Sermon on the Mount

by Scot McKnight

  Those who are on the scout for analogies of those blessed by Jesus will need to look into the cracks of culture and the corners of the church. As in Jesus’ day, so in ours: Jesus was able to find those who had surrendered themselves to God because he wasn’t in the flow of the powerful in his culture. Those who oppressed others surely thought they were justified and perhaps even had wisdom and Torah on their side, but Jesus saw things from a different angle. And it is that angle we need to have if we are to find the blessed in our culture. They are people whose fabric is the interweaving of love of God, love of others, and love of self. Time and time again we saw in the Beatitudes that Jesus’ own hermeneutic of the Jesus Creed was at work under and behind the individuals whom Jesus blessed. Sometimes it is the simple person who loves her neighbor well, and other times it is the mother or father who has framed their life in a sacrificial way.

  You know someone like this. As a child there was an old woman in our church whom we called Miss Meyers. She had to be ninety years old, though a preteen’s judgment on age is hardly infallible. What I remember of Miss Meyers is that she was loving and was constantly serving others; she taught us—her Sunday School kids—to love plants and to pray and love God and love others. She taught us the Bible as if it were alive, which it was for her. I remember to this day that she could grow a cactus in her home. As one who had only read about a cactus in schoolbook descriptions about desert places, I marveled at her abilities. What I recall is her gentle nature when it came to plants. So she cut off a bit, gave it to me, and told me how to care for it, which I didn’t do well because I wanted to care for it more than it needed. (That is, I wanted to water it because the sandy grit she planted it in was too dry—it wasn’t.) In the annals of Freeport, Illinois’ list of great Christians Miss Meyers may not be mentioned, but she was one whom Jesus blessed and she blessed us.

  The Beatitudes teach us to look to Jesus not only as the one who thunders “Blessed!” before those who needed to hear it, but also as the one who embodied each beatitude in singular form. If the Story of the Bible teaches us anything, it teaches us to see the Story of Israel coming to completion and fulfillment in Jesus. The one who is blessed by God is Jesus, and those whom he blesses are those who take on his ways, his manners, and his love and extend it to others. Jesus was poor and humble; Jesus burned up his days pursuing righteousness and justice; and Jesus created God’s peace everywhere he went. But paradoxically his kind of love is so sacrificial it cost him his life, so that learning to read the Beatitudes in their Jewish context must give way to reading them in the context of the Crucified.

  The Christian and Law

  It is hard not to point a finger at Martin Luther for creating a counterforce between law and gospel. In fact, contrasting the two—one to condemn and one to bring grace—is at the heart of the Lutheran dialectic, or how the Lutheran is taught to read the Bible. Nothing can be achieved by obedience to the law; all that can be achieved is achieved in Christ. The Reformed, those who follow from Calvin, involved themselves in a more nuanced way in the issue of how the law and the gospel are related. A good example of this approach is found in a statement by John Stott: “the law sends us to Christ to be justified, and Christ sends us back to the law to be sanctified.”57 There is considerable debate over this issue among evangelicals today.58

  This problem is created by tidy systematic formulas, and I appreciate the nuances and discussions and light that systematicians sometime shed, but in this case something has gone terribly wrong. The immediate problem is that the debate often assumes that law demands performance while the gospel expects only faith. Beside the importance of what the New Perspective on Paul brings to this discussion, not the least of which is a radical reshaping of how Judaism worked as a religion and that “works of the law” are not just Torah but the special laws that separated the Jew from the Gentile, the contrast Paul makes between works of the law and faith does not result in the latter not having law or performance. After all, in one of his quintessential statements in Ephesians 2:8–10, Paul overtly argues Christians are created by God “to do good works” (which is performance by any other name).

  As one sympathetic to the Anabaptists I believe in salvation by faith and not by works, and to their credit the Anabaptists have always taught the demand of discipleship in a way more emphatically central than most. Radical distinctions, often made by major theologians in the Protestant traditions, between justification and sanctification are unwise because they are not grounded in the Bible. The Torah is God’s revelation to God’s people and to be read as God’s gracious demand. God graciously reveals what God wants, but God unfolds that demand over time so that it is completely revealed only in Christ; God graciously provides the power for us to do what Jesus teaches as we live in the Spirit in the light of the coming kingdom; and God graciously demands how God wants us to live in the Sermon and in the ethical exhortations of the New Testament.

