The Sermon on the Mount

By F.

Whatever you think Jesus was, he was undoubtedly_important._

He started as one of many first century messiah claimants, preaching a radical message and gathering a following before being executed (which was the typical career path for first century messiah claimants). One hundred years after his death his followers were still preaching his message and had spread to every major city in the Roman Empire. Two hundred years after that a majority of the Empire claimed to be followers of Jesus. Eight hundred years later all of Europe was his. Today a little less than one out of every three people alive identifies as a follower of Jesus, and the number of Christians is only expected to grow over the next few decades.[1]

Jesus is particularly important due to his foundational influence on western culture. Europe lived, breathed, drank, and ate Jesus for a millenia and a half. The effect of that is easy for modern westerners to understate. Jesus makes up the background assumptions we are raised with, and like fish in water we are usually unaware of it. The historian Tom Holland wrote an entire book,Dominion, on the myriad ways that westerners, no matter their personal beliefs about Jesus, have fundamentally Christian assumptions. As he writes in the preface of his book:

To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions…Two thousand years on from the birth of Christ, it does not require a belief that he rose from the dead to be stamped by the formidable—indeed the inescapable—influence of Christianity. Whether it be the conviction that the workings of conscience are the surest determinants of good law, or that Church and state exist as distinct entities, or that polygamy is unacceptable, its trace elements are to be found everywhere in the West.

…

The more years I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, the more alien I increasingly found it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognized as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian. For a millennium and more, the civilization into which I had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with—about how a society should properly be organized, and the principles that it should uphold—were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctly of that civilisation’s Christian past.

With this in mind it behooves us to ask: what exactly were Jesus’s teachings anyway? Sure he said a lot of parables and supposedly did a lot of miracles, but what was his message? Did he write a manifesto? Did he have an elevator pitch? Did he ever host a TED talk that I can watch real quick and get the gist?

The closest we have to any of that is the Sermon on the Mount, a portion of the gospel of Matthew where, instead of throwing off cryptic parables or saying one liners while healing cripples as he is normally wont to do, Jesus stands up and gives a proper speech to a large audience. I believe that the Sermon on the Mount is a masterful work of rhetorical art. It is carefully crafted to deliver a message, and what Jesus teaches there includes a majority of the foundational concepts that Christianity would build upon for the next two thousand years. If you want to understand Jesus’s message and you don’t want to read all four gospels, or even one gospel, then this is the biggest bang for your buck. In this review I seek to unpack the Sermon, with a particular focus on helping a modern reader understand what it would have meant to the audience Jesus spoke to.

I say the audience Jesus spoke to, though of course we only know of the Sermon because Matthew (or whoever the true author was) wrote it down in his gospel. Even if we go with the earliest probable date that the gospel could have been written, that still gives us several years to several decades between Jesus actually giving the sermon (assuming he did) and Matthew writing it down. But whether the sermon is a word for word transcript or an invention of Matthew’s meant to encapsulate Jesus’s teaching, its importance is undiminished. The Sermon on the Mount, as we have it in the gospel of Matthew, has been hugely influential on history and on our culture whether Jesus actually said it or not. In this review I’m going to interpret the Sermon the way Matthew presented it: as if it was a real sermon given on a little hill to a crowd of thousands who had been following Jesus around the Sea of Galilee watching him heal people and cast out demons.

The text of the Sermon can be found in the book of Matthew, chapters five, six, and seven. I will not be going over every single line of the Sermon, and indeed have skipped a few sections here and there in order to focus on the parts I best understand.

The Beatitudes

One of the keys to an effective speech is starting with a good hook. You need something that will grab the audience’s attention. An element of mystery is helpful, something to pique their curiosity and get them wondering where you’re going with this.

The Sermon on the Mount begins with a series of statements known today as the Beatitudes: the “supremely blessed”. Let’s read them now, they’re not too long:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,

_for theirs is the kingdom of heaven._

Blessed are those who mourn,

_for they will be comforted._

Blessed are the meek,

_for they will inherit the earth._

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,

_for they will be filled._

Blessed are the merciful,

_for they will be shown mercy._

Blessed are the pure in heart,

_for they will see God._

Blessed are the peacemakers,

_for they will be called sons of God._

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,

_for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”_

To a modern audience, and particularly to those who grew up in the faith, the Beatitudes can be a bit confusing. Some of them are so straightforward that my mind tends to flow over them without taking notice, like “blessed are the peacemakers” or “blessed are the merciful.” Others are strange and confusing, like “blessed are the poor in spirit” or the most famous beatitude, “blessed are the meek”. The Beatitudes are never explained or referenced again. They just kind of happen. A modern Westerner reading them today will likely come away a bit confused why they’re there.

This is not how Jesus’s audience would have experienced them.

