When people read the New Testament, they usually go to Matthew, the first book. So their first real introduction to Christ Jesus’s teachings is the Sermon on the Mount. As, I would argue, it should be. I suspect that’s the reason the ancient Christians listed Matthew first among the gospels—not the shortest gospel, Mark, nor the longest, Luke, but the one with the Sermon in the Mount in it.
Evangelists will regularly tell newbies to read John first. I get why; John’s prologue spells out precisely who Jesus is, and what he’s come to earth to do. It’s a great book for talking about Jesus’s divine nature, and our salvation. But now that we’re saved, how are we to live? What are the good works God has in mind for us?
It’s
A little too challenging for a lot of Christians. For some newbies it’s a punch in the face. This is what Jesus expects of us? Righteous behavior? Self-control? Radical forgiveness? Integrity? Total faith in God? No double standards? In fact higher standards than the most religious people we know? Christ Almighty!
Some of us figure, “Okay,” and give it a shot. Try to follow it as best we can, all our lives. And grow as Christians really fast.
But historically most Christians look at the Sermon, balk, and try to find
Yes, many a Pharisee was guilty of legalism. Selective legalism. You’ll notice when you read the gospels, every time Pharisees got legalist it was so they could evade their duties to God. They didn’t help the needy six days a week for one excuse or another, and on sabbath the excuse was, “Oh, it’s sabbath; I gotta observe sabbath.” It’s pure
The results of their irreligion have been the five most common ways Christians choose to interpret the Sermon on the Mount. You’ll notice the first four are hypocritical attempts to weasel out of it. And of course, the fifth is to actually be Christian, and follow Jesus.
1. Take none of it literally.
Starting with the most common way Christians nullify the Sermon on the Mount: Treat it as
Including the parts where there’s no realistic way to interpret it as allegory. Fr’instance, how can we realistically explain away this instruction?—
- Matthew 6.1
NET - “Be careful not to display your righteousness merely to be seen by people. Otherwise you have no reward with your Father in heaven.”
How can we say, “No, God’s actually pleased when we go through the motions of religion just for public acclaim”? And yet you’ll find Christians who actually try to do this. Who say it’s important to make public displays of religion, even if we don’t really mean them, because we’re being good examples for other people. Who justify their hypocrisy—and nevermind what Jesus has to say about it.
How do people justify allegorizing the whole thing? Simple: Sometimes Jesus
Jesus instructs us to
But the real reason we don’t follow it is we don’t wanna. We fear people will take advantage, and abuse us, and Jesus can’t want his followers to be doormats. Besides what if the evildoer plans to rape or murder us, or harm our loved ones? Screw that! We’re gonna fight back. In Esther the Jews didn’t stand for that: The goverment permitted ’em to get weapons, fight back against the antisemites,
Extend this “it’s all hyperbole” interpretation to the rest of the bible, and you’ll magically find you don’t have to follow a word of it. Or believe it, for that matter.
So what about the bit where Jesus says those who dismiss him are like created deduced them, and tweaked them to their satisfaction. And don’t take the parable of the house on sand literally either.
You see the problem. Treating the Sermon as if it’s all hyperbole means we can repurpose it to mean whatever we wish. Jesus’s intentions and purposes? Irrelevant. God’s will? Don’t care. Evildoers? Balls.
2. Push it into another era.
Lemme first say there are no such things as dispensation. A
Dispensationalists claim that’s how God currently saves, but in the past he had other dispensations; other systems. They claim
As I said: No such thing. Dispensations aren’t taught in the bible whatsoever.
The Law of Moses wasn’t a system by which he saved anyone;
So why do so many Christians believe it anyway? ’Cause one of the dirty little secrets of dispensationalism is it permits Christians to nullify scriptures. Don’t wanna obey the Law? No problem: Claim it’s part of a different dispensation. One which God isn’t using anymore. So we can read it as a history lesson. But it doesn’t apply to our lives anymore, and we can ignore it. Skip it. Even break it.
Don’t wanna follow the Sermon on the Mount? Again, no problem! It’s Jesus’s interpretation of the Law—which he taught people before
Yeah, they don’t always put it in those words, but that’s the attitude. Jesus’s own statement about how the Law totally still counts, to these people, doesn’t count.
Matthew 5.17-20 KWL 17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish these things but to fulfill them.18 I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth pass away not the smallest letter or stroke of a letter will pass from the law until everything takes place.19 So anyone who breaks one of the least of these commands and teaches others to do so will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever obeys them and teaches others to do so will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness goes beyond that of the experts in the law and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven!”
