Friday, September 26, 2008

The Sermon on the Mount


The Sermon on the Mount is like the "constitution" of the Church according to Emory professor Tom Long. It is the charter document for life in Jesus' Kingdom. Much like the U.S. Constitution sets forth, among other things, the sort of citizens the founders hoped would make up the United States, in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus draws a picture of those who belong to His Kingdom. It is Jesus' own understanding of what his followers are, should be, and will be. In our denomination (Disciples of Christ) we often refer newcomers to the wonderful little book Handbook for Today's Disciples by Duane Cummins. If there is a definitive handbook for how to follow Jesus, it is his Sermon on the Mount.

There was a time when the Sermon played a huge role in the life of nearly every believer. For the first few hundred years of the church's existence it was the most often quoted part of the Bible. In preaching and teaching -- allusion to and quotation of the Sermon was central. Today it is mainly ignored and/or interpreted away except maybe in the Anabaptist traditions where they still think Jesus wasn't kidding. I leave it for others to tell us how and why the Sermon went from the center of the church's teaching to the periphery; rather, my concern is to place it once again in the center of my little corner of the church.

So today I'll begin blogging through the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5-7. There are a couple of things that might be helpful to keep in mind, or maybe to use as guidelines in reading the Sermon.
  1. The Sermon on the Mount “is not a list of requirements, but rather a description of the life of a people gathered by and around Jesus” (Hauerwas, 61). That is to say, you will not find in the Sermon rules that must be kept in order to be saved, but a picture of the way those who are saved live. This is what followers of Jesus look like.
  2. The Sermon is not to be dismissed as an impossible ideal that is wonderful to strive for, but cannot ever be reached. Jesus, as we will learn, really expects us to love our enemies, pray for our persecutors, turn the other cheek, and go the extra mile. One of my fundamental convictions about Matthew 5-7 is we make very poor disciples apart from the Sermon on the Mount. Converts, yes. Disciples, no. And it is disciples that Jesus commands us to make -- and become.
At the very end of Jesus' time on earth, in the days after his ministry had ended, in the time after Easter but just before he was to ascend back into heaven with His Father, Jesus gathered with his friends on a mountain top to deliver his final instructions (28:18ff): Make disciples, he says. Baptize them. And then Jesus instructs the group...

"Teach the new followers to obey all things I have commanded you."

In telling the story this way, Matthew wants us to hearken back to an earlier time, another mountain -- when Jesus delivered his most famous Sermon, in which Jesus lays out his program, his vision of life in God's Kingdom. It is the single most important passage in the Bible for those who want to know, "What does God want of those who are saved by His grace?"

At the close of the Sermon, Matthew notes that, "When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching." They are astonished at Jesus' preaching. I suppose we'll have to wait to see if their astonishment turned into something more substantial.

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