Picture it in your mind: Jesus is standing near the top of a tall hill, surrounded on all sides by an audience of thousands. Before this point in the gospel of Matthew Jesus has been traveling the countryside, healing the sick and preaching at synagogues. All the while he has been accumulating a crowd of followers; people who have come to see who this Jesus person they’ve all been hearing about is all about. What is he exactly? Is he another zealot, out to start a rebellion against the Roman occupation? Is he an orthodox rabbi teaching the old Law? Is he a radical teacher with a new message, one that goes against tradition? The people want to know. Suddenly Jesus starts talking: the crowd quiets down and strains to hear what he has to say.

And what they hear is_absolutely nuts_.

Two millennia of Christianity has softened the shock for modern readers. Even if you’ve never cracked open a Bible you’ve probably heard that “the meek shall inherit the Earth”. Even if you’ve never darkened the door of a Church you’ve probably gotten the impression from society that it’s good to be merciful. So it’s easy for us to miss how obviously backwards everything in the Beatitudes is.

He begins with what may be the weirdest one of all when translated into English, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” What does “poor in spirit” mean exactly? Lacking in spirit? Poor in your soul? The original Greek uses the word “ptochos” which means “one who is bent or folded”. At the time it was often used to refer to beggars, those who bend themselves down in the slums with their hands outstretched, a destitute man who slinks and crouches. A homeless, panhandling bum. Yet Jesus adds to “ptochos” the word “pneuma”, spirit, to make it clear that he’s not talking about the man’s economic condition. Whether rich or poor he’s referring to people who are “bums at heart” who rely on others: the dependent. Right from jump Jesus is saying something shocking and confusing: “Blessed are the cowering beggars, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Naturally this would have caught people’s attention. Blessed are…the moochers?They will get the Kingdom of Heaven (whatever that is)? What in the world is Jesus talking about?

Jesus does not stop to explain but continues on this baffling theme, line by line. Every person that Jesus calls blessed is united by a common trait: they’re all vulnerable. They’re all people you don’t want to be. Wretched, even. Yet he calls them blessed.

Seemingly to assure his audience that they had heard him correctly the first time Jesus next proclaims “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” As a boy in church that line didn’t seem odd to me–after all, won’t God wipe away every tear from our eyes in Heaven? But Jesus’s audience didn’t have that context. They didn’t have the Christian conception of the afterlife. To them the statement is just baffling: someone who mourns is pretty much the opposite of being blessed. A man loses his daughter, a son loses his mother, a sister loses his brother, and you call them blessed? What in God’s name do you mean by saying they’ll be comforted?! Someone they love is dead, and is never coming back! How will they be comforted?

It continues like this. Blessed are the_meek?_ They’ll inherit the Earth? How?! The meek don’t inherit, they get taken advantage of by the strong. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness? They’re not going to “be filled”, they’re going to run into cynical reality. How many times have we hungered for righteousness and found only corruption, greed, and power politics? Blessed are the merciful? If you show your enemies mercy they’ll just take advantage of you! They won’t show you mercy when they have the upper hand, you can count on that. Blessed are the pure of heart? They won’t see God, they’ll see how the world really is when it inevitably boots them upside the head. Blessed are the peacemakers? They won’t be called “sons of God”, they’ll be hated by everyone. Nobody respects cowards who compromise with the enemy instead of fighting, everyone knows that.

Each of the blessed get a different blessing, specific to them, except for the first and the last. They act as bookends, each of whom will receive “the Kingdom of Heaven.” This is done on purpose. The Kingdom is what Jesus is here to talk about, and it’s what he wants the crowd to focus on. The last of the blessed are those who are persecuted despite having done nothing wrong. They are explicitly victims, and unjustly victimized at that. They’re also the only ones who Jesus elaborates on.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.

How can this be? He explains:

Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven.

This is his transition from the attention getting intro into the sermon proper, and the start of one of the major throughlines of the sermon: reward in the Kingdom of Heaven as opposed to reward on Earth. Those who the world sees as wretched, God may see as blessed. Appearances are deceiving.

But what is the Kingdom of Heaven anyway?

The Kingdom of Heaven

Even if you only have the most cursory understanding of Christianity you likely know about Heaven. You die and go to Heaven or Hell. Heaven is the good place and Hell is the bad one. Easy peasy. As a concept, heaven and hell are pretty baked into our culture. So it's easy to gloss over the words “Kingdom of Heaven” and round them out to just “Heaven”. A celestial afterlife, with clouds and harps and what have you.

This would be a mistake! Jesus’s audience has no clear ideas about the afterlife, and Jesus makes no direct indication that the Kingdom of Heaven is something you go to when you die. Jewish ideas about the afterlife were mixed in Jesus’s time. The Pharisees believed that if you were good then when you died you would eventually be resurrected into a new body in a better world. The Essenes were a bit more Plato about the whole thing and believed that when you died your soul was freed from material concerns and good souls would find happiness with God. The Sadducees, who were the most prominent religious faction, taught that there was no afterlife at all.[2] This life is all you get, so follow the Law and God will bless you in it. Jesus could not have relied on his audience already having a consistent idea of “Heaven” as an afterlife. Instead Jesus is making a different point, one that will_later_ develop into the Christian concept of heaven.