Dispensationalism is just another loophole. It nullifies the Old Testament, and lots of the New, and makes it so dispensationalists don’t have to obey Jesus at all: Every sin is dissolved, we get to
Of course it makes no logical sense. Why would Jesus teach this Sermon, only to invalidate it a few years later by dying for our sins? Why would the apostles memorize it, write it down after Jesus died and was resurrected, then teach it to Jesus’s future followers as if it’s important? Why even have it in the bible? Doesn’t the idea of Jesus nullifying his own teaching, strike you as the behavior of a flip-flopping politician instead of the infallible Son of Man?
3. Push it into heaven.
The Sermon on the Mount is entirely about
But where’s the kingdom? Ah, that’s the thing. Many a Christian will point out it’s not of this world.
So when we die, the Sermon explains how things’ll be. On earth, not so much. True,
Meanwhile people on earth are gonna be awful. Life’s gonna suck. ’Cause the Sermon isn’t about earth, but heaven. Doesn’t apply to us in the here and now. Never will. But then we die, go to heaven, and experience God’s kingdom there.
What about those Christians who figure Jesus’s return
Either way, the Sermon doesn’t apply here and now. It applies somewhere else: Heaven, or Jesus’s future earthly kingdom. Here, it’s Jesus’s ideal, and should be our ideal. We look at the Sermon for how things oughta be, and apply it where we can. Well, where practical. But since the kingdom isn’t here, it’s not practical to apply these guidelines across the board.
Let’s use the example of evildoers. In the future kingdom, once Jesus reigns and all us Christians are resurrected and indestructible, we needn’t resist evildoers, because we needn’t worry about evildoers. Their slaps won’t hurt; they’ll tickle. Their demands won’t harm us. We’ll be beyond the worries and indignities of people being awful to us. But in the present day, where we’re still mortal and fragile, where their demands can even ruin or kill us, it makes no sense to capitulate to their demands. Keep kicking ’em in the balls.
Thus back in the 1950s, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. tried to convince his protesters to not resist evildoers, a large number of Christians claimed he was absolutely nuts. Not resist evildoers? You do realize the evildoers are gonna turn the dogs and firehoses and billyclubs on you, right? You can’t practically apply the Sermon on the Mount to the present day; you’ll get killed. The kingdom hasn’t come yet!
Believe it or not, King’s upbringing and education didn’t teach him to apply the Sermon on the Mount this way. Americans didn’t follow the Sermon on the Mount; hence segregation, and treating blacks like scum. King was instead inspired by a Hindu, Mohandas Gandhi, who’d read the Sermon on the Mount, saw similarities between Christ Jesus and Hindu teachings, decided to actually try nonviolence… and won the independence of India from the United Kingdom. Kinda sad when
Theologians call the many interpretations which push the Sermon into the future as
4. Let it drive you to grace.
In the Middle Ages, the popular view of the Sermon on the Mount was it only applied to bishops, priests, deacons, friars, and monastics. In other words, professional Christians.
But it wasn’t realistic for Christian commoners to possibly follow it. The world is too pagan and sinful, so the Sermon is too impractical. The kingdom isn’t of this world, remember? But within the walls of the church, the kingdom was sorta in the world, ’cause the church follows Jesus as our King. So in this shadow kingdom, the Sermon works. If you take holy vows, dedicated yourself to full-time ministry, and separate yourself wholly from the secular world, you could follow the Sermon perfectly! Too bad for everyone else.
This was the worldview Martin Luther was introduced to when he became a monk. His leaders expected him to follow the Sermon—plus all the other customs and requirements the church imposed on monks. And if you know Luther’s story, these standards made him nuts. He found himself totally unable to live up to these requirements. He didn’t yet realize God’s grace fills in all the blanks. Once he finally did, it blew his mind.
Problem is, Luther took Paul’s statements about the Law—
Romans 7.7-13 NET 7 What shall we say then? Is the law sin? Absolutely not! Certainly, I would not have known sin except through the law. For indeed I would not have known what it means to desire something belonging to someone else if the law had not said, “Do not covet.”Ex 20.17 8 But sin, seizing the opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of wrong desires. For apart from the law, sin is dead.9 And I was once alive apart from the law, but with the coming of the commandment sin became alive10 and I died. So I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life brought death!11 For sin, seizing the opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it I died.12 So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous, and good.13 Did that which is good, then, become death to me? Absolutely not! But sin, so that it would be shown to be sin, produced death in me through what is good, so that through the commandment sin would become utterly sinful.
