Fr Paul Gooley reads from the Gospel of Matthew (7: 21, 24-27) in which Jesus says, ‘Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a sensible man who built his house on rock’.

Fr Paul says the Sermon on the Mount is the first of Matthew’s great discourses of the teachings of Jesus; it is a sort of introductory exposition of the requirements for the Kingdom of God, laying down the conditions or attitudes required for entry into the Kingdom.

As the Sermon draws to its conclusion Matthew sums up the requirements for entry to the Kingdom of Heaven in the phrase ‘doing the will of my Father in heaven’. Doing the will of the Father is a characteristic emphasis of Matthew. He includes this in the Lord’s Prayer, ‘thy will be done’. So we hear in this Gospel, ‘Lord, Lord’ who will be saved?’, those who actually do the will of the Father. And finally, Jesus himself uses the petition of his own Lord’s Prayer in the depths of his fear and apprehension in the Garden of Gethsemane, ‘If this cup cannot pass by, but I must drink it, your will be done’.

Matthew does not pretend that this is easy, or that it can be done without care and forethought. So, he ends this first discourse with the stark contrast of the two people who built a house, respectively, on rock and on sand. This is an image especially striking to anyone who has spent time on the coast of the Holy Land. There is a sharp contrast between the rocky promontories and the banks of shifting sands, drifted over millennia from the outflow of the River Nile. On the rocks stands a line of ancient fortresses, but nothing lasts long on the sands.

Matthew has a gift of giving us parables with such stark contrasts of good and bad. So, Fr Paul says, the choice is there for us to decide.