The original Greek that is translated into “Kingdom of Heaven” is “basileia ouranos”. Basileia means an area, building, or institution that is ruled by a single central authority. It can be used to refer to an authority’s palace, the city where they rule from, or the entire realm they rule over. The commonality is the idea of rulership, that there is one man with authority over the basileia. The United States of America is not a basileia, as there is not one man who rules over it. North Korea is a basileia, as there is one man with authority over the entire realm. “Dictatorship of Heaven” has some bad connotations that do not exist in the original Greek, so “kingdom” is a decent translation of the idea.

Ouranos means the sky, and includes everything within it: the moon, the planets, the stars, etc. You could translate “basileia ouranos” as “Space Empire” if you wanted to, but it would also have misleading connotations. The “sky” doesn’t mean the same thing to you and me that it meant to the ancient Greeks. We think of it as a place full of physical objects: asteroids, stars, planets, comets, black holes, nebula, and hopefully space aliens. The Greeks, however, drew a sharp distinction between the sky and everything else. C. S. Lewis explains their mindset in his book_The Discarded Image_:

Aristotle, being interested both in biology and in astronomy, found himself faced with an obvious contrast. The characteristic of the world we men inhabit is incessant change by birth, growth, procreation, death, and decay. And within that world such experimental methods as had been achieved in his time could discover only an imperfect uniformity. Things happened in the same way not perfectly nor invariably but ‘on the whole’ or ‘for the most part’. But the world studied by astronomy seemed quite different. No Nova had yet been observed. So far as he could find out, the celestial bodies were permanent; they neither came into existence nor passed away. And the more you studied them, the more perfectly regular their movements seemed to be. Apparently, then, the universe was divided into two regions. The lower region of change and irregularity he called Nature. The upper he called Sky. But that very changeable phenomenon, the weather, made it clear that the realm of inconstant Nature extended some way above the surface of the Earth. ‘Sky’ must begin higher up. It seemed reasonable to suppose that regions which differed in every observable respect were also made of different stuff. Nature was made of the four elements, earth, water, fire, and air. Air then (and with air Nature, and with Nature inconstancy) must end before Sky began. Above the air, in true Sky, was a different substance, which he called aether. Thus ‘the aether encompasses the divine bodies, but immediately below the aethereal and divine nature comes that which is passible, mutable, perishable, and subject to death’.

“Ouranos” then refers to things not of this world: not part of “nature”, but a realm with different rules. A realm where things do not die, corrupt, decay, perish, or change. The Kingdom of Heaven, similarly, is defined by not following the rules of the kingdoms of the Earth. Jesus is preaching a new order, one radically different than what came before.

So how radical are we talking?

Fulfilling the Law

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. Truly I tell you until heaven and earth pass away not one letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will pass away from the Law until everything is accomplished.

This passage frightened me every time I ran across it.

Growing up in an evangelical Christian church, I was taught that New Testament superseded the Old, and that we were not required to follow the Law. That’s capital “L” law, as in the Law of Moses, the books of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the prohibitions against shellfish and pork, the requirement for circumcision, the whole kosher kit and kaboodle. That was the old covenant, we were under a new covenant, so to speak. Whole books of the New Testament are dedicated to driving that point home.

And yet, I worried. What if we were wrong about that? What if the Messianic Jews are right? What if I’m going to Hell because I wasn’t circumcised and have a love of bacon?

It was this passage here that kept me worried. Jesus seems pretty explicitly clear here that he is not going to get rid of the Law at all. Quite the opposite! And no matter how many letters Paul wrote to the contrary, Jesus certainly outranks him.

I don’t tell you this in order to come to a conclusion on that question one way or another. I only bring it up because it was the completely wrong way to approach this passage. I was missing the point entirely.

When we read the Sermon on the Mount we read it with 2,000 years of intervening context. When I read it I already knew what was going to happen in the story, so to speak. The crucifixion, the resurrection, the ascension, Pentacost, the founding of the Church, the writing of the Gospels, all of that is in my mind as I read. But absolutely none of that was in the mind of Jesus’s audience as he stood on that hill preaching. They don’t know any of that is coming: and Jesus is talking to them, not to us. They are his audience, and he’s trying to communicate something to them. They are not concerned with the question of whether the resurrection of Jesus has created a new covenant that supersedes the old one. They have entirely different concerns on their mind.

One of their biggest concerns was almost certainly “Is this guy some kind of heretic?” Heretic is the wrong word, perhaps, as the word took on its context in a Christian world, but the denotation is right. Is this guy preaching some new thing, something that goes against the old traditions? Is he preaching a new message that abolishes the old Law? What kind of radical is he? Some perhaps were listening hoping the answer would be “Yes, I’m abolishing the Law, breaking with tradition, and starting something brand new and exciting.” Most were probably listening hoping the answer would be “No, I’m not here to rock the boat. My message is totally respectful of Moses and the profits and tradition.” What was this strange rabbi from the sticks, the holy man who casts out demons and heals the sick with a word and a touch, here to say?

