Sermon on the Mount

by Scot McKnight

  What grabs us is the shocking disproportion between what we perceive to be the sin (anger) and its consequences (eternal punishment). In the words of R. T. France, “ordinary insults may betray an attitude of contempt which God takes extremely seriously.”13 Perhaps we need to be reminded that Jesus thinks anger leads to “the fire of hell,” which translates “Gehenna.” Gehenna was the valley south of Jerusalem and, because it had been a place of divine judgment, it became a trope in the Jewish world for the place of divine doom.14 Examples include 2 Chronicles 28:3, but especially the powerful warning of Jeremiah 19:2–9:

  2 Chron. 28:3: He [Ahaz] burned sacrifices in the Valley of Ben Hinnom [Gehenna] and sacrificed his children in the fire, engaging in the detestable practices of the nations the LORD had driven out before the Israelites.

  Jer. 19:2–9: 2“… and go out to the Valley of Ben Hinnom, near the entrance of the Potsherd Gate. There proclaim the words I tell you, 3and say, ‘Hear the word of the LORD, you kings of Judah and people of Jerusalem. This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Listen! I am going to bring a disaster on this place that will make the ears of everyone who hears of it tingle. 4For they have forsaken me and made this a place of foreign gods; they have burned incense in it to gods that neither they nor their ancestors nor the kings of Judah ever knew, and they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. 5They have built the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal—something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind. 6So beware, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when people will no longer call this place Topheth or the Valley of Ben Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter.

  7“ ‘In this place I will ruin the plans of Judah and Jerusalem. I will make them fall by the sword before their enemies, at the hands of those who want to kill them, and I will give their carcasses as food to the birds and the wild animals. 8I will devastate this city and make it an object of horror and scorn; all who pass by will be appalled and will scoff because of all its wounds. 9I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, and they will eat one another’s flesh because their enemies will press the siege so hard against them to destroy them.’ ”

  Jesus not only dismantles ethical codes at work in his culture, where anger was never on par with murder, but he sets his own ethical code in the context of entrance into the kingdom of God. He threatens his followers with divine judgment for anger. Here we have an Ethic from Beyond established by the Messiah, who reveals God’s truth for the kingdom community.

  Exhortation to Reconciliation

  Because Jesus prohibits anger, he offers counterbehaviors that illustrate what it means to live both beyond anger and in reconciled relations with others. His words are an Ethic from Beyond, that is, the kingdom appearing partially in the now. In 5:23–24, Jesus shows that reconciliation with a “brother or sister” (in Matthew the term “brother [and by extension] or sister” may only refer to followers of Jesus; cf. 12:48–50)15 trumps even the sacredness of offering a sacrificial gift in the temple.

  Jesus’ words are purposefully general: “has something against you.” But we must observe that Jesus doesn’t say in this specific text, “if you have something against someone else,” but if the offended party has something against you.16 Jesus wants his followers to live radically reconciled lives. Pastorally, there is the danger of being overly scrupulous, and this “something” can be petty, trivial, or even controlling. In context, Jesus isn’t talking about theological differences or petty human disagreements but anger, the kind of anger that leads to murder. So, in the word “something” we must keep our eyes on the brother or sister who is angry toward us or feels angered by things we have done that offended them; and we need to become aware of our own anger.

  There is nothing here that is not a part of Judaism’s own teaching, even if the best example comes from the later rabbinic text, Mishnah Yoma 8:9:

  This exegesis did R. Eleazar b. Azariah state: “From all your sins shall you be clean before the Lord (Lev. 16:30)—for transgressions between man and the Omnipresent does the Day of Atonement atone. For transgressions between man and his fellow, the Day of Atonement atones, only if the man will regain the good will of his friend.”

  Jesus emphasizes reconciliation more than what was typical in his world. All of this is wrapped up inside the Jesus Creed and the Golden Rule and will emerge with force in the Lord’s Prayer (6:12, 14–15): love means fellowship, and fellowship requires reconciliation. The exaggerated temple scenario, with its instruction to drop the sacrifice right there at the altar, illustrates the importance of living in reconciled relations.

  Repetition of Exhortation and a Warning

  But Jesus moves reconciliation outside the circle of his followers to include even those with whom one is in a legal dispute (5:25–26) in a scenario of an “adversary” suing a disciple of Jesus. On the way to the court the follower of Jesus is to strive for reconciliation—and here Jesus gives an almost comic, pragmatic example. Instead of trusting matters to the court case, in which case the follower may end up in prison, the follower is to take matters into his (or her) own hands and work for reconciliation—and to do so “quickly” (5:25). Why? Because the judge will have his way and the process of justice may lead to prison. The aim opens the verse: “Settle matters.” This expression translates the Greek word eunoōn, a term that means “to make friends with,” “to be well disposed toward someone,” or “to be in agreement with someone.” In this context, it could suggest becoming friends with someone, but it is perhaps wiser not to expect too much of this term and to see it as “come to agreeable terms with.”17

  This paragraph illustrates the centrality of reconciliation with others by appealing to an extreme situation: Jesus is for reconciliation, even if it means interrupting sacred actions and legal judgments.

