Chunks: The Sermon on the Mount

The sermon is over. But before moving on to the next part of the story, Matthew adds a closing comment, an observation about how the crowd reacted to Jesus’ preaching. The people were amazed, because they saw something in Jesus’ demeanor and heard something in his words that their teachers refused to recognize: this was a man with the authority of God.

Jesus’ first warning at the end of the sermon was that there are two roads from which to choose. Only one leads to life; the other leads to destruction. Similarly, his fourth and final warning—the closing words of the sermon—warn that there are two ways of building a house, one wise and one foolish, and the foolish way leads to destruction.

I imagine Jesus’ hearers being shocked by Jesus’ words in the third warning. How can people who do such amazing things as casting out demons and miraculous healings be rejected by him and called “evildoers”? Would we have reacted similarly? If so, we need to be reminded of what Jesus says in the rest of the sermon: faithfulness isn’t about showy demonstrations, but about obeying the teaching of Jesus in the way we relate to others.

Jesus’ third warning overlaps with the second. Whereas before he warned against false prophets, now he warns against false disciples, some of whom claim to have prophesied in his name. Indeed they claim more than that: they say they have done miraculous things in his name. People can do what seem on the surface to be amazing works of ministry, but not have a relationship with Jesus—and in the end, he will send them away.

What do we count as admirable or worthy of applause among Christians? What kinds of things win the approval of others? Jesus’ third warning, again, suggests that we may be looking at the wrong fruit, for not everyone who seems to have a “successful” ministry actually has a relationship to Jesus.

How can one tell between a sheep and a wolf? Jesus answers the question by shifting metaphors: you can tell what kind of a tree you’re looking at by the fruit it produces. His words help us understand one of the challenges of the church today. Why have there been such devastating, high-profile ministry failures? Because we were looking for the wrong fruit.

Jesus’ second warning is about false prophets, whom he likens to wolves disguised as sheep so they can infiltrate and devour the flock. False prophets claim to speak God’s truth, but spread lies, potentially leading the sheep astray. Be careful, Jesus warns. It’s not just about what people say they believe; it’s about how they live in relationship to others.

Sometimes, the gospel is presented as a choice between two destinies: heaven and hell. Choose Jesus and go to heaven, or refuse Jesus and go to hell. But the Christian life is more than just choosing where to spend eternity; it’s choosing to follow Jesus in all of our daily decisions and challenges.

Psalm 1 portrays life as a continual choice of which path we will walk: the path of righteousness that leads to blessedness, or the path of wickedness that leads to destruction. That image permeates the whole collection of psalms—as well as the first warning of Jesus at the end of the Sermon on the Mount.

We expect to be encouraged and uplifted when we listen to sermons; we don’t hear someone preach “hellfire and damnation”—like the famous sermon by Jonathan Edwards, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." But Jesus ends the Sermon on the Mount with four dire warnings of doom and destruction for those who don’t listen to what he said.

We may not have enemies of the kind that crucified Jesus. But we do have people we don’t want to love. We know that Jesus commanded us to love our enemies. How might the Golden Rule give us a place to start?

The Old Testament contains 39 books, many of which are quite different from each other in style and content. Who would dare to distill all of that wondrous complexity down to a sentence or two? As we’ve seen, Rabbi Hillel would, and so would Jesus. With both the Golden Rule and what he elsewhere called the two greatest commandments, Jesus summarized the heart of God’s intent for his people. In this episode, I suggest that the Golden Rule needs to be kept together with the command to love our neighbor as ourselves.

One of the most famous lines from the sermon is what we know as the Golden Rule. Others before Jesus had taught similar principles, including the great Rabbi Hillel. But Jesus’ teaching was more demanding morally than Hillel’s. The teaching is simple and straightforward, but requires self-discipline to put into practice; are we willing to treat others the way we would want to be treated?

In the sermon, Jesus teaches his hearers to pray for what they need. And he insists that God, as our trustworthy and loving Father, gives only good gifts to his children. But again, that doesn’t mean that God will give us anything we pray for…

We sometimes come to Scripture looking for promises that God will give us whatever we ask. Virtually any Bible verse about God's care and compassion can be turned into a "promise" that obligates God to grant whatever we ask for, as long as our prayer is earnest and faithful. And indeed, it sounds like Jesus is saying something like this in the sermon. Is that what he means?

One of the oddest verses in the sermon refers to dogs and pigs—and not surprisingly, scholars have debated its meaning for centuries. The language seems harsh and off-putting, and it’s easy to imagine the Pharisees having a field day with it. Whatever we take Jesus to be saying, however, it shouldn’t contradict his command to love our enemies.

In teaching about hypocritical judgment, Jesus uses the humorous metaphor of someone with a plank in his eye trying to take a speck out of someone else’s eye. Indeed, there’s a well-established principle of psychology that’s reminiscent of what Jesus teaches. But it’s important to notice that Jesus doesn’t tell his hearers to stop trying to remove those specks...