Jesus’s answer is “Why not both?”

He makes it clear in no uncertain terms that he has the highest respect for the law. Not the least stroke of a pen will pass away! But he finishes this reassuring intro with something a little strange:

For I tell you unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the keepers of the law, you will certainly not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

And just as his audience is chewing that thought over (“Wait, the Pharisees aren’t keeping the Law good enough? Isn’t being crazy careful to keep the Law their whole deal? How can I compete with that?”) he pulls a judo flip on them and spends the rest of the speech preaching the Law in radically new way.

Sky-High Standards

You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, “Thou shall not murder, and he who murders will be subject to judgment.” Yet I say to you, he who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. He who says to his brother “Empty head!” will be answerable to the courts, and he who says to his brother “You fool!” will be in danger of the fires of Hell.

This section, called the Antitheses, consists of Jesus taking important pillars of the Law and extending them to points that are frankly unreasonable. Everyone in his audience, including ourselves 2,000 years later, thinks that a law against murdering people makes a lot of sense. Yep, you shouldn’t kill other people. Everybody knows that, even the gentiles! But who could possibly expect you not to get angry with people from time to time? Who hasn’t blown off some steam by verbally lambasting a jerk? I mean their feelings might get hurt, but it’s a far cry from murder.

Jesus’s message is “No, actually, it’s not.” Murder is an extreme act of anger, hatred, or contempt for a fellow human, but it is different from ordinary verbal abuse in degree only, not in kind. To kill your brother is an evil act, but so is hating your brother, and neither will fly in the Kingdom of Heaven. Jews, Romans, Persians, and Greeks may all agree that you shouldn’t murder someone but verbal contempt is fine, but the Kingdom of Heaven isn’t like the kingdoms of the Earth. It’s something radical. Something new. The citizens of that Kingdom do not hate their fellow citizens at all. When you screw something up they don’t chew you out and call you a jackass. They hold you by the shoulder and say “What’s up bro? Are you feeling alright? I notice you keep making mistakes, do you need some help?” It’s the kind of place where if someone sues you in court you talk it over with them over coffee before the trial even begins, and settle things without legal coercion or punishment.

Before his audience has time to process the impractical advice to always settle things out of court (“Wouldn’t that just encourage your enemies to harass you with more frivolous lawsuits?”) Jesus plows right into another “fulfillment” of the Law:

You have heard that it was said, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” But I say to you, anyone who looks at another man’s wife with lust has committed adultery with her in his heart.

Whoa there Jesus, slow down a second. Of course you don’t sleep with your neighbor’s wife, but who can help enjoying the view every now and then? I mean as long as you don’t act on it, what’s the harm? You can’t be serious Jesus!

I suspect his audience may have been tittering quite a bit at this point, because Jesus’s very next line is perhaps the most shocking one yet:

If your right eye causes you to sin, cut it out and throw it away. It is better to go through life without an eye than for the whole body to be thrown into Hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better to go through life without an arm than for the whole body to be destroyed in Hell.

That’s a message to make you stand up and pay attention! To you lusting after another man’s wife in privacy seems like perfectly acceptable behavior, or something wrong but so minor as to not be a serious concern like adultery. But Jesus is saying that it is serious, deadly serious, so serious that it’s the kind of thing you would consider dismembering yourself to avoid.

He follows this up with some news about divorce:

It has been said “He who wants to divorce his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.” Yet I say to you, he who divorces his wife, unless she is one already, makes her an adulteress, and he who marries her commits adultery with her.

Now, this is a subject that the modern mind is particularly apt to misunderstand due to the context gap. Modern divorce is a very different beast from divorce in 30 AD, with the main difference being that back then getting divorced was usually a catastrophe for the woman. She was not an individualistic modern woman living in a rich first world nation where there are a lot of opportunities to be a girl boss, or at minimum to get a job and support yourself. There weren’t many jobs at all, for one thing, hardly any wage labor to speak of. You either worked the fields or you worked a skilled trade or you sold yourself into slavery and worked for a rich person. As a wife her husband could work the fields and bring home food to eat, while she carried out the hard work of cooking, cleaning, laundering, spinning, weaving, tailoring, and a hundred other tasks that need doing if you want your family not to starve or go naked. Getting divorced wasn’t just losing your husband, it was more like losing your husband, your job, and your social network all in one go.

Options were pretty slim for a divorced woman: you could try to get married again, but your “market value”, so to speak, has gone down quite a bit since you’re no longer a virgin, are probably a good deal older than you used to be and less able to bear healthy children, and any potential suitors are going to wonder what’s wrong with you so bad that your last husband divorced you. Or you could go back to live with your mom and dad, if you can swing it. But they might not want you back, particularly if they blame you for the divorce. Even if they do, you may be an economic burden on the family. Your only other option is to beg in the streets, maybe take up prostitution if you get hungry and desperate enough. Divorce was not empowering for women then, it was a tool for men to get out of their financial obligations to their wives. It should be remembered that at this time women could not sue for divorce; only men could start the divorce proceedings.

