Sermon on the Mount

Scot McKnight, Tremper Longman III, Scot McKnight

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780310599012
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Emphasizing the historical distance between the New Testament and our contemporary culture, The Sermon on the Mount offers helpful contextual insights for those seeking to discern how to live out the Bible in today's world.

This sermon is the moral portrait of Jesus' own people—yet the contrast between his vision and our lives is so stark that many theologians have tried to soften the demands it makes on us until it's been skewed beyond recognition in the minds of many Christians. The goal of this special volume of The Story of God Bible Commentary series is to investigate the Sermon on the Mount in light of the way Jesus meant it to be heard, requiring us to ask difficult questions about ethics, discipleship, and salvation.

The first commentary series to do so, SGBC offers a clear and compelling exposition of biblical texts, guiding everyday readers in how to creatively and faithfully live out the Bible in their own contexts. Its story-centric approach is ideal for pastors, students, Sunday school teachers, and laypeople alike.

Each volume employs three main, easy-to-use sections designed to help readers live out God's story:

• LISTEN to the Story: Includes complete NIV text with references to other texts at work in each passage, encouraging the reader to hear it within the Bible's grand story.
• EXPLAIN the Story: Explores and illuminates each text as embedded in its canonical and historical setting.
• LIVE the Story: Reflects on how each text can be lived today and includes contemporary stories and illustrations to aid preachers, teachers, and students.

Edited by Scot McKnight and Tremper Longman III, and written by a number of top-notch theologians, The Story of God Bible Commentary series will bring relevant, balanced, and clear-minded theological insight to any biblical education or ministry.

Chapter 1

Matthew 5:1–2 and 7:28–29

LISTEN¹ to the Story

5:1Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him….

7:24“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. 26But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”

28When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, 29because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law. 8:1When Jesus came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him.

Listening to the text in the Story: Matthew 4:23–25 and 9:35; 17:1–8; John 6:3; Exodus 19:3; 24:12–13; 34:1–2, 4; Deuteronomy 9:9; 10:3.

It is against every known method of reading, but we must begin reading the Sermon on the Mount by listening carefully to the ending of the Sermon (7:24–27 and 7:28–8:1) and tie that ending to the beginning at 5:1–2. As we begin at the end, we also must listen to how Matthew sets the context for the Sermon at 4:23–25 and 9:35.²

First the context. When the gospel of Matthew was written, no chapter divisions were used. To indicate transitions authors in the ancient world used a quarry of devices, one of which was summary statements. Matthew’s summary statement in 4:23–25 is nearly repeated verbatim in 9:35 and 10:1.

4:23Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. 24News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them. 25Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him.

9:35Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness.

10:1Jesus called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out impure spirits and to heal every disease and sickness.

The italicized connections are obvious, but they are even more obvious in Greek. The only three places where these Greek words are used together in Matthew are in these three sets of verses, which leads me to this observation: Matthew 4:23–25 outlines what Matthew will tell us about Jesus’ ministry (teaching, preaching, healing) in Matthew 5–9, Matthew 9:35 tells us that Matthew has completed his sketch of Jesus’ ministry of teaching, preaching, and healing, and then Matthew 10:1 shows that Jesus empowered his twelve apostles to extend that sketched ministry of Jesus to others.

Put together, here’s what we get: Matthew 4:23–9:35 is a sketch of the mission and ministry of Jesus: he teaches and preaches in Matthew 5–7 and he heals in Matthew 8–9. The Sermon on the Mount, then, is a comprehensive sketch of the teaching and preaching message of Jesus. In the context of Matthew’s narrative, the Sermon is a presentation of Jesus’ moral vision, his ethic. You could say Matthew is saying to his audience who listens to Matthew 4:23–9:35: “Here’s Jesus, here’s his message [5–7], here are his actions [8–9]. You can now decide.”

Second, the ending of the Sermon on the Mount provides a fundamental clue on how to read the Sermon. We will provide commentary on 7:24–27 at the end of this commentary, but for now we must observe that Jesus ends the Sermon by calling people to do what he has taught. Some soften his words: “He said, ‘Do this,’ but he didn’t mean we have to obey his words.” Others see a different motive: “Jesus’ aim is to drive us to our knees, not make us obey his words.” These common approaches fail the words of Jesus because in the Sermon Jesus calls his followers to do what he teaches. Those who don’t do what he says, in fact, are condemned as foolish. The entire Sermon on the Mount, which Augustine said was the “perfect standard of the Christian life,”³ then drives home one haunting question:

Will you follow me?