Many if not most of us have been judged unfairly at one time or another. And we have done the same to others, though we may not have known it. At the beginning of Matthew 7, Jesus warns his hearers not to be judgmental of others. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no place for wise judgment.

Jesus has told his hearers not to worry; it’s unnecessary and pointless. But that’s not to say that worrisome things won’t happen. Whether large or small, troubles will come our way. Can we still trust God in the midst of them? Can we still seek the kingdom?

Jesus’ instruction to seek God’s kingdom above all is one of the best-known lines of the sermon. But we have to read it rightly. It can sound like he’s saying, “Do a good job of seeking the kingdom, and God will reward you by giving you your basic needs.” But is that what he means?

It’s possible to read Jesus as preaching a lofty and ideal kind of kingdom in which people transcend such earthly needs as food and clothing. And again, it’s true that he wants his hearers to live every day in light of the big picture of God’s sovereign work in the world. But he is asking his hearers to live with a wholehearted trust in a loving Father who knows even their most basic of needs.

Some of us have been taught that any prayer will be answered if we just have enough faith. And against that background, it’s easy to criticize ourselves or others for having too little faith when prayers seem to go unanswered. Jesus even calls his hearers people “of little faith” for worrying. Is he scolding them? Or is he inviting them into something greater that they can’t yet imagine?

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his hearers not to worry about food and clothing. He points them beyond the necessities of earthly life to the bigger picture of God’s gracious providence over all creation. He knows that we worry about many things, but teaches us what we might already know, if we thought about it: worry accomplishes nothing.

Throughout the sermon, Jesus has been trying to teach his hearers to imagine the big picture and pray and act accordingly. We can be pulled in so many different directions by our worries and concerns, and he wants us to be able to transcend that. Thus, he says, “Don’t worry.” We’ll draw on the story of Martha of Bethany to explore what he means.

Matthew portrays the Sermon on the Mount as being preached outdoors; that’s how Jesus often spoke to large crowds. And as he turns to the universal subject of the worries and anxieties of life, he makes use of what’s at hand for sermon illustrations. There are lessons to be learned from the birds and the flowers, if we can remember the hand that created them.

How often do we live with divided loyalties? Jesus has spoken about the treasure we pursue, and the way we direct our attention. We may want God, but we want more than God. Jesus uses strong contrasts to make a point: we can’t serve two masters at the same time. If we give all our attention to material things, are we enslaved to them? And is there anything left for God?

We now live in what some have called an “attention economy”—a world in which marketers and advertisers compete for a few moments of our attention as we stay glued to our electronic devices. But how we direct our attention has always mattered. That’s important to understanding what may seem like an odd saying of Jesus, that the eye is like the lamp of the body.

Our world is one in which people often learn to derive their sense of security from material things. But again, Jesus wants his followers to have a big-picture perspective. That’s why he taught them to pray the Lord’s Prayer. And that’s also why, immediately after, he taught them not to focus on the accumulation of earthly “treasure,” but to pursue heavenly treasure instead.

The Bible speaks of both “trials” and “temptations.” But both of these English words can be used to translate the same word in Greek—making translators have to choose one on the basis of the context. So how might we understand the prayer that God wouldn’t lead us into temptation? Would God actually lead us to be tempted?

We’ve all heard the saying that we should “forgive and forget.” But forgiveness can be difficult, precisely because it’s also difficult to forget how others have hurt or offended us. In this episode, we’ll look at the story of a well-known evangelist who struggled to forgive those who had tormented her, and revisit Jesus’ teaching about loving our enemies.

In an earlier episode, we reflected on Jesus’ parable of the unmerciful servant from Matthew 18. In this episode, we revisit that parable, because its ending is similar to the warning that Jesus gives after the Lord’s Prayer: if we don’t forgive others as we should, God will not forgive us. But how can we understand that warning in a way that doesn’t contradict a gospel of grace?

Bread isn’t the only thing we need every day. We also need forgiveness, and Jesus teaches his hearers to pray for that too. But even as we pray for God’s mercy, we are reminded to be merciful to others; in that way, the prayer echoes what Jesus already taught in the Beatitudes.

In Matthew 4, the chapter just before the Sermon on the Mount, we read the story of Jesus being tempted by Satan in the wilderness. Jesus had been fasting for forty days, and the first temptation was for him to do a miracle to satisfy his hunger. He refused, quoting a speech given by Moses centuries before. Both of these stories give us some important context for understanding the prayer for our daily bread.

In the previous episode, I suggested that we need to keep a big-picture perspective throughout the Lord’s Prayer. When we pray for our daily bread, for example, we can remember that Jesus himself claimed to be the bread of life. Even praying for our daily needs can be done against the background of God’s provision for the world and for the future.