Now the Israelites are not barbaric gentiles who throw their wives to the curb on a whim! They have the Law, and the Law says you have to give her a certificate of divorce. There’s a whole legal process to go through. You have to have a priest write up the official certificate which means you need to justify to him that the divorce is legitimate. According to Mosaic law a man could only divorce his wife if “he finds some indecency in her” (Deuteronomy 24:1), but there was wide debate about what counted as indecency. Some rabbis taught that only adultery counted, while others believed that if his wife displeased him in any way whatsoever then that was acceptable grounds for divorce.

Very civilized it may be, and perhaps much better than the divorce laws in gentile nations, but that’s not good enough for the Kingdom of Heaven. When you got married you two made a promise: you husband promised to take care of her and make her part of his family and protect her and all the rest, and she promised to be loyal and be part of the family and not to sleep with anyone else.^[3] By divorcing her you’re reneging on your side of the deal, and now her womb is adulterated with your seed! Anybody who marries her next (and there’s not many who would) is basically sleeping with another man’s wife. So don’t do that! Instead take care of her for the rest of her life, as you promised to do.

And speaking of promises, let's talk about oaths!^[4] The Law says you should keep the oaths you make? Why are you swearing oaths at all! What, you think saying some special words before you make a promise makes a difference? Jesus says that you should just always keep your promises. In the Kingdom of Heaven there isn’t a special category of promise that you really mean called an “oath”, as opposed to all your other promises which you didn’t mean at all. No, in the Kingdom you

Simply let your yes mean yes, and your no mean no. Anything further is from the evil one.

Jesus has made a lot of surprising statements so far, but he finishes with the most radical of all. Here he ties it all together: what does showing contempt for someone, wanting to sleep with their wife, wanting to abandon your obligations to your loved ones, and making promises you don’t intend to keep all have in common? None of them are loving actions. If you loved someone you wouldn’t do any of those things to them. Jesus could go on for hours examining facets of the Law and showing how they point to even higher obligations towards our fellow men, but he will summarize his point instead:

You have heard that it was said “Love your neighbor, and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you be children of your Father in Heaven. For he sends the sun to shine on the righteous and the unrighteous, and rains to fall on the evil and the good.

The radical nature of this message may be lost on a Western audience. The last 2,000 years of Christian history has consisted in great part of men grappling with this concept, trying to live it out, failing often but also succeeding here and there until we reach today where it is commonly accepted that unconditional love is an ideal goal to reach for. This was not anywhere in the headspace of his audience. These were the people, remember, who wrote things like:

O daughter of Babylon, you devastator,

How blessed will be the one

Who repays you as you have repaid us.

How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones

Against the rock. (Psalms 137:8-9)

Or

Therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place, in the wrath of the Lord of hosts, and in the day of his fierce anger.

And it shall be as the hunted gazelle, and as sheep with none to gather them: they shall every man turn to his own people, and flee every one into his own land.

Every one that is found shall be thrust through; and every one that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword.

Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished.

Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, which shall not regard silver; and as for gold, they shall not delight in it.

Their bows also shall dash the young men to pieces; and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eyes shall not spare children. (Isiah 13:13-18)

We recoil at Old Testament verses like these because our culture spent the last two millennia attempting to live out Jesus’s teachings. The people on the hill are hearing this for the first time. Love even our enemies? What? Why would we do something crazy like that?

It's a radical message, and Jesus has already prepped for pushback. He reminds them that they are not just any people: they’re the children of Abraham, the chosen tribes of God. They’re supposed to do things that seem crazy and weird to everyone else, like not eating pork or mixing fabrics or worshiping idols. That’s what the Law is all about! Note that Jesus immediately justifies why his audience should consider doing something as crazy as loving their persecutors: so that they will be children of God. Isn’t that what they are supposed to be? Aren’t they supposed to be better than the gentiles, who have no covenant with God?

If you love only those who love you, what reward do you deserve? Even tax collectors do that! And if you greet only those of your own tribe, what are you doing more than others? Do not the Gentiles do the same?

So be perfect, even as your Father is perfect.

Rewards from Heaven

Okay, so we have been failing to live up to the purpose of the Law, we have been failing to live up to our position as the chosen ones of God, our righteousness does not surpass that of the Pharisees, and we will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. What can we do about that? How can we be perfect the way God is perfect? What exactly do you want us to do Jesus?

