The Mountain Where we Encounter God

Have you ever climbed a mountain? Not metaphorically, but actually set your boots on a trail, felt the burn in your calves, watched the air thin and the trees shrink to scrub and then to nothing? There is something the ancients knew that we, in our age of cable cars and scenic overlooks, have nearly forgotten: a mountain costs you something. You do not arrive at the summit by accident. You arrive sweating, with your heart pounding in your ears, having left behind everything you could not carry.

This is precisely the picture Matthew paints for us at the beginning of the fifth chapter of his Gospel. "When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them" (Matthew 5:1-2, NRSV). It is a scene so familiar to us that we may miss what is happening. A great crowd has gathered. Jesus does not stay in the valley to meet them on level ground. He climbs. And they, if they wish to hear Him, must climb too.

The Geography of God

Mountains in Scripture are never merely incidental. They are places of Divine encounter, places where heaven leans low and earth strains upward.

Abraham climbs Moriah with his son and a bundle of wood. Moses ascends Sinai and disappears into the cloud for forty days. Elijah hides in a cave on Horeb and hears the still, small voice. Solomon's temple is built on Zion. Our Lord is transfigured on Tabor, prays in agony on the Mount of Olives, and is crucified on Golgotha. The pattern is unmistakable. When God wishes to speak something definitive to His people, He calls them upward.

So when Matthew tells us that Jesus "went up the mountain," he is not giving us a topographical footnote. He is telling us that something on the scale of Sinai is about to happen. The crowd that has followed Him from "Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan" (Matthew 4:25) has made a pilgrimage, even if they did not know it. They have walked away from their homes, their fields, their nets, their tax tables, their illnesses, their petty grievances. And now they must climb.

There is a beautiful irony here.

At Sinai, Moses ascended alone while the people were warned not even to touch the foot of the mountain, lest they die (Exodus 19:12). The Law came down from a place the people could not go. But here, on this nameless Galilean hill, the people are invited up.

The mountain is no longer forbidden. The cloud has parted. The One who once thundered from the summit now sits down and teaches, and the crowds press in close enough to hear Him speak.

 

The Hand That Writes

When God gave Moses the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai, we hear that when God finished speaking with Moses on Mount Sinai, He gave him the two tablets of the Testimony, "tablets of stone, written with the finger of God." (Exodus 31:18). Lest we think this detail be minor, an incidental anthropomorphism or a metaphor, we hear Moses recount the same thing later in Deuteronomy: ""The Lord delivered to me two tablets of stone written with the finger of God; and on them was written according to all the words which the Lord had spoken with you on the mountain." (Deuteronomy 9:10).

This is a remarkable detail. What a human image? Does God have fingers? Well, Christ did. I cannot prove that this is the case, and perhaps it is anthropomorphic language, but that this detail is given twice suggests otherwise. What if on the very mountain of Sinai, the pre-incarnate Second Person of the Trinity was whom Moses encountered? After all, we're told similarly that, "The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend." (Exodus 33:11).

The Mount of Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1–8) connects to this. When Moses appears on that high mountain standing beside the transfigured Jesus, he isn't meeting a new deity or a stranger; he is standing with the very Person whose "finger" inscribed the Law and whose "face" he sought in the cleft of the rock (Exodus 33:22–23). This scene confirms that the glory Moses caught only a glimpse of on Sinai is the same glory now radiating from Christ’s own person. By standing in such familiar conversation with Jesus, Moses identifies the Author of the Law, signaling that the One who once carved requirements into stone has finally arrived in the flesh to fulfill the promise of writing them upon the heart.

I think it's remarkable when we read the account of the Transfiguration we have no formal introductions. Moses and Elijah, who'd both encountered God on mountains, immediately recognize Jesus for who He is.

Consider for a moment the hands of Jesus. The carpenter's hands, calloused from years at the bench. The hands that touched lepers, that broke bread, that would soon be pierced. What if it was his hands, manifest in mysterious way prior to the Incarnation, that in eternity past traced the Law into stone on the heights of Sinai? The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that "in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son... through whom he also created the worlds" (Hebrews 1:2).

The Word who spoke creation into being is the Word who gave the commandments to Moses. The finger that wrote on tablets is the finger that now points to the poor in spirit and calls them blessed.

But notice what has changed. On Sinai, the Law was written on stone. Stone is durable, unchanging, but it is also cold, external, foreign to the body. You can break stone tablets, as Moses did when he came down and saw the golden calf. You can lose them, ignore them, build a temple around them and forget what they say. The Law on stone remains outside of us.

The prophets longed for something deeper. Jeremiah heard the Lord promise, "I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people" (Jeremiah 31:33). Ezekiel heard a similar word: "A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 36:26).

The old covenant was inscribed on stone tablets. The new covenant would be inscribed on the tablets of the heart.

And here, on this mountain in Galilee, that prophecy begins to be fulfilled. Jesus does not bring stone tablets upon which He inscribes laws. He brings human hearts, a crowd, and offers them beatitudes. He does not hand down commandments primarily as prohibitions—"thou shalt not"—but offers blessings that describe a kind of person, an interior shape, a contour of the soul.