—and applied ’em to the Sermon on the Mount. The Law defines sin: The Law says “Don’t,” and when we do, that’s sin. We know we’re sinners because we break the Law. And the Sermon also defines sin, ’cause Jesus closed a few of the Pharisees’ loopholes in the Law. When we adopt Pharisee-style loopholes, this also exposes what sinners we are. But this made Luther feel especially sinful. He felt he couldn’t live up to the Sermon—but thanks to grace, he didn’t feel he really had to.
No, Luther was no libertine. Let’s not make that mistake. Luther believed God was serious when he issued his commands; believed Jesus was serious when he preached his Sermon. Good Christians oughta make a serious effort to obey what we can. But the greater purpose of the Law and the Sermon on the Mount, is to ultimately show us we can’t obey God to perfection. We’re never gonna earn our way to salvation. Isn’t possible. Don’t be stupid and try.
Luther concluded Jesus made the Sermon deliberately too hard. Who’s gonna successfully go through life without ever being angry with their fellow Christian?
The only downside to Luther’s idea: We wind up with a lot of Christians who miss Luther’s intent, and figure since the Sermon is impossible to fully implement, give up. Don’t bother. It doesn’t drive them to grace, so much as it drives ’em to despair about ever being good or obeying God. They’re not entirely sure how to deal with a God who piles such impossible burdens on his children.
Me, I don’t believe Jesus did make his Sermon too impossible to follow. It’s only gonna be impossibly hard for people who expect to fulfill it under their own power, without
5. Do it!
If God told us to do something, yet never actually meant for us to do it, it’d make him a hypocrite.
And no, God’s no hypocrite. He has infinitely more integrity than that. Same with Christ Jesus. When he taught it in the Sermon on the Mount, he meant it. Not always literally; don’t start plucking your eyes out. But he did mean it seriously. Sin should bother us so much, we’d rather pluck out our eyes than sin. Sin should bother us so much, we’d rather saw off limbs. It doesn’t, and that’s the problem. We’d rather risk the fire.
The purpose of the Sermon on the Mount is to teach us something firm. Something Jesus wants us to live our lives by. He doesn’t want us with a Christianity that’s purely academic, imaginary, or hypothetical. ’Cause reality’s gonna come kick us in the arse, and Christians who think our religion is purely philosophical, are always ill-prepared for the pressures and tribulations of life. When problems come, and they always do, these irreligious Christians
To be fair, too many churches wrongly teach us to be irreligious. They don’t teach us to follow the Sermon, but to get our theology straight. Don’t read Matthew first; read John. How we build a house on solid rock is not by following Jesus, but by believing
Which Jesus’s brother James rightly called dead faith.
So when people quit Christianity, or “lose their faith,” it’s not really because a
Actions, in comparison, are tangible. They exist in the real world. They’re footprints in the sand which anyone can see. Fruitless Christians object they don’t prove our faith is real; it’s all just Christians being good to salve our consciences. That’s a cop-out, invented by people who don’t love God enough to live like he wants. When we get off our behinds and act in faith, God shows up. Sometimes in little ways; sometimes in huge miracles which nobody, not even skeptics, can explain. But this is why Jesus told us to act. When we follow God, he grants us God-experiences. And that’s solid rock.
Just as Jesus described it.
Matthew 7.24-27 NET 24 “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them is like a wise man who built his house on rock.25 The rain fell, the flood came, and the winds beat against that house, but it did not collapse because its foundation had been laid on rock.26 Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them is like a foolish man who built his house on sand.27 The rain fell, the flood came, and the winds beat against that house, and it collapsed—it was utterly destroyed!”
Living faith produces fruit. Acts follow it. Obeying Jesus means we do stuff. We actually follow the Sermon on the Mount, instead of applaud it as a nice idealistic treatise. We take Jesus seriously enough to help him construct his kingdom, instead of sitting on the sidelines, watching others work, hoping it’ll all come together, yet doubting—and never really knowing—whether it will. We watch for ourselves as the kingdom happens before our eyes.
Storms come. Always do. But though rain comes down in buckets, the river smashes against us, and a tornado or two tries to rip the roof off, we won’t collapse. We can’t. We’ll have seen too much. We’ll have experienced too much. We won’t be able to explain our lives and achievements any other way than to say, “God was with me.”
You may think I’m exaggerating. I’m not. God is present when his kids obey him. He lets us see his presence for ourselves.