  In other words, in Jesus’ demand to live righteously, which runs through the Sermon, we see an Ethic from Above, from Below, and from Beyond—but it is an ethic his followers are to perform. The best way to preach the Sermon is to preach what it is: a demand on the disciple.

  Notes

  1. Translations are interesting here. A literal translation would be “And opening his mouth Jesus began to teach them.” The NIV, like the NRSV, simplifies by having only “he began to teach them,” dropping the apparently redundant “opening his mouth.” Older translations (KJV, ASV) and standard translations in other languages (French, German, Spanish) have “opening his mouth.” Tom Wright’s new translation (KNT) offers a helpful translation: “He took a deep breath, and began his teaching.” Another translation of the Beatitudes worthy of consideration is that of T. D. Howell, The Matthean Beatitudes in Their Jewish Origins: A Literary and Speech Act Analysis (Studies in Biblical Literature; New York: Lang, 2011), 181–82. Here are his principal findings: “spiritually destitute,” “those who experience sorrow,” “humbled while on earth,” “longing for and needing what is right,” “showing mercy,” “hearts of devotion,” “who make peace,” and “treated badly because of associating with the right.”

  2. D. Willard, Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 121–23.

  3. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, 1:35.

  4. Dowsett, “Matthew,” 525.

  5. For the Mishnah, see Jacob Neusner, The Mishnah: A New Translation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). A list is found in the Dead Sea Scrolls at 4Q525 2.2.1–6 (the blessing here is for faithfulness to the Torah as the community interpreted it).

  6. Carter, What Are They Saying, 21. Along this line of thinking Charles Campbell likens the Sermon to “folly” and Jesus to a “jester,” pushing forward the radicality of Jesus’ alternative society; see C. Campbell, “The Folly of the Sermon on the Mount,” in Preaching the Sermon on the Mount: The World It Imagines (ed. D. Fleer and D. Bland; St. Louis: Chalice, 2007), 59–68.

  7. L. L. Hogan, “You Be the Judge? Matthew 7:1–6,” in Preaching the Sermon on the Mount: The World It Imagines (ed. D. Fleer and D. Bland; St. Louis: Chalice, 2007), 152.

  8. On the history of happiness, D. McMahon, Happiness: A History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006); I have an essay on happiness studies: “Happiness: Given, Lost, Regained,” Books & Culture (Nov/Dec, 2008): 44–46, online at: www.booksandculture.com/articles/2008/novdec/14.44.html.

  9. Tom Wright’s “You’re going to …” and “You will …” in his KNT gets at this eschatological dimension well.

  10. Stassen, Living the Sermon, 41–62. Stassen makes the following alignments with Isaiah 61: Matt 5:3 (Isa 61:1); 5:4 (61:2); 5:5 (61:1, 7); 5:6 (61:3, 8, 11); 5:8 (61:1); 5:10 (61:1); 5:11–12 (61:10–11).

  11. D. C. Allison Jr., The Sermon on the Mount: Inspiring the Moral Imagination (Companions to the New Testament; New York: Crossroad/Herder & Herder, 1999), 42.

  12. Ibid.

 
13. Willard, Divine Conspiracy, 97–106, 114–25.

  14. S. Hauerwas, Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 38–39.

  15. Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, famously translated the word “Congratulations!” and used that to define the blessing of salvation (pp. 109–11). “Joyful” is the proposal of Stassen, Living the Sermon, 39. Stott weighs in against translating the term with “happy,” in Stott, Message, 33. Also D. A. Hagner, Matthew 1–13 (WBC; Dallas: Word, 1993), 91; Keener (Matthew, 166) translates “ultimately be well”; France, Matthew, 160–61. Also, D. L. Turner, Matthew (BECNT; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 146–47.

  16. The Beatitudes are read through four basic lenses: eschatological promises, entrance requirements, Wisdom tradition, and an epitome of Jesus’ ethics; for a sketch, see T. D. Howell, Matthean Beatitudes, 3–6. Our view sees the Beatitudes more ecclesially; that is, they focus on who constitutes the kingdom of God.

  17. A good example is to see in them a “spiritual progression of relentless logic,” as can be seen in Stott, Message, 46.

  18. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 101–9.

