Wide Angle view of the Sermon on the Mount

This morning I want to take on the task of giving a wide angle view of the Sermon on the Mount. 

One of the unfortunate characteristics of evangelicalism is the propensity to take many verses from scripture and assemble them like jigsaw pieces into a doctrine. If you pick up a devotional or self-help book you’ll see this. It’s an approach that sees a univocal voice through scripture and assumes that it’s all got equal weight. People who spout lots of verses are often described as knowing their bible. I wonder about this as it’s more or less skipping across the peaks of waves on an uneven ocean. It doesn’t seem to pause and ask what the merit of the words are in their context, in other words, the water that supports the wave is ignored.

When we step back and say that the Gospel of Matthew was written (around 50 years after Jesus death), the book was enough to explain the Gospel of how to become a full disciple of Jesus—or a Christian in our contemporary terms.

Just that simple exercise in imagining that this was all that was required, changes gravitas of the words that are written. We no longer need to refer to any other scripture except the Hebrew Testament (known crassly as the Old Testament) to understand enough for our faith.

Verses then should be seen as the centre of ripples that reach out to the container of the book. I was determined to get this word in. In all probability, the German term often used by later scholars, “Zusammenfassung” (“summary”) was derived from Erasmus who introduced the idea of the SM summarising Christs teachings.

The Sermon on the mount can be seen like this. Take the following:

“Turn the other cheek” is within the passage:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

This is within a section in the SM where Jesus is uses the structure “you have heard it said, but I say…” Six times.

This is within a section devoted to the interpretation of the Hebrew Law in the Torah. Specifically to move Jews beyond a fastidious adherence to the words of that law and into an understanding that these need to be heart attitudes. 

This in turn is right after the beatitudes and before a discussion on the way we should be together as a church community, putting it in the flow of a set of teaching. 

The whole sermon is bracketed with beatitudes at the start and concluding with the Golden Rule:

“In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.

But followed with three warnings of how hard this will be and to remain vigilant.

And the last part of this sermon is the parable of the Wise house builder vs the foolish house builder. 

And the SM is part of a narrative section of Matthew that’s introduced with a story of Jesus being baptised, being tested in the desert, beginning his ministry and crowds forming around him.

Of course this is all in the lead up to the crucifixion and resurrection. And this is contained in the one book bracketed by Christ entering into our existence and then exiting through the ascension. It could be argued that the opening genealogy of Jesus is present in the ‘heaven’ or afterlife at the end….

And of course this book is in the context of church traditions that formed over the following four hundred or so years where it’s placed with 25 other writings to create the christian testament—which really makes more sense in the context of the Hebrew Testament and it’s grand narrative that says it will all work out in the end because God loves this into being.

To return then to the SM, and the example of turn the other cheek. We can trip up on the impossibility of this when we read it in isolation. But with the preceding antitheses we see a crescendo rising. The magnitude of each common sense law becomes greater until Jesus hits us with the very hard, “love your enemies”. 

At the start of this crescendo is Jesus stating that he is not abolishing the law, but fulfilling it—and that the key to fulfilling it is not obedience to every jot and tittle, but to exceed it. And to exceed it is to view the law in the context of love (love to enemies in this case). 

His final phrase then:

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

To fulfil the law to perfection is to love others as God loves them.

Taken in isolation, turn the other cheek becomes an impossible rule to follow. Taken in isolation, not hating my enemies is impossible. Taken in the context of the one who is speaking this, i.e. the Christ, the fulfilment of the law, the living perfection of the law, we can understand these differently.

A journey of perfect living is not dictated by the rules, but by the journey of love. The rules are in the truest sense, metrics by which we can measure our progress, but they are not failure points to form a weight on our back.

The fact that there is a request for forgiveness in the Lord’s prayer attests to this reality. 

Having said all that, we will never know exactly what it means. It’s not a maths equation, or an instruction book. There are a multitude of interpretations of the SM. It’s been tackled in different ways with different emphases and conclusions throughout history. Incredible minds have applied themselves to this text and so there’s definitely not just one interpretation but many. That’s not to say all interpretations are equal, there are some which really do not reflect the intention of it—they tend to be the hyper-legalistic plain readings. You know, the ones that think you should actually gouge your eye out if it sins against you.

The issue here is that to treat it as a legal document is to miss the point. All of these statements are a challenge to power and so carry the gravity of social justice. Without being subversive they lose their substance.

More than many other passages in Scripture the SM has so much clarity mixed with ambiguity that it cannot be said that it is anything but multilayered. We should be encouraged then, because, like the beatitudes, if we treat it like a song or poem, we can be impacted by its force without really understanding it’s depth. And as long as we never disassociate it from the one who is speaking it, as long as it is treated as being uttered from Christ’s mouth to a community then it would be hard not to pick up the gist of things.

Also that it’s a communal document. The standards that are applied here are not just for the individuals, but as Richard Lischer puts it: 

“Our only hope of living as the community of the Sermon is to acknowledge that we do not retaliate, hate, curse, lust, divorce, swear, brag, preen, worry, or backbite because it is not in the nature of our God or our destination that we should be such a people. When we as individuals fail in these instances, we do not snatch up cheap forgiveness, but we do remember that the ecclesial is larger than the sum of our individual failures and that it is pointed in a direction that will carry us away from them. (Lischer 1987, 161-62)”

The SM is again where the joined body of believers is important for realising the kingdom of God in our world. Being isolated from the body, from relationship and connection will not serve that vision well.