Chunks: The Sermon on the Mount

It’s not easy to love one’s enemies. We remember the things people have done to hurt or wrong us. But Jesus is not asking us to be best friends with those who have abused us. If we don’t know where to start in loving our enemies, Jesus has a suggestion: pray for them.

It’s natural to love our friends and hate our enemies. But in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls his hearers to live with the kind of righteousness that lets others see the character of God our Father. God’s gifts of sunlight and rain are for everyone, even for those who rebel against him. Can we live with the same merciful character?

The command to love our neighbor can be found in the Old Testament—but there is no command to hate our enemies, contrary to what the Pharisees may have taught. It’s understandable that the Pharisees would teach that Jews should love their fellow Jews and hate Gentiles. But to do this takes even the command to love one’s neighbor out of context, as we’ll see.

Research has demonstrated again and again how easily humans form in-groups and out-groups, and the Pharisees seem to have reinforced that tendency with their teaching, saying that we should love our neighbor but hate our enemies. But Jesus teaches differently. Those who would be truly righteous must love their enemies as well.

Have you ever been attacked in a way you felt was undeserved? Everyone should have the right to be treated with fairness and justice, and one day God’s justice will reign. But what do we do until then? It can be dangerous to turn the hard sayings of Jesus into new laws of behavior. In this episode, therefore, I will suggest that as peacemakers, we should always be asking ourselves what behavior—even in the face of injustice!—would move the needle toward greater shalom.

An eye-for-eye kind of retaliation may seem fair, but in his teaching about righteousness, Jesus calls his hearers to something higher. He asks them to forgo retaliation. We must be careful here, for in saying this Jesus is not teaching that Christians should ignore injustice. But he wants his hearers to have a vision for how the pursuit of shalom is radically different from the world’s way of thinking.

The idea of an “eye for an eye” kind of justice is an ancient one, found even in the Law of Moses. And the principle may make intuitive sense: if you hurt me, I get to hurt you back in equal measure. But in the Old Testament at least, this is a less a matter of having the right to revenge than setting a limit on what kind of retribution was permitted. Moreover, as we’ll see, Jesus sets a higher standard of righteousness.

Many of us have suffered from broken promises—or from the violation of what we took to be a promise. The Law of Moses required people to fulfill their oaths, but the legalism of the Pharisees actually made it possible for people to weasel out of their commitments on technical grounds. What Jesus wants instead is a people whose word can be trusted. How else will others believe that God can be trusted?

Have you ever heard someone swear “on a stack of Bibles” that what they were saying was true? Or have you heard someone say, “I swear to God”? Verbal formulas like these are meant to convey that the person’s word can be trusted. People in Jesus’ day used similar formulas when they made oaths or vows. Unfortunately, it was possible to get lost in the technical details of what was and wasn’t a binding oath—and Jesus wanted something different from his hearers.

The rabbis of Jesus’ day had different views about divorce, and some of the teaching gave men a tremendous amount of power and freedom in ridding themselves of their wives. The culture, after all, was strongly patriarchal. To read Jesus rightly today, it’s necessary to recognize how his teaching was not trying to establish a new law, but to point to matters of the heart.

In our world, divorce is commonplace, even among Christians. Not surprisingly, then, Jesus’ teaching about divorce is controversial. In this episode and the next, we’ll unpack that teaching against the background of the Law of Moses and how it may have been misinterpreted and misused in Jesus’ day.

What does it mean to be a faithful Christian? How high does Jesus set the bar for true righteousness? Jesus has already taught the commandment against adultery in a way that was far more radical than what the people had learned from the Pharisees. As we’ll see next, Jesus gets more radical still: he suggests that serious sacrifice may be necessary if one is to be obedient. Does he really mean what he says?

We live in a world dominated by electronic devices. Through them, marketers and advertisers continually manipulate our desires. And while we may consider ourselves innocent of violating the commandment against adultery, we may not be innocent of unbridled desire. In this episode, we’ll explore how Jesus’ reference to the sixth and seventh commandments may also be a reference to the tenth: the commandment against covetousness, the desire for things that don’t belong to us.

In the Ten Commandments, God’s people are forbidden to commit adultery. Yet even someone with as legendary a reputation as King David was guilty of that sin. In this episode, we’ll zero in on the story of David and Bathsheba to ask what might seem like a question with an obvious answer: what was the nature of David’s sin? The teaching of Jesus suggests that we may need to look deeper.

One of Jesus’ examples about the need for reconciliation describes a person being taken to court for an unpaid debt. He says nothing about the legal merits of the case. But if we were in that position, would we have the humility to admit our fault? And would we have the desire to make amends as needed?

Jesus unsettled his hearers with the idea that the heart of the commandment against murder was about unrestrained anger. You would think that what he would say next is to recommend that everyone work on managing their anger. But he pulls another surprise: to live righteously, people should seek reconciliation with those who are angry at them.

When it came to following the Law, some folks probably thought they were doing as well as could reasonably be expected for someone who hadn't been trained as a Pharisee. Most of his hearers, for example, would have thought themselves innocent of violating the law against murder. But Jesus upends even that assumption by asking if his hearers ever got angry enough to call someone an “idiot.” For even that would make them guilty before God.

