There are three elements in this first summary of Jesus' activity (cf. Mt 4:12-25) to which we will have to return later. The first is Matthew's indication of the fundamental content of Jesus' preaching, which is intended to summarize his entire message: "Repent, for the Kingdom [the lordship] of heaven is at hand" (Mt 4:17). The second element is the calling of the twelve Apostles, which is both a symbolic gesture and a totally concrete act by which Jesus announces and initiates the renewal of the twelve tribes, the new assembly of the people of Israel. Finally, this passage already makes it clear that Jesus is not just the teacher, but also the Redeemer of the whole person: The Jesus who teaches is at the same time the Jesus who saves.
With a few strokes of his brush--in fourteen verses (4:12-25)--Matthew presents his audience with an initial portrait of the figure and work of Jesus. Thereupon follow the three chapters of the Sermon on the Mount. What is this Sermon? With this great discourse, Matthew puts together a picture of Jesus as the new Moses in precisely the profound sense that we saw earlier in connection with the promise of a new prophet given in the Book of Deuteronomy.
The opening verse is far more than a casual introduction: "Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them" (Mt 5:1-2). Jesus sits down--the expression of the plenary authority of the teacher. He takes his seat on the cathedra of the mountain. Later on he will speak of the rabbis who sit in the cathedra--the chair--of Moses and so have authority (cf. Mt 23:2); for that reason their teaching must be listened to and accepted, even though their lives contradict it, even though they themselves are not authority, but receive authority from another. Jesus takes his seat on the cathedra as the teacher of Israel and as the teacher of people everywhere. For--as we shall see when we consider the text itself--Matthew uses the word disciple here not in order to restrict the intended audience of the Sermon on the Mount, but to enlarge it. Everyone who hears and accepts the word can become a "disciple."
What counts from now on is hearing and following, not lineage. Discipleship is possible for everyone; it is a calling for everyone. Hearing, then, is the basis on which a more inclusive Israel is built--a renewed Israel, which does not exclude or revoke the old one, but steps beyond it into the domain of universality.
Jesus sits on the cathedra of Moses. But he does so not after the manner of teachers who are trained for the job in a school; he sits there as the greater Moses, who broadens the Covenant to include all nations. This also explains the significance of the mountain. The Evangelist does not tell us which of the hills of Galilee it was. But the very fact that it is the scene of Jesus' preaching makes it simply "the mountain"--the new Sinai. The "mountain" is the place where Jesus prays--where he is face-to-face with the Father. And that is exactly why it is also the place of his teaching, since his teaching comes forth from this most intimate exchange with the Father. The "mountain," then, is by the very nature of the case established as the new and definitive Sinai.
And yet how different this "mountain" is from that imposing rocky mass in the desert! Tradition has identified a hill north of Lake Genesareth as the Mount of the Beatitudes. Anyone who has been there and gazed with the eyes of his soul on the wide prospect of the waters of the lake, the sky and the sun, the trees and the meadows, the flowers and the sound of birdsong can never forget the wonderful atmosphere of peace and the beauty of creation encountered there--in a land unfortunately so lacking in peace.
Wherever the Mount of the Beatitudes actually was, something of this peace and beauty must have characterized it. Elijah was granted a transformed version of the Sinai experience: He experienced God passing by, not in the storm or in the fire or in the earthquake, but in the still small breeze (1 Kings 19:1-13). That transformation is completed here. God's power is now revealed in his mildness, his greatness in his simplicity and closeness. And yet his power and greatness are no less profound. What formerly found expression in storm, fire, and earthquake now takes on the form of the Cross, of the suffering God, who calls us to step into this mysterious fire, the fire of crucified love: "Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you" (Mt 5:11). The violence of the Revelation of Sinai so frightened the people that they said to Moses, "You speak to us, and we will hear; but let not God speak to us, lest we die" (Ex 20:19).
Now God speaks intimately, as one man to another. Now he descends into the depth of their human sufferings. Yet that very act prompts, and will continually prompt, his hearers--the hearers who nonetheless think of themselves as disciples--to say, "This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?" (Jn 6:60). This new goodness of the Lord is no sugarplum. The scandal of the Cross is harder for many to bear than the thunder of Sinai had been for the Israelites. In fact, the Israelites were quite right when they said they would die if God should speak with them (Ex 20:19). Without a "dying," without the demise of what is simply our own, there is no communion with God and no redemption. Our meditation on the Baptism has already demonstrated this for us--Baptism cannot be reduced to a mere ritual.
We have already anticipated some points that will emerge fully when we consider the text itself. It should be clear by now that the Sermon on the Mount is the new Torah brought by Jesus. Moses could deliver his Torah only by entering into the divine darkness on the mountain. Jesus' Torah likewise presupposes his entering into communion with the Father, the inward ascents of his life, which are then prolonged in his descents into communion of life and suffering with men.
