During the three Sundays of Ordinary Time before the beginning of Lent, Catholics attending Mass heard Gospel readings taken from the fifth chapter of Matthew. This is the beginning of the famous “Sermon on the Mount,” which runs all the way through chapter seven and comprises the longest sermon of Jesus recorded in the Gospels.
This sermon—a distillation of the whole of Christ’s teaching—thus hangs over the whole of our Lenten season of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. And why shouldn’t it? St. Augustine in the fourth century called it the perfect guide to the Christian life; Servant of God Dorothy Day in the twentieth century called it the “manifesto” of Catholics in general—and of the Catholic Worker Movement in particular. Like Lent itself, the sermon invites us to get back to basics: Who is Jesus to me? What does it mean to be his disciple? Am I living in his kingdom, here and now? If not, how do I start? If so, where am I still holding back?
These are the same questions at the heart of a beautiful album from singer-songwriter Jon Guerra titled, simply enough, Jesus. The record draws consistently and creatively from Christ’s teachings in the Gospels, but the Sermon on the Mount shines forth in a special way, challenging us to see his words afresh.
Guerra—born near LA, raised between Houston and Chicago, and based now in Austin—has roots in the Evangelical world but has since become Anglican, referencing both Scripture and C. S. Lewis (and even Thomas Aquinas) with ease. And his music displays a similar breadth: Having started out writing jingles for commercials, he’s also composed music for Terrence Malick’s 2019 film A Hidden Life about Bl. Franz Jägerstätter—and, apparently, Malick’s forthcoming film about Christ titled The Way of the Wind.
At the heart of it all is always “the Lord of Crucifixion”—his words, his example, his invitation.
His album Jesus comes on the heels of American Gospel, a three-track EP resisting the instrumentalization of the Christian faith for worldly ends—a theme, incidentally, underscored in Bishop Erik Varden’s first Lenten meditation for Pope Leo and the curia in Rome. The motif first emerged in Guerra’s 2020 cri de coeur “Citizens”: “What is the meaning of Christian in this American life?” he sings in his searching tenor. “I look around and I wonder ever if I heard it right.” By the 2024 EP, Guerra looked with exasperation at the whole circus of politics and media—from the power-hungry glitterati to speech-policing rioters, from Fox News to The New York Times—and how far so much of it is from the heart of the Gospel. The EP ends with a desperate plea: “God what we need only you can give it / We need the truth, and only you can speak it . . . We need someone to save us, someone to change us, someone like Jesus.”
Enter Jesus.
While Guerra doesn’t lay aside the charged social commentary on the album entirely—“Reckoner” (An Axe Laid at the Root)” casts a prophetic word, with Isaiah and John the Baptist, over our techno-futuristic fog—the album’s primary aim is to rediscover what Jesus taught and, more fundamentally, who Jesus is. “A couple of years ago I felt I needed to be reacquainted with Jesus,” he writes in a note accompanying the album. “And so I began cyclically reading through the Gospels, in different translations. The repetition became prayerful and then generative: little song fragments started coming. . . . My hope for you is that the songs would feel like an encounter with Christ.”
This is precisely what the album feels like. But Guerra doesn’t just set passages of Scripture to song; he creatively weaves their phrases together, finding his way along the fundamental trajectories of the Gospel truth, all of them still so very counterintuitive and, let’s face it, difficult: forgiveness, humility, self-sacrifice, poverty. “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting,” Chesterton famously quipped. “It has been found difficult; and left untried.” Guerra also frames this Christian ideal in a contemporary and, at times, even personal register, wrestling with issues like technology (“The phone in my pocket was sold like a gain to me”), immigration (“I was born the only child of child immigrants”), and even financial security (“I want a nest egg for a rainy day / Stocks and bonds and real estate”).
But at the heart of it all is always “the Lord of Crucifixion”—his words, his example, his invitation. In sharp contrast to the declarations of many a public figure donning the mantle of Christianity, Guerra’s message would be instantly recognizable to St. Paul and St. Francis of Assisi, to the Church and Desert Fathers. These songs are Christian songs.
Jesus is one of those rare albums where not a single track is a skippable throwaway—not even the sole instrumental at the midway point, “The Death of Lazarus.” It opens with a gorgeous meditation on the prologue of John and, as Dante envisioned, “the love that moves the sun and the other stars” (“In the Beginning Was Love”), and closes with the title track, whose verses search through poetic signs but whose chorus simply intones the holy name (“Jesus”). In between are unforgettable meditations on smallness (“Who Is Greatest?”), ascesis (“Take Up Your Cross”), anxiety (“I See the Birds”), trust (“The Lord Is My Shepherd”), wealth (“Where Your Treasure Is”), repentance (“The Prayer God Always Answers”), suffering (“Gethsemane”) and—that deepest heart of Christ’s great Sermon, and the true test of Christian discipleship—the love of enemies.
In an interview with Russell Moore for Christianity Today, Moore asks Guerra which of the Beatitudes—the eight “Blesseds” that begin the Sermon on the Mount and, in many ways, summarize the great summary—is most countercultural in America today. After a long pause, Guerra answers: “Blessed are the meek” and “Blessed are the pure.” It’s a very good answer—one that cuts against the idols of both right and left.
But at the end of the day, isn’t every single one of them overwhelmingly countercultural? Is poverty of spirit the engine of social media? Are mourning and mercy the subjects of bingeworthy TV? Is peace a key theme of our politics? The hunger and thirst for righteousness the great passion of our thought leaders? Does the reviling of those bearing the name of “Jesus” into the public square inspire in us more than a scoff or shrug? Is the persecution of Christians in faraway lands even on our radar at all?
Of course, if the reports and studies are any indication, the tides of culture may be changing. Gen Z—raised on the empty promises of secularism and the disorientation of the digital age—is more and more turning to Christ and the Church for answers. Will they find refuge in the wounded side of Christ, living by every word that comes from the mouth of God? Or will they fall for a counterfeit, one of the many antichrists whose spirit—even if it means keeping a thin carapace of “Christianity”—is simply to do away with Christ? In short: Will they become citizens of the city of God or remain stuck in the city of Man?
A return to Jesus’s manifesto is in order—and Jesus will help.