The first part of the Lord’s Prayer is what I call a “big-picture” prayer, a prayer not just for the things we want or need, but for the world. The second half of the prayer then seems to turn to the smaller matters of our daily needs. But it’s important, even when praying for these, that we not lose the big-picture perspective with which the prayer began…

Part of the Lord’s Prayer sounds like were asking for “heaven on earth.” But that sounds like we’re asking for God to turn the world into a vacation paradise. Rather, we are asking that God’s will would be done on earth in a way that matches how God’s will is done in heaven. And if we assume that God’s will is done perfectly in heaven, what does such a prayer ask of us?

Often, we speak of “God’s will” as something we seek when we have an important decision to make; we want to know what the “right” decision is, the one that God wants us to make. But this is far too narrow a way of thinking of God’s will, and that’s not what we’re praying in the Lord’s Prayer. The question is, “What does God want from his people?” And Jesus has already taught much of this in the earlier part of the sermon. Can we pray that we would be obedient to his teaching?

As human beings, we are all naturally storytellers. We inherit stories from our families and from the cultures in which we live. And there is a sense in which the Bible not only tells stories, but is a story. That’s one way to understand the Lord’s Prayer. It’s not just a set of religious words to be recited by rote. In and through the prayer, we are immersing ourselves in the story of God.

What does it mean to treat a name as holy? The idea may be a little odd to people who live in a day and culture in which names function like labels and have little real significance in themselves. To begin to get a feel for this, we need to go back to the Old Testament, beginning with the story of God revealing himself to Moses for the first time.

In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray that God’s name would be “hallowed.” That’s a word that contemporary speakers of English almost never use. But the prayer is an important one. It recognizes that God is holy, and thus so is his name—and we are praying that his name would be revered as holy by others. We’ll explore that idea both here and in the next episode.

Jesus taught his hearers to pray to God as their heavenly Father, using the Aramaic word, “Abba.” Some have said that this means “Daddy,” but biblical scholars generally agree that this isn’t quite right. So what’s the significance of being able to address the God of heaven as our Father?

Many of you listening to this can probably recite the Lord's Prayer from memory. But do we ever think about what we’re saying when we pray those words? The prayer sits at the center of the sermon, and indeed, some of the prayer’s themes are central to the spirit of the sermon itself. We’ll begin exploring the prayer here, and will continue to examine it closely over several episodes.

Jesus has already condemned the practice of praying in public in order to be noticed by others. But it’s not just about where one prays, but how. In this episode, we explore his next critique: some people pray in a way that just piles up religious sounding words. He reminds his hearers that there’s no need to try to impress God with their words; the Father already knows what they need.

Some prayers are public, which is as it should be. But there will always be the temptation to turn it into a performance of piety, using more sophisticated words than we would normally use, or using the catchphrases that mark us as part of the in-group. We might even try to sneak in a mini-sermon, or a bit of gossip disguised as prayerful concern. Against such things, Jesus teaches his hearers to pray in secret to God alone.

Some of us are reluctant to pray out loud in front of others, worried that we may not “get it right.” That fear already suggests how our concern over what others think may get in the way of being able to pray freely to God. But some people pray in order to be noticed by others—a practice which Jesus labels as hypocritical.

Jesus gives three examples of public piety to distinguish between hypocritical and true righteousness: charitable giving, prayer, and fasting. All three were common religious behaviors in his day. In this episode, we’ll tackle the first. Jesus encourages generosity—but do we give in a way that draws attention to ourselves?

What kinds of things do Christians do that people might consider “religious”? Pray, go to church, read the Bible? Yes, all these, and more. But in the first part of Matthew 6, Jesus will teach that it’s possible to do good things for the wrong reasons. It’s one thing to engage in religious practices because we want others to think of us as pious people; but it’s another to do them in a way that only God sees.

It’s common these days to make a distinction between “religion” and “spirituality,” as if the former was bad and the latter was good. But that’s too much of a simplification. Christianity has always included a variety of religious practices, and always will. Having said that, however, Christianity is more than a set of religious behaviors. That’s important to remember as we transition from chapter 5 of Matthew to chapter 6.

Before we move on to Matthew 6, let’s take an episode to review. What Jesus is giving his hearers in Matthew 5 is a vision for a kind of righteousness that is different from what they’ve learned from their religious leaders. We can’t turn his teaching into a new legalism, as if he were asking us to out-Pharisee the Pharisees. Rather, we need to let his words transform our imagination of what true righteousness could be.

Some of us struggle with some degree of perfectionism. And if so, what Jesus says at the end of Matthew 5 may be particularly disturbing: he suggests that we are to be “perfect” like our heavenly Father. And that’s in the context of teaching that we should love our enemies! Does he mean that we have to be flawless in love, even in loving our enemies, to be accepted by the Father?