  LIVE the Story

  Those familiar with the Bible and the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount may be those most apt to miss what must have screamed “Can you believe it!” in Jesus’ day. In the world of Jesus, especially among the observant types, Moses was the man. He was the one through whom God gave the Torah and was held in the highest possible of honors. Jesus, in the antitheses, puts himself not only alongside Moses but above Moses. Moses more or less prohibits murder; Jesus flat-out prohibits something deeper and something more transcendent at the level of morality: he prohibits anger. By getting behind murder, Jesus on some level trumps the perceptions of Moses.

  We have already discussed the Moses Christology of Matthew, so I don’t want to dwell on this any more here, but we dare not miss the fundamental Christology of what Jesus is doing here. He is setting himself up as someone greater than Moses. This is a Messianic Ethic that is at the same time an Ethic from Beyond: the King of the kingdom calls kingdom citizens to live now as if the kingdom had arrived.

  While Jesus does not come out and say, “Do not be angry,” his words “But … anyone who is angry with a brother or sister” all but lays down a universal prohibition of anger. Three interpretations beckon our allegiance. Some suggest this is a radical and almost utopian, even absolute, prohibition of every and any kind of anger; others suggest it is hyperbolic, and what Jesus has in mind is to get his disciples wedged away from the justification of anger in their culture. Yet a third view could be called a kingdom-perspective view, what I am calling an Ethic from Beyond.

  Often enough the Bible counsels against, warns about, or prohibits anger. Thus, one thinks of an Ethic from Above: God says don’t be angry. This is where we need to begin. One thinks here of Ecclesiastes 7:9 (“for anger resides in the lap of fools”) or Psalm 37:8 (“Refrain from anger and turn from wrath”). The apostle Paul says, “Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice” (Eph 4:31), and the near parallel (in Col 3:8) says to be rid of “anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips.” James says that our “anger does not produce the rig
hteousness that God desires” (Jas 1:20). Taken together, one could easily infer that anger is absolutely prohibited.

  But there is the evidence that God himself is sometimes angry (Exod 4:14; Jer 6:11) and that Jesus himself expressed anger (see, e.g., Mark 3:5), and perhaps anger is behind the “You blind fools!” in Matt 23:17 and the cleansing of the temple (Matt 21:12; Mark 11:15; Luke 19:45; John 2:15). Such texts lead others to see in the words of Jesus in our passage an exaggerated or hyperbolic statement, or they see here an Ethic from Below. It is not possible to be free entirely of anger, and there are sometimes when anger is justified, often called “righteous indignation,” that creates the difficulty of knowing how to “live” Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:22. That is, some would say this is no more than a rhetorical ethic designed to warn.

  I disagree. No matter how clear the references are to God’s anger or the anger of Jesus, not to mention Paul’s own anger (how else to read Gal 3:1), the language of Jesus in Matthew 5:22 is neither easily dismissed nor the context minimized, for in that context Jesus is raising the ante and upping the expectations of his followers. Jesus wants his followers to be different when it comes to anger and murder. So, in light of how the New Testament frames the ethics of Jesus, the best interpretation is what may be called an Ethic from Beyond. The kingdom is both partially realized in the here and now, and the kingdom is also partially yet to come. We live in the “now but not yet.” Because the kingdom is in some sense “now”—and that means some of the powers of the kingdom have already been unleashed (think Holy Spirit)—followers of Jesus are to avoid sinful anger, and they are capable of being transformed from anger. In the future kingdom of God, when all is consummated and when heaven comes to earth, anger will vanish because loving fellowship will flourish. The prohibition of anger here is not so much hyperbolic as it is a foretaste of kingdom realities.

  Nothing expresses kingdom realities more than reconciled relations. A biblical understanding of love, which lies behind this passage, includes the notions that God is with us as the Someone who is for us. The core expression of God’s love for humans is found in the covenant God made with Abraham, Moses, and David—and then in its complete form through Jesus. That covenant, in the “I will be your God and you will be my people” formula (cf., e.g., Jer 31:33), frames everything needed to be said about reconciled relations. We are to live out that covenant with others, beginning with family and the people of God, but also in connecting ways with everyone we know and meet (so far as is possible).