He is not engraving stone. He is engraving hearts.

 

The Strange Door

And what is the first letter He carves? "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:3).

This is the door. Everything else in the sermon, everything else in the Christian life, opens from here.

But it is a strange door.

We expect the gate of heaven to be marked by some great achievement: by mighty faith, by heroic virtue, by spiritual mastery.

Instead, the first beatitude tells us that the kingdom belongs to those who have nothing.

The Greek word here is ptōchos, and it does not mean merely poor in the sense of having little. It means utterly destitute, the kind of poor who must beg for bread. The poor in spirit are those who know, deep in their bones, that they have no spiritual wealth of their own.

They are spiritual beggars at the door of God.

his is not a virtue we can manufacture by trying harder. In fact, the harder you try to be humble, the more proud of your humility you tend to become. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux famously diagnosed twelve steps of pride, and one of the most insidious is the pride of false humility.

So how do we arrive at this poverty of spirit? How is the heart of stone replaced with a heart of flesh?

Here is where the structure of the Beatitudes becomes so wonderfully subversive. Jesus seems to know that we cannot simply will ourselves into poverty of spirit. So He offers eight beatitudes, and they form a kind of spiral staircase. Each one, if we take it seriously, drives us back to the first.

Consider what it would mean to truly mourn for sin, your own and the world's. Consider what it would mean to be meek, to renounce the violence of self-assertion. Consider what it would mean to hunger and thirst for righteousness, with the same desperation a starving man hungers for bread. Consider what it would mean to be merciful even to those who do not deserve it, to be pure in heart when the heart is so often a muddy stream, to make peace in a world that profits from division, to be persecuted and reviled and to count it joy.

If you sit with even one of these beatitudes honestly, what happens?

You discover that you cannot do it.

Your own willpower and effort will not suffice.

You discover the gap between what Christ describes and what you actually are. You discover, in other words, your poverty. The Beatitudes are not a checklist of virtues to acquire. They are a mirror that shows us our need, and in showing us our need, they lead us back to the only door that opens onto the kingdom: the door of spiritual poverty.

 

The Pilgrimage of Detachment

The crowd that climbed the mountain had already taken the first step. They had left something behind. They had set aside, however briefly, the relentless tug of daily concern.

There is a kind of physical theology in the act of pilgrimage, a way that the body teaches the soul. When you walk away from your usual life, even for an hour, you are practicing a small detachment. You are saying with your feet what you may not yet be able to say with your heart: that there is something more important than the urgent business of the day.

This is why Carmelite spirituality, and indeed the contemplative tradition more broadly, has always insisted on the necessity of detachment. Saint John of the Cross writes that "to come to possess all, desire the possession of nothing" (Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book 1, Chapter 13). The mountain in his great spiritual treatise is, of course, Mount Carmel, but it is also every mountain where God meets His people.

The climb is the same. You leave behind what you cannot carry, and the higher you go, the less you find you need.

The poor in spirit are simply those who have allowed the climb to do its work. They have let go. They have stopped clutching. They have discovered, perhaps to their surprise, that the kingdom is not a reward for spiritual achievement but a gift given to empty hands.

 

Living the Climb

How do we live this in the rhythm of ordinary days, when we cannot literally climb a mountain and sit at the feet of Jesus?

First, find your mountain. By this I mean a place and a time set apart, a daily appointment with silence. It need not be long. It doesn't have to be an actual mountain, but it can be! Many spiritual pilgrims have climbed literal mountains--St. Francis of Assisi made pilgrimage on Mount La Verna and there received the stigmata--but others found solace in the desert, in caves, in small rooms, or just behind a closed door. Even fifteen minutes of intentional stillness, with the Scriptures open or simply with the heart turned toward God, is a small ascent. The mountain is wherever you go to leave the valley behind.

Second, read the Beatitudes slowly. Take one a day, or one a week. Do not try to master them. Let them master you. Notice where you fall short, not as an exercise in self-loathing, but as an honest reckoning that drives you back to the first beatitude. Each gap you discover is a window onto your poverty of spirit, and therefore a window onto the kingdom. As you release your attempt to "grasp" at achieving these beatitudes on your own, and become poor in spirit, you will find that the others are realized in you as a gift from the One who loves to fill empty hands with heavenly gifts.

Third, practice small detachments. Give something away. Skip a meal. Turn off the phone for an evening. Let one preference go unmet without complaint. These are tiny letting-goes, but they train the soul in the great letting-go that is the work of a lifetime.

Fourth, when you fail, and you will, do not despair. Despair is the temptation that comes when we still believe, secretly, that we ought to be able to do this on our own. The poor in spirit do not despair when they fall, because they never imagined they could stand on their own to begin with. They simply hold out their empty hands again and wait to be fed.

The hand that wrote the Law on stone is writing now on your heart. The chisel is the gospel; the stone is your resistance; the flesh beneath is the soul God made and loves. Climb the mountain. Sit down. Listen. And when you find that you cannot do what He asks, give Him the only thing He has been asking for all along: your poverty, your need, your empty and open hands.

For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.