After waves undermine million-dollar foundations, residents say they had assumed Jesus was speaking figuratively about “bad life choices,” not beachfront property.
DANA POINT, CA — Homeowners along Southern California’s battered coast expressed surprise this week after powerful waves tore away the sand beneath their oceanfront properties, prompting several to reconsider whether a certain two-thousand-year-old warning about building houses on sand might have contained an overlooked real-estate component.
“What Jesus meant was clearly spiritual,” said Beach Road homeowner Richard Malloy, surveying the exposed underside of his foundation from a patio that had become “mostly conceptual.” “He was warning against unstable values, bad decisions, maybe podcast theology. He could not possibly have meant: ‘Do not build a $4.8 million home directly above a moving ocean.’”
High surf and erosion linked to the remnants of Hurricane Marie damaged homes in Dana Point and Laguna Beach, prompting local emergency declarations. Dana Point has red-tagged 10 beachfront homes as unsafe and yellow-tagged seven more; officials said waves and sand loss undermined foundations, destroyed decks, and damaged seawalls.
Malloy said he had not expected the parable to become “this aggressively literal.”
“In Sunday school, there was always a wise man and foolish man,” he said. “But nobody mentioned a coastal engineer, a county permit, or an ocean that has apparently been waiting 2,000 years to make a theological point.”
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus compares the person who hears His words and does them to a wise man who builds on rock; the person who hears but does not obey is like a foolish man who builds on sand, where rain, floods, and wind bring the house down.
Residents say the comparison felt uncomfortably specific after contractors began dropping boulders in front of homes in an attempt to stop further erosion.
“I hear what you’re saying,” said homeowner Denise Carter, standing beside a red tag and a newly delivered truckload of emergency riprap. “But there is a difference between ‘house on sand’ as an illustration and ‘house on sand’ as an investment property with panoramic views.”
City inspectors clarified that a red tag does not necessarily mean a house is destroyed, but that it is unsafe to occupy without substantial work.
Local pastor James Whitaker said he did not want to minimize residents’ losses, but admitted the passage had become difficult to preach without someone staring directly at him.
“People are hurting; homes are damaged; this is serious,” Whitaker said. “Still, if the sermon text is Matthew 7 this Sunday, I may have to begin by saying, ‘For legal reasons, I assure you this illustration is still primarily about obedience.’”
At press time, several homeowners were reportedly petitioning the city to classify bedrock as an “unreasonably exclusionary building material,” while one resident asked whether a seawall could qualify as “hearing these sayings of mine and doing them.”
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