  It is perhaps easier to think here of golden examples, not the least of which would be the Christians of Germany who suffered under Hitler and who found themselves after the war joined by those who served in Hitler’s troops. Another example would be the Afrikaner Christians of South Africa with whom Archbishop Desmond Tutu (standing next to Nelson Mandela) worked to form reconciliation as South Africa moved out of apartheid into a genuine expression of what Africans call ubuntu, the sense that we become humans by living with other humans in reconciliation. And I think of the extreme example of Tutsis and Hutus as they sought to make peace, where the numbers of atrocities were so great and the legal system so small that courts were formed under trees in local communities as locals sought reconciliation. I think too of the stories that arise when we think of New World slavery, of Jim Crow laws in the South (and less overtly but real in the North), as well as the Great Migration that led to exacerbation of frayed relations between American citizens who were black or white.18

  Extreme and newsworthy examples, however, aren’t the only way Jesus chose to express himself. Thus, I am thinking we would do better to ponder the ordinariness of Jesus’ examples: immediately suspending what we are doing to find peace with our own relations. What comes to mind for me are the relations of husbands and wives, the relations of fathers and mothers to children, of sibling relations, and of the relations of neighbors and community members and those with whom we work. It is far too easy to ponder reconciliation of monstrous problems, like those in Rwanda, than it is to ponder a day-to-day pursuit of peace and reconciliation in our own relations. The global issues flow out of local and personal issues.

  Here’s the nub of the issue: we must be intentional about reconciliation for it to become a pervasive lifestyle. This can only begin if we find space and time to ponder, to pray, and to discern where it is that we—let me say “you”—need to pursue reconciliation. We must ponder those with whom we are out of sorts, those who are closest to us with whom we are not living fully reconciled lives, and those who may not even know that we are harboring bitterness and resentment. Reconciliation is not likely to be something that happens to us, as it is something we pursue.

  One of my favorite writers is Trevor Hudson, a Methodist minister in Johannesburg, South Africa. I quote now from Trevor’s fine study, Discovering Our Spiritual Identity, wherein he discloses how his wife pursued reconciliation with him because she wanted it—even when Trevor wasn’t aware how out of sorts they were:

  I recall one painful moment in my own marriage. I had just assumed responsibility for my first congregation. Obviously keen to succeed, I worked long, hard hours. Externally things were going well. Attendance was increasing, finances had improved, and a new sanctuary was on the drawing boards. Within my marriage relationship, however, I was not doing well. Often away from home, I was denying the person closest to me the attention, time and energy necessary for real communication and caring. Coming home late one night I found a note at my bedside table. It read: “Trevor, I love you and want to be married to you. Sometimes I worry though that one day I may not be worried if you don’t come home. I miss you and want to reconnect.”19

  Trevor, who uses the expression “acid test” for the Christian’s love of those closest to us (in contrast to the easier test of loving the world), said this: “I had failed the acid test.”

  Perhaps we need to ask ourselves—and I ask myself as you ask yourself: To whom do we need to drop such a note? The hard work is acting on the intention and then living with the tension that is created by the action, but there is no way to create reconciled relations with those around us until we intentionally decide to act on what Jesus summons us to do: “Settle matters quickly.” There are no options here: Jesus calls his followers to be people of reconciliation. In fact, he warns his followers of final destruction if they walk away from that path.

  Notes

  1. KNT: “foul and abusive language.”

  2. TNIV: “Sanhedrin.”

  3. KNT: “Gehenna.”

  4. It is worth observing how the six antitheses are formed:

  “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago …” (5:21).

  “You have heard that it was said …” (5:27).

  “It has been said …” (5:31).

  “Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago …” (5:33).

  “You have heard that it was said …” (5:38).

  “You have heard that it was said …” (5:43).

  The repetition of “to the people long ago” in the first and fourth antitheses cuts the antitheses into two groups. The three-step reduction of formula in the first three is not repeated in the second group of antitheses.

  5. David Turner observes that “antitheses” is not the best word since that would imply overt contradiction of the Torah; other terms have been suggested, like “hypertheses” or “epitheses” or “contrasts.” See Turner, Matthew, 165. Lapide suggests “supertheses”; see Lapide, Sermon on the Mount, 46. This all hangs on what Jesus is speaking against; I would contend that if Jesus is speaking against interpretations of the Torah, then the word antithesis applies. Stott says it best: “In relation to scribal distortions of the law, the term ‘antithesis’ rightly describes” what Jesus is teaching, but “in relation to the law itself ‘exegesis’ would be a more accurate word” (Stott, Message, 77).

  6. For a more extensive analysis, see G. H. Stassen, “The Fourteen Triads of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt
hew 5:21–7:12),” JBL 122 (2003): 267–308; summarized and graphed in Stassen, Living the Sermon. Stassen contends there are three parts to the “antitheses” (and not just two): a citation of a traditional teaching, a diagnosis of a vicious cyle, and—here is his distinction—a “transforming initiative” that maps the way of deliverance.

  7. See further Strickland, ed., Five Views on Law and Gospel; with appropriate differences and nuances, I side with D. J. Moo’s essay in that book (pp. 319–76).

  8. I take these examples from Garland, Reading Matthew, 63.

  9. A Jewish expression for clarifying the law: see Aaron M. Gale in The Jewish Annotated New Testament (ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Z. Brettler; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 11 notes.

  10. So Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 187.

  11. Keener, Matthew, 183–84.

  12. Some restrict the anger to anger with fellow believers; this was the view of Hilary and Peter Chrysologus. See ACCS: Matthew, 102–3. More below at 5:24.

  13. France, Matthew, 201.