The Sermon on the Mount is the first of five blocks of Jesus’ teaching in the gospel according to Matthew. So for most of the history of the Jesus movement, it’s the first main block of teachings that people encounter if they pick up and start reading the New Testament. Just the sheer brilliance, genius and power of what Jesus says in these three chapters, they have been a generative beating heart of the ethic and value system of the Christian movement throughout its history. Imagine were in first century Israel Palestine, the people who heard Jesus’ sermon is a people group who have lived on this piece of land for centuries, going back to the time of Moses and Joshua, but in Jesus’ day, it’s occupied territory, because of the Roman Empire.
Your living on your own ancestral lands, but you are now reduced to day labor or just kind of scratching out a lower class living. Your reminded by Rome’s presence, because there’s tax booths, taxing the fish you haul up out of the sea, all of the wheat that is grown in your fields for Rome, there are lots of poor and sick people who are just falling through the cracks by the droves. This is the scene into which Jesus says things like, if someone forces you to go one mile, he’s talking about a Roman soldier. Roman soldiers could commission anybody to carry their luggage. When Jesus talks about people suing and taking your cloak, he’s talking about actual exploitation of day laborers on these Jewish farms that are now owned by Romans. Jesus is drawing on actual political, social, economic realities of people’s day.
Matthew chapter 4 concludes with Jesus, he gathers a nucleus of his crew of apprentices and then he goes about north of Jerusalem, in a region called Galilee, he went about announcing the good news about the arrival of God’s kingdom. Healing every kind of disease, every kind of sickness among the people, news spread and people came from all over, from Galilee, from Syria, from Jerusalem and they flocked to Jesus and he went up onto a hillside and opened his mouth and said, that’s sort of the biblical storyline and cosmic context, the sermon is actually Matthew unpacking what it is that Jesus said as he went about as a traveling teacher, it’s like a summary of what would Jesus have said on any given day, when he walked into a town announcing the good news of God’s Kingdom.
Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, what they are about is not just a set of ideas, they actually are a way of translating into a vision of human life that matches what Jesus is actually doing. Jesus is both living this way, but he’s kickstarting these communities with generous surprising acts of God’s mercy, because people’s bodies are being healed and poor people are getting invited to sit and begin to have meals and share life and reciprocity with people who have a lot more resources than they do. There are slaves and fishermen and farmers all sharing a table and then Jesus is calling those people to live by a vision of what human life is about and Jesus names this moment as the arrival of God’s Kingdom. The sermon is itself, an exposition of beautiful lofty ideals for human life and relationships, but also it describes the things that Jesus is doing as he goes into these towns.
Jesus has this radical vision for how to create a beautiful life and there is a call to respond, by the end of the sermon he says, if you listen to my words and do them, you’re like somebody building your house on a rock. If you don’t, you’re going to build your house on the sand and the flood’s are going to wash you away. While Jesus is certainly being presented as wisdom itself as modeling and teaching the true wisdom about how to live well, Jesus’ teachings are constantly explaining what the nature of reality is, how do we know things, what the Kingdom is like, so that we can be invited into his way of wisdom, that we might experience true human flourishing.
The sermon, it’s Jesus vision of a counterculture reality, we’re used to living in the world one way and Jesus weaves a picture of an alternate way of living as a human community, it’s going to embrace the poor and the tax collectors and Roman soldiers, it’s a call to live in reality. A vision of reality, but it’s not our typical vision, it speaks to something we know must be true or else is life really worth living. What is ultimately most beautiful and true about reality, what if generosity and kindness make right, what if that’s actually reality. What if a group of people lived as if these words were true and then these words of Jesus then become like the compass pointing to the true north. The calling to live in reality by the teachings of Jesus is itself a part of and a result of a response to this transformational work that God’s doing in the human family and so, it’s God’s work in us and it’s our work with God. God called us to live by his wisdom, if we’re open to letting Jesus work in our minds and our hearts, imagine what could happen.
Your living on your own ancestral lands, but you are now reduced to day labor or just kind of scratching out a lower class living. Your reminded by Rome’s presence, because there’s tax booths, taxing the fish you haul up out of the sea, all of the wheat that is grown in your fields for Rome, there are lots of poor and sick people who are just falling through the cracks by the droves. This is the scene into which Jesus says things like, if someone forces you to go one mile, he’s talking about a Roman soldier. Roman soldiers could commission anybody to carry their luggage. When Jesus talks about people suing and taking your cloak, he’s talking about actual exploitation of day laborers on these Jewish farms that are now owned by Romans. Jesus is drawing on actual political, social, economic realities of people’s day.
Matthew chapter 4 concludes with Jesus, he gathers a nucleus of his crew of apprentices and then he goes about north of Jerusalem, in a region called Galilee, he went about announcing the good news about the arrival of God’s kingdom. Healing every kind of disease, every kind of sickness among the people, news spread and people came from all over, from Galilee, from Syria, from Jerusalem and they flocked to Jesus and he went up onto a hillside and opened his mouth and said, that’s sort of the biblical storyline and cosmic context, the sermon is actually Matthew unpacking what it is that Jesus said as he went about as a traveling teacher, it’s like a summary of what would Jesus have said on any given day, when he walked into a town announcing the good news of God’s Kingdom.
Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, what they are about is not just a set of ideas, they actually are a way of translating into a vision of human life that matches what Jesus is actually doing. Jesus is both living this way, but he’s kickstarting these communities with generous surprising acts of God’s mercy, because people’s bodies are being healed and poor people are getting invited to sit and begin to have meals and share life and reciprocity with people who have a lot more resources than they do. There are slaves and fishermen and farmers all sharing a table and then Jesus is calling those people to live by a vision of what human life is about and Jesus names this moment as the arrival of God’s Kingdom. The sermon is itself, an exposition of beautiful lofty ideals for human life and relationships, but also it describes the things that Jesus is doing as he goes into these towns.
Jesus has this radical vision for how to create a beautiful life and there is a call to respond, by the end of the sermon he says, if you listen to my words and do them, you’re like somebody building your house on a rock. If you don’t, you’re going to build your house on the sand and the flood’s are going to wash you away. While Jesus is certainly being presented as wisdom itself as modeling and teaching the true wisdom about how to live well, Jesus’ teachings are constantly explaining what the nature of reality is, how do we know things, what the Kingdom is like, so that we can be invited into his way of wisdom, that we might experience true human flourishing.
The sermon, it’s Jesus vision of a counterculture reality, we’re used to living in the world one way and Jesus weaves a picture of an alternate way of living as a human community, it’s going to embrace the poor and the tax collectors and Roman soldiers, it’s a call to live in reality. A vision of reality, but it’s not our typical vision, it speaks to something we know must be true or else is life really worth living. What is ultimately most beautiful and true about reality, what if generosity and kindness make right, what if that’s actually reality. What if a group of people lived as if these words were true and then these words of Jesus then become like the compass pointing to the true north. The calling to live in reality by the teachings of Jesus is itself a part of and a result of a response to this transformational work that God’s doing in the human family and so, it’s God’s work in us and it’s our work with God. God called us to live by his wisdom, if we’re open to letting Jesus work in our minds and our hearts, imagine what could happen.