Before Jesus could teach the true nature of righteousness, he had to reassure his hearers that his teaching upheld God’s law—and he expected his hearers to be obedient to the Law as well. In a way that must have been shocking to his hearers, he declared that they wouldn’t get into the kingdom unless they were more righteous than the scribes and Pharisees. But what does that mean?

In the gospels, Jesus had argument after argument with the Pharisees. They were respected as the interpreters of God’s Law, but their teaching had led the people away from the kind of righteousness God wanted. At the beginning of the sermon, then, Jesus has to make clear to the people that even as he challenges what the scribes and Pharisees taught, he is upholding God’s law down to the last detail.

The gospels, especially the gospel of John, portray the world as a place darkened by sin. And in John’s gospel, Jesus will declare himself to be the light of the world. But here in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls his hearers to be the light of the world. They are to live in a righteous way that brings glory to God the Father.

You may have friends or relatives that you think of as "salt of the earth" kind of people. It’s meant as a compliment, to say that they’re honest, trustworthy, and so on. It’s a way of saying that the world needs more people like that. The saying goes back to Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount. It’s one of two metaphors he uses to give his hearers a vision of the life and character to which God is calling them.

Perhaps the most striking and counterintuitive of the Beatitudes is Jesus’ statement that those who are persecuted for righteousness and their allegiance to Jesus should rejoice! How is that possible? In this episode, we’ll use the apostle Paul as an example of someone who suffered greatly for the gospel, and yet was still able to consider himself blessed.

What does Jesus mean when he says "Blessed are the peacemakers"? As we’ll explore in this episode, we might understand God to be reclaiming the world from the brokenness of sin, restoring the world to the wholeness it was meant to have. We cannot, as humans, fix the world. That’s God’s job. But we can participate in his work by doing our part to bring moments of peace in our relationships.

Jesus says that the “pure in heart” are blessed. His words are reminiscent of Psalm 51, in which David repents of his sin with Bathsheba. But it’s not necessarily just a matter of sin; a pure heart is also an undivided heart. We live in a world of endless distraction, with our attention constantly pulled in multiple directions. Do we ever take time to focus entirely upon God?

In the Beatitudes, Jesus teaches that the “merciful” are blessed. A righteous person is also a forgiving person, as we will see in Jesus’ parable of the unmerciful servant from Matthew 18. Do we recognize how much we’ve already been forgiven? And do we live accordingly in our relationship to others?

The first half of the Beatitudes declare a truth that anyone familiar with the Old Testament already knows: God is the champion of the poor and needy. Things aren’t as they should be, and the righteous person longs for God to set things right. But this isn’t a passive wish; the righteous will want to get in on the action, to join God’s work of bringing peace (the rich Old Testament concept of shalom) to a broken world.

As we’ll see as we go through our study of the sermon, Jesus is teaching his hearers about the nature of true righteousness. This is reminiscent of the Old Testament prophets like Micah, who accused the people of empty religion. The theme of righteousness also bookends the Beatitudes—and what we’ll see in the Beatitudes is a progression from humility to a righteous life.

Remember the idea of bookends? Even the Beatitudes have their own bookends. These bookends let us know that the Beatitudes themselves have the kingdom of heaven as their theme. But when we look at how the bookends are different from rest of the Beatitudes, we learn something more: the blessing they describe is one that necessarily involves hope.

To understand the so-called “Beatitudes,” it’s helpful to read them alongside the similar statements of both blessing and woe that we find in Luke 6. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann gives us a helpful way of understanding these strange pronouncements: they are words of blessing for the “have-nots” of society who need some good news from God. But what about the “haves”? How will more privileged people take what Jesus has to say?

The sermon opens with a set of “beatitudes” or statements about blessing. But what Jesus says about people who can be counted as “blessed” may seem odd—he describes things that don’t sound anything like blessedness. But if we’re going to understand what Jesus is saying, these strange statements have to be read against the background of the Old Testament.

The Sermon on the Mount contains multiple references to the kingdom of heaven. From that alone, one might see that the kingdom is the central theme. But there’s another way to see this. The sermon both begins and ends with references to the kingdom. These are the “bookends” of the sermon, and in the Bible, bookends like this typically tell you the theme of what comes between.

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus’ sermon about the kingdom of heaven doesn’t appear out of nowhere. Matthew tells the story of Jesus in such a way that the kingdom is the theme right from the start, in the genealogy of chapter 1, the beloved Christmas story of chapter 2, and even the temptation story of chapter 4. And both John the Baptist and Jesus preached that the kingdom of heaven had come near. All of this comes before the Sermon on the Mount, as Matthew’s lead-in.

The Sermon on the Mount, found in chapters 5 through 7 of the gospel of Matthew, contains some of the best-known and most challenging teaching of Jesus. In it, he teaches the essence of what he calls “the kingdom of heaven.” In this first episode, we’ll explore how Jesus not only preached the kingdom, but was himself the King.