 corporately. So here is the agenda of the Sermon on the Plain very clearly. It's an agenda of peace, of peacemaking. It's an agenda of living in a whole new way, of the love of enemies, and of imitating God, God the merciful, God the generous, and avoiding the agendas which would imply that God wasn't merciful, that God wasn't generous, and that really God wanted you to hate your enemies, not to love them. By goodness we need this word in our own day. Luke's picture here of Jesus is, as he says later, someone who is mighty in word and deed. This is an extraordinary vision of what it's like to be a genuine human being, following straight on from the Magnificat, from the Nazareth manifesto, following on from all those earlier consolations and warnings. It's an agenda which is inviting people, recruiting people into a project, the project of following Jesus as new creation people, and becoming ourselves living models of, living contributors to God's whole new creation. And that new creation we are given to understand is a merciful, generous kingdom, fulfilling those glorious dreams in Isaiah and elsewhere of a world in which the wolf and the lamb will lie down together, a world in which the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped and so on, as opposed to what was so prevalent in Jesus' day and what is dangerously prevalent in our own. People who think that the only real way to get stuff done is through violence, is through condemnation, is through saying we don't like that lot, they're all wrong, we're just going to do every bad thing we can to them. Somehow Luke's Gospel, particularly Luke's Gospel, stands there in the middle of the New Testament canon as a way of saying there is a different way to be human. Following Jesus is the way to get there. And when you follow Jesus, what is going on is that God himself, the merciful, generous God, is becoming king of his world in and through the people who follow that path.