That is the natural next question after someone drops a bomb like that on you, and that’s where Jesus pivots to. The next section, like the last one, is repetition and expansion on a theme. The theme is that if you want God to reward, if you want to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, then it’s not what you do on the outside that counts. It’s what’s going on within. To elaborate:

When you give to the poor do not announce it with trumpets as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. Truly I tell you they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the poor do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret. Then your Father in Heaven, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Jesus repeats this same point three more times, changing only the specific action being taken. If you pray in public because you want to be seen praying, you’ve already got your reward: but if you hide in your closet and pray where no one but God can see you, then he will reward you. If you throw ashes on your head and moan and groan when you fast so everyone will see how holy you are, their approval is your only reward. But if you hide your suffering from everyone God will see it, and reward you. If you want the rewards given in the kingdoms of Earth, then you know how to get them. If you want the rewards of the Kingdom of Heaven then you have to do things in an un-Earthly way. You have to do what is right solely to please the King of the Kingdom of Heaven: not to impress your peers, not to raise your social capital, not to show anybody up or put yourself at the top of the pecking order, you have to keep it pure. Is it worth it to do a good deed if nobody but God will ever know? Yes, always. It’s what someone from the Kingdom of Heaven would do.

Along the way Jesus has a couple of asides about praying. Most notably he introduces the famous Lord’s Prayer (“Our Father who art in Heaven…”). Within that prayer is something old hat to us Christians and Post-Christians, but pretty radical for the time: asking God to forgive our sins that way we forgive the sins of others against us. Jesus takes special note of this, introducing the idea to the audience before he really dives into it later in the Sermon:

For if you do not forgive others when they sin against you, neither will your Father in Heaven forgive your sins. But if you forgive others their sins against you, your sins will also be forgiven.

We’ll get back to that later, because first we’ve got to drive home the point that you should work for Heavenly rewards, not Earthly ones. The rewards of the Kingdom of Heaven are strictly superior in to those of the kingdoms of Earth:

Do not store up treasures on Earth where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal, but store up treasures in Heaven where moth and rust do not destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

This is a practical argument: any wealth gained on this Earth is sure to leave us. Nothing lasts forever, and the more valuable the item the more people who will want to take it from you. The rewards of the Kingdom of Heaven, in contrast, cannot be lost or destroyed. How could they be? God is unchanging (and so are the stars in the heavens, as far as the experts of their time know). Rewards granted by Earthly kings are as fleeting as the kings themselves, here today and gone tomorrow. The rewards of the King of Heaven are as eternal as He is.

Some might reasonably react to this by thinking “Well, that’s good and all, but why not both? I can store up treasures on Earth and in Heaven, and have all my bases covered.” To which Jesus preemptively responds:

No servant can serve two masters. He will either love the one and hate the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and wealth.

So we’re supposed to dedicate ourselves to Heavenly concerns, okay, sure. But a man’s got to eat! Doesn’t it make sense to serve riches just enough to get by, and spend the rest of your energy on Heaven stuff?

Why do you worry about your life, saying “What shall we eat?” Consider the birds of the air. They neither sow, nor reap, nor store up in barns, yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth more than many birds? And who by worrying can add one hour to his life’s span? And why do you worry about your body, saying “What shall we wear?” Consider the lilies of the valley. They neither spin nor weave, yet truly I tell you Solomon in all his glory was not dressed like one of these. If God so clothes the grass of the field which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire how much more will he do for you: oh you of little faith!

These are examples his audience was well equipped to understand, as it the was primary labor of farmers (and almost everybody was a farmer in those days) to sow, reap, and store up in barns so that the family wouldn’t starve to death, and it was the primary labor of women to spin thread (an incredibly time consuming process) and weave it into clothing so the family wouldn’t die of exposure. They also go straight to the most foundational Earthly needs of everyone. If food and clothing aren’t more important than the Kingdom of Heaven, then nothing is. Which means there is no tradeoff between Earthly rewards and Heavenly rewards that is worth it.

It should be noted that Jesus doesn’t say “Stop all that sowing and reaping, it’s unnecessary.” The point about the birds isn’t that people need to stop farming, it’s that God can feed birds who aren’t even smart enough to grow their own food then how much more will he feed you when you’re working so hard in the fields? His point is that if you are worried that becoming part of the Kingdom of Heaven will put you in danger of ruin, stop. Trust that God will take care of the citizens of his Kingdom:

So do not worry about your life saying “What shall we eat?” or “Where shall we sleep?” or “What shall we wear?” For the gentiles seek after these things and your Father in Heaven knows that you need them. But seek first his Kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you as well.

In other words, if you’re worrying that what I’m saying is impractical and risky, you need to get your priorities straight.

Judge Dread

Judge not, or you shall be judged. For in the manner you judge others you too shall be judged, and the measure you give to others will be given to you.

This is one of the few passages that may still be as controversial today as when Jesus said it. Alright, clearly not as controversial (we’ve had two millennia to think it over as a society) but certainly controversial among Christians. “Judge not” sounds a lot like liberal, culturally relativistic, hippie-type talk. We’re not supposed to judge people when they do bad things? What about serial killers, rapists, or pedophiles? Shouldn’t we judge at least some people?