The Sermon presents Jesus’ moral vision and summons us to follow him, and the Sermon is designed to prompt one to make a decision about Jesus. Thus, we are led to think immediately of an Ethic from Above.⁴ John Stott finishes off his splendid and influential commentary on the Sermon with these words: “So Jesus confronts us with himself, sets before us the radical choice between obedience and disobedience, and calls us to an unconditional commitment of mind, will and life to his teaching.”⁵ Theologically speaking, the Sermon is grounded in a Christology, a view of who Jesus is, and that Christology begins at 5:1.

EXPLAIN the Story

As God (through Moses) did not give the Torah in Egypt but waited until the Israelites were deep in the wilderness, so Jesus waited. In Matthew’s narrative we observe that Jesus waited for crowds to gather around what he was doing before he set out his own moral vision. Jesus had already been baptized and been tempted, and he had returned to Galilee and called four disciples to follow him (Matt 3:1–4:22). Furthermore, Matthew makes it clear that Jesus was on a public tour of Galilee, teaching in synagogues, preaching about God’s kingdom, and healing all sorts of people (4:23–25), and with crowds gathering he set forth his moral vision.

Surrounding the Sermon are notations of crowds (4:25; 5:1; 7:28; 8:1). “When Jesus saw the crowds” in 5:1, presumably the crowds of 4:25, he began to teach. The “crowds” would have included males and females as well as adults and children.⁶ There is a bit of a complication here for which there is no compelling solution: Jesus sees the crowds, sits down, and his disciples (not the crowds) gather around him, but when the Sermon is over we are told “the crowds were amazed” (7:28). The simple solution is that the crowds gathered around the disciples as Jesus taught his disciples, but it is just as possible to think Matthew has collected teachings of Jesus from various settings, some restricted and some more open to the crowds.⁷

How Jesus begins the Sermon opens up vistas: “He went up on a mountainside [more accurately, ‘into the mountain’] and sat down” (5:1). Saying Jesus went onto a “mountain” could be no more than a casual, (almost) meaningless geographical observation, and that Luke says Jesus taught from a flat place (Luke 6:17) supports such a casual view for some.⁸ Or, as so many of the early fathers thought, it could be a geographical symbol of higher reality.⁹ But anyone who reads the Bible as the Story of God suspects there is more at stake. Bible readers connect mountain with Moses. We agree: Matthew presents Jesus as a new Moses figure. As Moses ascended the mountain, as Moses sat on the mountain, as Moses descended the mountain, and as Moses taught the Torah, so Jesus does the same. Some Moses themes were set before Jesus ascended the mountain: both Jesus and Moses had a dream connected to their births, the slaughter of children is connected to their births, both narrowly escaped the clutches of a despot, both had to flee and then only later could return to the land—and, like Moses, Jesus was in the wilderness, fasted forty days, was tested by God, and passed through the Jordan (though Moses died before the Jordan).¹⁰

There is, then, plenty of evidence to see Matthew’s description as more than accidental allusions to Moses.¹¹ The expression “he went up on a mountainside” is used many times in the Old Testament, especially for Moses’ ascent onto the mountain (see, e.g., Exod 19:3; 24:12–13; 34:1–2, 4; Deut 9:9; 10:3). Moses also descended the mountain, as does Jesus in Matthew 8:1, and Matthew’s words here are almost verbatim from Exodus 34:29. In addition, in the Sermon itself Jesus and Moses are explicitly connected if not contrasted at 5:17–48. Jesus’ teachings are set in the context of the Torah of Moses as their completion.

Not to be forgotten is that the posture of a lawgiver is sitting. As those with legal authority sat in the seat of Moses (Matt 23:2; cf. Luke 4:16, 20), so Jesus “sat down” to teach (Matt 5:1). Jesus is compared to both Moses and Elijah in 17:1–8. The early church saw Jesus taking Moses to an entirely new level, and no text is perhaps more pointed than Eusebius, Demonstration of the Gospel 3.2:¹²

Moses was the first leader of the Jewish race. He found them attached to the deceitful polytheism of Egypt, and was the first to turn them from it, by enacting the severest punishment for idolatry. He was the first also to publish the theology of the one God, bidding them worship only the Creator and Maker of all things. He was the first to draw up for the same hearers a scheme of religious life, and is acknowledged to have been the first and only lawgiver of their religious polity. But Jesus Christ too, like Moses, only on a grander stage, was the first to originate the teaching according to holiness for the other nations, and first accomplished the rout of the idolatry that embraced the whole world. He was the first to introduce to all men the knowledge and religion of the one Almighty God. And He is proved to be the first Author and Lawgiver of a new life and of a system adapted to the holy.

And with regard to the other teaching on the genesis of the world, and the immortality of the soul, and other doctrines of philosophy which Moses was the first to teach the Jewish race, Jesus Christ has been the first to publish them to the other nations by...