  19. M. A. Powell, God with Us: A Pastoral Theology of Matthew’s Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 119–40.

  20. Garland, Reading Matthew, 54.

  21. A humorous comment by J. Pelikan on Augustine’s lining of seven beatitudes with seven requests in the Lord’s Prayer, then multiplying them (to 49) and adding one (divine nature, after all) to get 50, for Pentecost ends with this: “Could it have been otherwise?” See Pelikan, Divine Rhetoric, 63.

  22. Schnackenburg, All Things Are Possible, 33–34.

  23. Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 67–72, though I disagree with him on the Anawim question (see below). For other definitions, see U. Luz, Matthew 1–7: A Commentary (Hermeneia; trans. J. E. Crouch; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 191–93; Allison, Sermon on the Mount, 45; Hagner, Matthew 1–13, 91; Keener, Matthew, 168–69; France, Matthew, 165.

  24. E.g., Martin Luther, The Sermon on the Mount (Sermons) and The Magnificat (Luther’s Works; ed. J. Pelikan; St. Louis: Concordia, 1956), 12. On Luther, see Pelikan, Divine Rhetoric, 81–94. Emerging from this line of thinking some have seen “poor in spirit” as the fundamental virtue and then have even found development from the first beatitude to the ninth. See those cited by Allison, Sermon on the Mount, 45. Also Talbert, Reading the Sermon on the Mount, 50.

  25. As does Stott, Message, 32, 39; Quarles, Sermon on the Mount, 44.

  26. Kapolyo, “Matthew,” 1118.

  27. Careful study of the exile texts of Isaiah 40–66 could suggest that those blessed by Jesus are the economically challenged returning exiles of Isaiah now applied, in an end-of-exile manner, to his followers. On the Anawim, J. D. Pleins, “Poor, Poverty,” ABD, 5:411–13.

  28. R. E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (ABRL; rev. ed.; New York: Doubleday, 1993), 350–55.

  29. On kingdom, see G. E. Ladd, The Presence of the Future: The Eschatology of Biblical Realism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974). A shorter sketch can be found in G. E. Ladd and D. A. Hagner, A Theology of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 42–132. The literature is enormous: J. D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Christianity in the Making 1; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 383–487; N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Christians Origins and the Question of God 2; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996); G. R. Beasley-Murray, Jesus and the Kingdom of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986). Also D. C. Allison Jr., “Kingdom of God,” EDEJ, 860–61.

  30. Turner, Matthew, 150–51.

  31. The Greek term behind “humble” here is tapeinos; behind “poor” in 5:3 it is ptōchos. Both words evoke the humble poor, the Anawim.

  32. See Keener, Matthew, 168, for a full display of references. Also Powell, God with Us, 125–26.

  33. See 4QpPs 37 [= 4Q171], and the pesher/comment on Ps 37:11 reads: “This refers to the company of the poor who endure the time of error but are delivered from all the snares of Belial. Afterwards they will enjoy all the [ … ] of the earth [Heb., hā ʾāreṣ, ‘land’] and grow fat on every human [luxury]” (lines 8–11a).

  34. Quarles, Sermon on the Mount, 56–58.

  35. Hagner, Matthew 1–13, 92; Talbert, Reading the Sermon on the Mount, 52. On land, B. H. Amaru, “Land, Concept of,” EDEJ, 866–68.

  36. Powell, God with Us, 127.

  37. Hagner, Matthew 1–13, 93, sees the two accounts as nearly the same.

  38. So Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 83–84, 87–88.

  39. E.g., Luz, Matthew 1–7, 195–96; France, Matthew, 167–68; Turner, Matthew, 151. See the discussion in Talbert, Reading the Sermon on the Mount, 63–65.

  40. B. Przybylski, Righteousness in Matthew and His World of Thought (SNTSMS 41; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

  41. France, Matthew, 168; Turner, Matthew, 152. See also Stott, Message, 49. Also, J. Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  42. Allison, Sermon on the Mount, 51–54; also see his Studies in Matthew (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 43–63, where he sketches seven elements in the history of interpretation: an embodied deity, a christological interpretation, a mystical encounter, a metaphor for insight, God in perfected creation, God in perfected self and neighbor, and a present and future experience.