This misses the point. Like the rest of the Sermon this verse needs to be taken in context. Jesus has put his audience through a lot so far. He’s raised the bar on moral virtue drastically, told them to seek only heavenly rewards, and along the way has emphasized that they are a chosen people meant to be a light to the world. Anyone in the crowd who is actually on board for all this is in significant danger of becoming a self-righteous zealot who thinks he’s better than everyone else. “You follow the Law? Ha! I don’t even raise my voice in anger. I never even look at women, lest I commit adultery in my heart. I am devoted to the Kingdom of Heaven, while you are trapped in the backwards mindset of the kingdoms of the Earth.”

Now if he’s really trying to follow Jesus’s teachings he probably wouldn’t say all that out loud. After all, he was pretty clear that we shouldn’t seek the approval of men by parading our righteousness to the world. But they would certainly think it. Self-righteous pride, distilled slowly over years of silently judging those more sinful than you, will only make it more difficult to love others. It’s hard to love someone that you have deep contempt for!

So Jesus is going to nip that in the bud. You think you’re ready to seek the Kingdom of Heaven? Well you’re going to have to not judge people too. He repeats what he introduced earlier in the Lord’s Prayer, the concept of reciprocity of judgement. When God judges you, do you want Him to do so with some mercy and understanding? Then you need to be merciful and understanding to others. Do you want God to give you more than you deserve? Then you should be more generous to others than they deserve.

Alright, I shouldn’t judge people harshly. But can’t I judge them to help them? Kind of a “tough love” thing, where I correct them where they go wrong and set them on the right path?

How can you say to your brother “Let me help you take a speck of sawdust from your eye” when you have an entire plank in your own eye! First remove the plank from your own eye. Then you will see clearly to remove the speck of sawdust from your brother’s eye.

Once again, Jesus turns our eyes away from the exterior and Earthly and towards our own character. You want to help people? You’re not qualified. Before you try to fix other people you need to fix yourself, and you’ll likely find that you need more fixing than they do. Instead of focusing on other peoples flaws you need to focus on your own. Be perfect, even as your Heavenly Father is perfect!

Okay, so maybe there are people in his audience who are ready to try to seek the Kingdom of Heaven, hard as it sounds. But how can they start? What do they need to do? Jesus’s answer is to get moving and try:

Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door will be open. For he who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks, the door is opened.

Only those who ask receive, while those who don’t ask can’t be surprised when they don’t get what they want. Similarly you're not likely to find something without seeking it, and the door won’t be opened until you knock on it. The first step is to try, and trust that God will help you find your way. God is, after all, good! If you ask him for help in seeking the Kingdom then he is sure to give it to you:

Who among you if his son asks you for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks you for a fish, will give him a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good things to your children, how much more will our Father in Heaven give to those who ask?

These last two verses tend to trip people up when taken out of the context of the Sermon, as usual. Some (particularly those who preach the prosperity gospel) will band those verses about to claim that God will give anything to you if you ask for it: a raise at work, a new car, a nice vacation…anything! In context we can better see that Jesus isn’t making the claim that God is a giant genie who grants your wishes. Seek the Kingdom of Heaven and you shall find. Note that Jesus says that God won’t give you a snake if you ask for fish; but what if you asked for a snake? If your son asked you for a rattlesnake, would you give it to him? No? Then we shouldn’t expect God to give us everything we ask for either, only good things. Not a genie, but a Father.

Having established how to begin, Jesus now focuses on instructing and preparing those who will choose to seek the Kingdom of Heaven. He starts with a foundational piece of practical advice, an encapsulation of the mindset needed to seek the Kingdom. A heuristic that will help you choose what to do when you’re uncertain: the Golden Rule.

In all things then do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

It’s a pretty good rule to follow if your goal is to love everyone. Thomas Aquinus writing more than a thousand years later would define love as “Willing the good of another.” Our default state is to will our own good, so treating others the way we treat ourselves is a good start.

Jesus warns that those who seek the Kingdom cannot follow the crowd. Generally it’s safe to follow the lead of others and assume that they know where they’re going, but that would be a fatal mistake:

Broad is the gate and wide the road that leads to destruction, and many find it. Narrow is the gate, and narrow is the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

He then warns against false teachers, those who look good but “inwardly are ravenous wolves”. These teachers claim to seek the Kingdom, but they will exploit you and lead you astray. Good advice, but if they appear good on the outside how can we identify them?

By their fruits you shall know them. Do grapes grow on thornbushes, or figs on thistles? In the same way every good tree bears good fruit, but every bad tree bears bad fruit. A tree that bears good fruit cannot bear bad fruit, and a tree that bears bad fruit cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut up, and thrown into the fire.

