The Message of the Sermon on the Mount

John Stott

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781783590407
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

'The followers of Jesus are to be different, ' writes John Stott, 'different from both the nominal church and the secular world, different from both the religious and the irreligious. The Sermon on the Mount is the most complete delineation anywhere in the New Testament of the Christian counter-culture. Here is a Christian value-system, ethical, standard, religious devotion, attitude to money, ambition, lifestyle and network of relationships - all of which are totally at variance with those in the non-Christian world. And this Christian counter-culture is the life of the Kingdom of God, a fully human life indeed but lived out under the divine rule.'In his careful exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, John Stott accurately expounds the biblical text and relates it to life today. Above all, the author says, he wants to let Christ speak this sermon again, this time to the modern world.

Matthew 5:1–2

1. Introduction: what is this sermon?

The Sermon on the Mount is probably the best-known part of the teaching of Jesus, though arguably it is the least understood, and certainly it is the least obeyed. It is the nearest thing to a manifesto that he ever uttered, for it is his own description of what he wanted his followers to be and to do. To my mind no two words sum up its intention better, or indicate more clearly its challenge to the modern world, than the expression ‘Christian counter-culture’. Let me tell you why.

The years which followed the end of the Second World War in 1945 were marked by innocent idealism. The ghastly nightmare was over. ‘Reconstruction’ was the universal goal. Six years of destruction and devastation belonged to the past; the task now was to build a new world of cooperation and peace. But idealism’s twin sister is disillusion – disillusion with those who do not share the ideal or (worse) who oppose it or (worse still) who betray it. And disillusion with what is keeps feeding the idealism of what could be.

We seem to have been passing through decades of disillusion. Each rising generation is disillusioned with the world it has inherited. Sometimes the reaction has been naive, though that is not to say it has been insincere. Others today are repudiating the greedy affluence of the West which seems to grow ever fatter either by the misuse of the natural environment or by the exploitation of poorer countries or by both at once; and they register the completeness of their rejection by living more simply, avoiding waste and protesting against the exploitation of our planet. Instead of the illusions projected by social media they hunger for the authentic relationships of love. They despise the superficiality of both irreligious materialism and religious conformism, for they sense that there is an awesome ‘reality’ far bigger than these trivialities, and they seek this elusive ‘transcendental’ dimension through meditation, drugs or sex. They detest the very concept of the rat race, and consider it more honourable to drop out than to participate. All this is symptomatic of the inability of the younger generation to fit in with the status quo or adapt to the prevailing culture. They are not at home. They are alienated.

In a way Christians find this search for a cultural alternative one of the most hopeful, even exciting, signs of the times. For we recognize in it the activity of that Spirit who before he is the comforter is the disturber, and we know to whom their quest will lead them if it is ever to find fulfilment.

Yet alongside the hope which this mood inspires in Christians, there is also (or should be) a sense of shame. For if today’s young people are looking for the right things (meaning, peace, love, reality), they are looking for them in the wrong places. The first place to which they should be able to turn is the one place which they normally ignore, namely the church. For too often what they see in the church is not counter-culture but conformism, not a new society which embodies their ideals but another version of the old society which they have renounced, not life but death. They would readily endorse today what Jesus said of a church in the first century: ‘you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead’.1

It is urgent that we not only see but feel the greatness of this tragedy. For to the extent that the church is conformed to the world, and the two communities appear to the onlooker to be merely two versions of the same thing, the church is contradicting its true identity. No comment could be more hurtful to the Christian than the words, ‘But you’re no different from anybody else.’

For the essential theme of the whole Bible from beginning to end is that God’s historical purpose is to call out a people for himself; that this people is a ‘holy’ people, set apart from the world to belong to him and to obey him; and that its vocation is to be true to its identity, that is, to be ‘holy’ or ‘different’ in all its outlook and behaviour.

This is how God put it to the people of Israel soon after he had rescued them from their Egyptian slavery and made them his special people by covenant:

I am the Lord your God. You must not do as they do in Egypt, where you used to live, and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you. Do not follow their practices. You must obey my laws and be careful to follow my decrees. I am the Lord your God.2

We notice that this appeal of God to his people began and ended with the statement that he was the Lord their God. It was because he was their covenant God, and because they were his special people, that they were to be different from everybody else. They were to follow his commandments and not take their lead from the standards of those around them.