The Evangelist Luke gives us a shorter version of the Sermon on the Mount with different emphases. Luke writes for Gentile Christians, and so his concern is not so much to portray Jesus as the new Moses whose words constitute the definitive Torah. Hence even the outward framework of the Sermon is differently presented. In Luke's account, the Sermon on the Mount immediately follows the calling of the twelve Apostles, which he presents as the fruit of a night spent watching in prayer. Luke sets the calling of the Twelve on the mountain, the place of Jesus' prayer. After this event, which is of such fundamental importance for Jesus' path, the Lord comes down from the mountain with the Twelve, whom he has just chosen (and whom Luke has just introduced by name), and he stands on the plain. For Luke, this standing is an expression of Jesus' sovereignty and plenitude of authority, and the plain is an expression of the broad scope of his intended audience. Luke goes on to underscore this breadth when he tells us that--apart from the Twelve with whom Jesus had come down from the mountain--a great host of his disciples, as well as a crowd of people from Judea, Jerusalem, and the coastal regions of Tyre and Sidon, had flocked to listen to him and be healed by him (Lk 6:17ff.). The universal significance of the Sermon evident in this scene is further qualified when Luke--like Matthew--goes on to say that "he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said..." (Lk 6:20). Both elements are true: The Sermon on the Mount is addressed to the entire world, the entire present and future, and yet it demands discipleship and can be understood and lived out only by following Jesus and accompanying him on his journey.
The following reflections cannot, of course, aim at a verse-by-verse exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount. I would like to pick out three parts of it, from which it seems to me that the message and the person of Jesus emerge with particular clarity. Firstly, the Beatitudes. Secondly, I would like to reflect on the new version of the Torah that Jesus offers us. Jesus stands here in dialogue with Moses, with the traditions of Israel. There is an important book in which the great Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner takes his place, as it were, among the audience of the Sermon on the Mount and, having listened to Jesus, attempts a dialogue with him under the title A Rabbi Talks with Jesus. More than other interpretations known to me, this respectful and frank dispute between a believing Jew and Jesus, the son of Abraham, has opened my eyes to the greatness of Jesus' words and to the choice that the Gospel places before us. In the second section, then, I would like as a Christian to join in the rabbi's conversation with Jesus, so as to be guided to
ward a better understanding of the authentic Jewishness and the mystery of Jesus. Finally, an important part of the Sermon on the Mount is devoted to prayer--indeed, how could it be otherwise? This part culminates in the Our Father, by means of which Jesus intends to teach disciples of all times how to pray; he intends to place them before the face of God, thus guiding them along the path to life.
THE BEATITUDES
The Beatitudes are not infrequently presented as the New Testament's counterpart to the Ten Commandments, as an example of the Christian ethics that is supposedly superior to the commands of the Old Testament. This approach totally misconstrues these words of Jesus. Jesus always presupposed the validity of the Ten Commandments as a matter of course (see, for example, Mk 10:19; Lk 16:17). In the Sermon on the Mount, he recapitulates and gives added depth to the commandments of the second tablet, but he does not abolish them (cf. Mt 5:21-48). To do so would in any case diametrically contradict the fundamental principle underpinning his discussion of the Ten Commandments: "Think not that I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished" (Mt 5:17-18). This statement, which only appears to contradict the teaching of Saint Paul, will require further discussion after our examination of the dialogue between Jesus and the rabbi. For the time being, it suffices to note that Jesus has no intention of abrogating the Ten Commandments. On the contrary, he reinforces them.
But what are the Beatitudes? First of all, they are situated within a long tradition of Old Testament teachings, such as we find in Psalm 1 and in the parallel text at Jeremiah 17:7-8: Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord. These are words of promise. At the same time, though, they are criteria for the discernment of spirits and so they prove to be directions for finding the right path. The setting in which Luke frames the Sermon on the Mount clarifies to whom the Beatitudes of Jesus are addressed: "He lifted up his eyes on his disciples." The individual Beatitudes are the fruit of this looking upon the disciples; they describe what might be called the actual condition of Jesus' disciples: They are poor, hungry, weeping men; they are hated and persecuted (cf. Lk 6:20ff.). These statements are meant to list practical, but also theological, attributes of the disciples of Jesus--of those who have set out to follow Jesus and have become his family.
Yet the menacing empirical situation in which Jesus sees his followers becomes a promise when his looking upon them is illuminated in the light of the Father. The Beatitudes, spoken with the community of Jesus' disciples in view, are paradoxes--the standards of the world are turned upside down as soon as things are seen in the right perspective, which is to say, in terms of God's values, so different from those of the world. It is precisely those who are poor in worldly terms, those thought of as lost souls, who are the truly fortunate ones, the blessed, who have every reason to rejoice and exult in the midst of their sufferings. The Beatitudes are promises resplendent with the new image of the world and of man inaugurated by Jesus, his "transformation of values." They are eschatological promises. This must not, however, be taken to mean that the joy they proclaim is postponed until some infinitely remote future or applies exclusively to the next world. When man begins to see and to live from God's perspective, when he is a companion on Jesus' way, then he lives by new standards, and something of the eschaton, of the reality to come, is already present. Jesus brings joy into the midst of affliction.