This is another metaphor that his audience of farmers would have been intimately familiar with, moreso that modern audiences whose primary exposure to fruit is picking out ripe ones off a grocery store display. You may or may not be familiar with the concept of grafting, where branches from one fruit tree are added to the trunk and roots of another tree. This is the normal practice for most commercial fruit trees: every apple you find at a store comes from a grafted tree, for example. The reason for this is that a lot of fruit trees are incredibly frustrating to cultivate for food purposes. Apple trees do not breed true, so to speak: if you take the seeds from a delicious honeycrisp apple from the store and plant then you’ll find (in a few years when the tree is finally mature enough to bear fruit) that the apples from that tree are nothing at all like a honeycrisp. Apple trees scramble their chromosomes into a wild mosaic when fertilizing a seed, and planting an apple seed is like spinning a roulette wheel where every spot except one just says “some kind of crabapple”.

A lot of fruit trees have similar problems, so if you want a tree that will grow good fruit the only way to ensure that happens is to grow the tree, cut off the top of it, and graft branches onto the rootstock from a tree whose fruit you know is good. Heck, almost certainly every banana you’ve eaten was a genetic clone, as the entire banana industry works on planting shoots from already productive banana trees. So the farmers in Jesus’s audience get what he’s saying immediately. You plant twenty apple seedlings to make an orchard: how do you know which ones are good? You have to wait until they bear fruit, then you know. And once you know, you know for sure: there’s no chance that a tree that grew crabapples this year will grow honeycrisps the next. What do you do with the trees that turn out to have bad fruit? You certainly don’t keep tending to them, you cut them down and use them for firewood. So in the same way you can tell whether a teacher is true or false by seeing what kind of fruit he bears. Do his teachings produce good results? Are his followers better people? Do his prophecies come true? If the fruit is bad don’t wait in the hope that it will become good. It won’t!

In the same way, just because you look and act like a citizen of the Kingdom doesn’t mean you will enter into it. You need to make sure you produce good fruit as well:

Not all who say “Lord! Lord!” shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but only those who do the will of my Father in Heaven. On that day many shall say to me “Did we not prophecy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and in your name perform many miracles?” And I shall say “I never knew you. Depart from me, you evildoers!”

Notice the good fruits that the “evildoers” claim here. They’re all big, flashy actions that would impress people, just like the actions of the “hypocrites” Jesus condemned earlier who pray on the streetcorners and blow trumpets before giving to the poor. They gave outward signs, when Jesus is preaching inward change: do not commit adultery in your heart, do your good deeds in secret, seek the Kingdom instead of wealth and security, etc.

Always End With a Call to Action

We’re familiar with the Sermon on the Mount (if we know it at all) as a scattering of sayings, each individually good. When we put those scattered bits together and read it as a whole piece, we find that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. Each part of the Sermon leads naturally into the next, giving us needed context. I recommend reading the Sermon in full after finishing this review. It’s not that long, for a foundation stone of Western culture.

Jesus finishes his Sermon with one last metaphor and a call to action of sorts:

He who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house upon the rock. The rain came down, the waters rose, the wind battered and beat against the house, and it did not fall because it was built on the rock. And he who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like the foolish man who built his house upon sand. The rain came down, the waters rose, the wind battered and beat against the house, and it fell with a great crash.

The part of the house you could see was not the part that determined its fate. It was the hidden part that made the difference. The kingdoms of the Earth concern themselves with outward appearance, and are doomed to perish. The Kingdom of Heaven concerns itself with what is hidden within, and it will never die.

Western culture ultimately built its own house upon this rock. Some would argue that house came crashing down in 1914 when all of Europe decided to engage in the suicide pact that was WWI. I would argue that the house still stands today, though perhaps as a culture we’ve built a lot of additions to the house in the last hundred years or so that aren’t built on the original foundation. Certainly Christianity as a whole still stands. It has stood for two thousand years, it may well stand for ten thousand more. Even if the house that was built on that rock looks strange today, and even though many of those who live within that house do not trust the rock it was built on, it remains the same house. And even though the Kingdom of Heaven is still far from us, it’s closer than it was two thousand years ago.

ENDNOTES

[1] Grow in absolute terms, while remaining at 31.4% of the global population. See here for more detail.

[2] Paul amusingly uses this eschatological disagreement to his own advantage when he’s dragged before the Sanheidren on trial for his Christianity:

“Then Paul, knowing that some of them were Sadducees and the others Pharisees, called out in the Sanhedrin, ‘My brothers, I am a Pharisee, descended from Pharisees. I stand on trial because of the hope of the resurrection of the dead.’ When he said this, a dispute broke out between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and the assembly was divided. (The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, and that there are neither angels nor spirits, but the Pharisees believe all these things.)

“There was a great uproar, and some of the teachers of the law who were Pharisees stood up and argued vigorously. ‘We find nothing wrong with this man,’ they said. ‘What if a spirit or an angel has spoken to him?’ The dispute became so violent that the commander was afraid Paul would be torn to pieces by them. He ordered the troops to go down and take him away from them by force and bring him into the barracks.” -Acts 23:6-9