  43. “Anonymous” in the Incomplete Work on Matthew, Homily 9, understands this vision of God in two ways: the one who sees Jesus sees God and does good works, while in the kingdom God will be seen directly (see ACCS: Matthew, 87).

  44. Kapolyo, “Matthew,” 1119.

  45. Augustine: “Thereby they themselves [peacemakers] become the kingdom of God” (see ACCS: Matthew, 88–89).

  46. James S. McLaren, “Resistance Movements,” EDEJ, 1135–40.

  47. On the anti-Zealot perspective, see Hagner, Matthew 1–13, 94.

  48. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 108. E. Bethge observed that Bonhoeffer was led into pacifist thinking through Jean Lasserre; see his Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography. Theologian, Christian, Man for His Times (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 153–54. Bonhoeffer’s decision to cooperate with the resistance to Hitler seemingly strains themes in Discipleship.

  49. Turner, Matthew, 152–53.

  50. J. Denny Weaver, Becoming Anabaptist (2nd ed.; Scottdale, PA: Herald, 2005); W. R. Estep, The Anabaptist Story (3rd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996).

  51. The best book I’ve read from the pacifist side is R. J. Sider, Christ and Violence (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1979); the classic is J. H. Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994). But one should not neglect A. Trocmé, Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution (trans. M. H. Shank and M. E. Miller; Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1973). Options are discussed in R. G. Clouse et al., War: Four Christian Views (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991), and in A. F. Holmes, War and Christian Ethics (2nd ed; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005).

  52. See Matt 8:12; 9:15; 13:38; 23:31.

  53. Matt 5:11–12 is not the same form as vv. 3–10. Not only is it “Blessed are you when …” but the person changes from third person (“they”) to second person (“you”).

  54. On reward in Matthew, see 5:46; 6:1, 2, 5, 16; 10:41–42; 20:1–16; 25:31–46. Recent scholarship has shown that Judaism shifted from conceptualizing sin as a burden to sin as indebtedness, which led in the centuries around Jesus to seeing good works in terms of credit. One should be wary, in other words, of inferring a works-based righteousness in Judaism on the basis of this shift from burden to debt. See G. A. Anderson, Sin: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

  55. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 109.

  56. I rely here on the piece I wrote for Books & Culture (November/December 2008): “Happiness: Given, Lost, Regained.”

  57. Stott, Message, 36.

  58. W. G. Strickland, ed., Five Views on Law and Gospel (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996).

  Chapter 3

  Matthew 5:13�
�16

  LISTEN to the Story

  13“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.1

  14“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.2 Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds3 and glorify your Father in heaven.”

  Listening to the text in the Story: Genesis 1:26–27; Exodus 19:4–6; Psalm 8; Isaiah 51:4; 60:3; 61:6; Matthew 19:28; Romans 5:12–21 (esp. v. 17); 2 Timothy 2:8–13; 1 Peter 2:1–12; Revelation 1:5–6; 5:9–10; 20:4–6.

  It is easier to think of salt and light as clever metaphors and then assume their meanings are clear to spin off into practical living exercises, than it is to think of the metaphors in the context of the Bible’s big Story. This text encourages us to reimagine our role in the world as God’s agents of redemption. Again, it is simpler to reimagine that role in this world as “moral influence” than through the biblical notion that is at work in the metaphors of salt and light. Because the moral-influence theory is instinctive for us, I have provided a long list of texts immediately below the citation of 5:13–16. I would urge you to read them all.

  A brief sketch of those passages in the Bible assigns a particular role to Adam and Eve (Gen 1:26–27; Ps 8:1–6), then to Abraham (Gen 12), then through him to Israel (Exod 19:4–6), and eventually to Jesus and through him to his disciples as the church (Matt 19:28; 1 Pet 2:1–12). But this role is given to the church only after Jesus Christ has actually performed that role perfectly (Rom 5:12–21; 2 Tim 2:8–13). What role is this? The role of being both priests and kings on behalf of God in this world. A simple probing of the final kingdom reveals that God’s people will be mediating and ruling in the world in the kingdom (Rev 1:5–6; 5:9–10; 20:4–6). This conclusion to history leads us to a powerful and practical orientation in life: we are to mediate and rule now in light of the task we will be assigned in the kingdom.4 Again, we are looking at an Ethic from Beyond mediated to us through the ruling King Jesus.