Throughout the centuries which followed, the people of Israel kept forgetting their uniqueness as the people of God. Although in Balaam’s words they were a ‘people who live apart and do not consider themselves one of the nations’, yet in practice they kept becoming assimilated to the people around them: ‘they mingled with the nations and adopted their customs’.3 So they demanded a king to govern them ‘such as all the other nations have’, and when Samuel remonstrated with them on the ground that God was their king, they were stubborn in their insistence: ‘No! . . . We want a king over us. Then we shall be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us.’4 Worse even than the inauguration of the monarchy was their idolatry. ‘We want to be like the nations, like the peoples of the world, who serve wood and stone.’5 So God kept sending his prophets to them to remind them who they were and to plead with them to follow his way. ‘Do not learn the ways of the nations,’ he said to them through Jeremiah, and through Ezekiel, ‘do not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.’6 But God’s people would not listen to his voice, and the specific reason given why his judgment fell first upon Israel and then nearly 150 years later upon Judah was the same: ‘the Israelites had sinned against the Lord their God . . . and followed the practices of the nations . . . and even Judah did not keep the commands of the Lord their God. They followed the practices Israel had introduced.’7

All this is an essential background to any understanding of the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon is found in Matthew’s Gospel towards the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. Immediately after his baptism and temptation he had begun to announce the good news that the kingdom of God, long promised in the Old Testament era, was now on the threshold. He himself had come to inaugurate it. With him the new age had dawned, and the rule of God had broken into history. ‘Repent,’ he cried, ‘for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’8 Indeed, ‘Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom.’9 The Sermon on the Mount, then, is to be seen in this context. It describes the repentance (metanoia, the complete change of mind) and the righteousness which belong to the kingdom. That is, it describes what human life and human community look like when they come under the gracious rule of God.

And what do they look like? Different! Jesus emphasized that his true followers, the citizens of God’s kingdom, were to be entirely different from others. They were not to take their cue from the people around them, but from him, and so prove to be genuine children of their heavenly Father. To me the key text of the Sermon on the Mount is 6:8: ‘Do not be like them.’ It immediately reminds us of God’s word to Israel in earlier times: ‘You must not do as they do.’10 It is the same call to be different. And this is the theme which runs right through the Sermon on the Mount. Their character was to be completely distinct from that admired by the world (the Beatitudes). They were to shine like lights in the surrounding darkness. Their righteousness was to exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees, both in ethical behaviour and in religious devotion, while their love was to be greater and their ambition nobler than those of their pagan neighbours.

There is no single paragraph of the Sermon on the Mount in which this contrast between Christian and non-Christian standards is not drawn. It is the underlying and uniting theme of the Sermon; everything else is a variation of it. Sometimes it is the Gentiles or pagan nations with whom Jesus contrasts his followers. Thus pagans love and greet each other, but Christians are to love their enemies (5:44–47); pagans pray in a way which Jesus describes as ‘babbling’, but Christians are to pray with the humble thoughtfulness of children to their Father in heaven (6:7–13); pagans are preoccupied with the things they need, but Christians are to seek first God’s rule and righteousness (6:32–33).

At other times Jesus contrasts his disciples not with Gentiles but with Jews, not (that is) with heathen people but with religious people, in particular with the ‘scribes and Pharisees’. Professor Jeremias is no doubt right to distinguish between these as ‘two quite different groups’ in that ‘the scribes are the theological teachers who have had some years of education, [while] the Pharisees on the other hand are not theologians, but rather groups of pious laymen from every part of the community’.11 Certainly Jesus sets Christian morals over against the ethical word games of the scribes (5:21–48) and Christian devotion over against the hypocritical piety of the Pharisees (6:1–18).

So the followers of Jesus are to be different – different from both the nominal church and the secular world, different from both the religious and the irreligious. The Sermon on the Mount is the most complete description anywhere in the New Testament of the Christian counter-culture. Here is a Christian value system, ethical standard, religious devotion, attitude to money, ambition, lifestyle and network of relationships – all of which are totally at odds with those of the non-Christian world. And this Christian counter-culture is the life of the kingdom of God, a fully human life indeed but lived out under the divine rule.

We come now to Matthew’s editorial introduction to the Sermon, which is brief but impressive; it indicates the importance which he attached to it.

Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them.

(5:1–2)

There can be little doubt that Jesus’ main purpose in going up a hill or mountain to teach was to withdraw from the ‘large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan’12 who had been following him. He had spent the early months of his public ministry wandering throughout Galilee, ‘teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and illness among the people’. As a result, ‘News about him spread all over Syria’, and people came in large numbers bringing their sick to be healed.13 So he had to escape, not just to secure for himself the opportunity to be quiet and to pray, but also to give more concentrated instruction to his disciples.

Further, it seems likely (as many commentators ancient and modern have suggested) that he deliberately went up on a mountainside to teach, in order to draw a parallel between Moses who received the law at Mount Sinai and himself who explained its implications to his disciples on the so-called ‘Mount of the Beatitudes’, the traditional site of the Sermon on the northern shores of the Lake of Galilee. For, although Jesus was greater than Moses and although his mes...