The Jesus Manifesto (aka Sermon on the Mount: Matthew 5 – 7) is probably the best-known part of the teaching of Jesus, though arguably it is the least understood, and certainly it is the least obeyed. It is the nearest thing to a manifesto that he ever uttered, for it is his own description of what he wanted his followers to be and to do. It is the core teaching of how to live our faith out at work. We must spend time understanding the goal Jesus has in mind for us. We find it in the manifesto.

The years which followed the end of the second world war in 1945 were marked by innocent idealism. My dad was a part of this generation. The ghastly nightmare was over. ‘Reconstruction’ was the universal goal.

• Six years of destruction and devastation belonged to the past; the task now was to build a new world of co-operation and peace.
• But idealism’s twin sister is disillusion—disillusion with those who do not share the ideal or (worse) who oppose it or (worse still) who betray it.
• And disillusion with what is keeps feeding the idealism of what could be.

We seem to have been passing through decades of disillusion. Each rising generation is disaffected with the world it has inherited. Sometimes the reaction has been naive, though that is not to say it has been insincere. The horrors of Vietnam were not ended by those who gave out flowers and chalked up their slogan ‘Make love not war’, yet their protest did not pass unnoticed.

Others today are repudiating, by adopting socialism and Marxism to counteract the greedy affluence of the west which seems to grow ever fatter. It happens either by the spoliation of the natural environment or by the exploitation of developing nations or by both at once; and they register the completeness of their rejection by living simply, dressing casually, going barefoot and avoiding waste. Instead of the shams of bourgeois socializing they hunger for the authentic relationships of love.

It is happening at work. We will not be able to avoid it at all as we witness about the good news of Jesus.

They despise the superficiality of both irreligious materialism and religious conformism, for they sense that there is an awesome ‘reality’ far bigger than these trivialities, and they seek this elusive ‘transcendental’ dimension through meditation, drugs or sex.

• They abominate the very concept of the rat race and consider it more honorable to drop out than to participate.
• All this is symptomatic of the inability of the younger generation to accommodate themselves to the status quo or acclimatize themselves to the prevailing culture.
• They are not at home. They are alienated.

In a way, the followers of Jesus find this search for a cultural alternative one of the most hopeful, even exciting, signs of the times. For we recognize in it the activity of that Spirit who before he is the comforter is the disturber, and we know to whom their quest will lead them if it is ever to find fulfilment. Indeed, it is significant that when Theodore Roszak is fumbling for words to express the reality for which contemporary youth is seeking, alienated as it is by the scientist’s insistence on ‘objectivity’, he feels obliged to resort to the words of Jesus:

What does it profit a man that he should gain the whole world but lose his soul?