23.
2. Dear, Gospel of Peace, 14.
3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works — Reader’s Edition (Fortress Press, 2015). Chapter 1, “Costly Grace,” contrasts “costly grace” with “cheap grace.” This particular edition of Discipleship runs 271 pages. The chapter on Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, chapter 6, is by far the longest chapter, running 89 pages, or 32.8% of the 271 pages.
4. Gandhi, a movie produced and directed by Richard Attenborough, 1982, written by John Briley. The scene and quote begins at about 2:14:30.