The paradoxes that Jesus presents in the Beatitudes express the believer's true situation in the world in similar terms to those repeatedly used by Paul to describe his experience of living and suffering as an Apostle: "We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything" (2 Cor 6:8-10). "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed" (2 Cor 4:8-9). What the Beatitudes in Luke's Gospel present as a consolation and a promise, Paul presents as the lived experience of the apostle. He considers that he has been made "last of all," a man under a death sentence, a spectacle to the world, homeless, calumniated, despised (cf. 1 Cor 4:9-13). And yet he experiences a boundless joy. As the one who has been handed over, who has given himself away in order to bring Christ to men, he experiences the interconnectedness of Cross and Resurrection: We are handed over to death "so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh" (2 Cor 4:11). In his messengers Christ himself still suffers, still hangs on the Cross. And yet he is risen, irrevocably risen. Although Jesus' messenger in this world is still living the story of Jesus' suffering, the splendor of the Resurrection shines through, and it brings a joy, a "blessedness," greater than the happiness he could formerly have experienced on worldly paths. It is only now that he realizes what real "happiness," what true "blessedness" is, and, in so doing, notices the paltriness of what by conventional standards must be considered satisfaction and happiness.
The paradoxes that Saint Paul experienced in his life, which correspond to the paradoxes of the Beatitudes, thus display the same thing that John expresses in yet another way when he calls the Lord's Cross an "exaltation," an elevation to God's throne on high. John brings Cross and Resurrection, Cross and exaltation together in a single word, because for him the one is in fact inseparable from the other. The Cross is the act of the "exodus," the act of love that is accomplished to the uttermost and reaches "to the end" (Jn 13:1). And so it is the place of glory--the place of true contact and union with God, who is love (cf. 1 Jn 4:7, 16). This Johannine vision, then, is the ne plus ultra in concentrating the paradoxes of the Beatitudes and bringing them within reach of our understanding.
This reflection upon Paul and John has shown us two things. First, the Beatitudes express the meaning of discipleship. They become more concrete and real the more completely the disciple dedicates himself to service in the way that is illustrated for us in the life of Saint Paul. What the Beatitudes mean cannot be expressed in purely theoretical terms; it is proclaimed in the life and suffering, and in the mysterious joy, of the disciple who gives himself over completely to following the Lord. This leads to the second point: the Christological character of the Beatitudes. The disciple is bound to the mystery of Christ. His life is immersed in communion with Christ: "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Gal 2:20). The Beatitudes are the transposition of Cross and Resurrection into discipleship. But they apply to the disciple because they were first paradigmatically lived by Christ himself.
This becomes even more evident if we turn now to consider Matthew's version of the Beatitudes (cf. Mt 5:3-12). Anyone who reads Matthew's text attentively will realize that the Beatitudes present a sort of veiled interior biography of Jesus, a kind of portrait of his figure. He who has no place to lay his head (cf. Mt 8:20) is truly poor; he who can say, "Come to me...for I am meek and lowly in heart" (cf. Mt 11:28-29) is truly meek; he is the one who is pure of heart and so unceasingly beholds God. He is the peacemaker, he is the one who suffers for God's sake. The Beatitudes display the mystery of Christ himself, and they call us into communion with him. But precisely because of their hidden Christological character, the Beatitudes are also a road map for the Church, which recognizes in them the model of what she herself should be. They are directions for discipleship, directions that concern every individual, even though--according to the variety of callings--they do so differently for each person.
Let us now take a somewhat closer look at each individual link in the chain of the Beatitudes. First of all, we have the much debated saying about the "poor in spirit." This term figures in the Qumran scrolls as the self-designation of the pious. They also call themselves "the poor of grace," "the poor of thy redemption," or simply "the poor" (Gnilka, Matthausevangelium, I, p. 121). By referring to t
hemselves in this way, they express their awareness of being the true Israel, thereby invoking traditions that are deeply rooted in Israel's faith. At the time of the Babylonian conquest of Judea, 90 percent of Judeans would have been counted among the poor; Persian tax policy resulted in another situation of dramatic poverty after the Exile. It was no longer possible to maintain the older vision according to which the righteous prosper and poverty is a consequence of a bad life (the so-called Tun-Ergehens-Zusammenhang, or conduct-life correspondence). Now Israel recognizes that its poverty is exactly what brings it close to God; it recognizes that the poor, in their humility, are the ones closest to God's heart, whereas the opposite is true of the arrogant pride of the rich, who rely only on themselves.
The piety of the poor that grew out of this realization finds expression in many of the Psalms; the poor recognize themselves as the true Israel. In the piety of these Psalms, in their expression of deep devotion to God's goodness, in the human goodness and humility that grew from it as men waited vigilantly for God's saving love--here developed that generosity of heart that was to open the door for Christ. Mary and Joseph, Simeon and Anna, Zachariah and Elizabeth, the shepherds of Bethlehem, and the Twelve whom the Lord called to intimate discipleship are all part of this current, which contrasts with the Pharisees and the Sadducees, but also, despite a great deal of spiritual affinity, with Qumran as well. They are the ones in whom the New Testament begins, in full awareness of its perfect unity with the faith of Israel that has been maturing to ever greater purity.
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