Lecture

When we turn to the Sermon on the Mount by itself, we encounter a huge variety of interpretations throughout church history. If we’re going to make sense of the Beatitudes, not merely in light of the overall context of Matthew, not even in light of where the Sermon on the Mount appears in Matthew, but how Jesus understood His teaching fitting together, we have to make our way through a whole variety of options in the early church, in the patristic period, the so-called church fathers. Some call it the great tradition, approximately the first five hundred years of church history before there were the many theological splits or at least most of them that would start to create denominationalism in the church. There was a widespread conviction that Jesus’ teaching the Sermon on the Mount, like His ethical teaching elsewhere, was His vision of life before God, what would come to be called the Christian life in the community of those people who were enacting God’s kingdom, His kingly reign on earth.

However, as Roman Catholicism developed and especially moved into the medieval period, a view became very pervasive that said the demands of the sermon are so stringent that these are really for priests and monks and nuns and those who take other ecclesiastical orders, a higher level of commitment to Jesus, than for the run-of-the-mill churchgoer. Given that Jesus spoke not just to His disciples, but to all of His disciples, but also to larger crowds who were accompanying Him (see 5:1–2), this seems hard to justify. At the time of the Reformation, Martin Luther made famous the view that the stringency was to show the impossible demands of the Old Testament law, even as Jesus reinterpreted it, and therefore our need for a Savior. But again, it’s not clear that that does justice to the fact that Jesus is at least in part addressing some who have already chosen to follow Him.

John Calvin emphasized continuity with the law, much more than Luther did, and therefore saw this as a kind of law for the new covenant era, the most radical of the Reformation perspectives. The Anabaptists took much of the sermon more literally than anyone else did, including turning the other cheek, and used it to promote a farm of pacifism, even withdrawal from society. In the 1830s, the rise of modern dispensationalism, a view that became popular, said this was God’s will for Israel. This would have been their kingdom mandate, but because Israel rejected it, the church came instead. And so these stringent ethics are postponed for perhaps a millennial kingdom.

There’ve always been individuals, as well as entire movements, particularly in Socialist or Marxist contexts, that have seen the Sermon on the Mount as a vision far more radical and liberating. As they understand it, political perspectives apply it to government in Southern Asia as the gospel spread to those areas and interacted with traditional Confucian or Hindu models.

There were people who stressed this was simply a better or higher morality than what their sages and gurus and religious leaders had taught for the last couple of hundred years. However in, first of all, the Western world, and then through the missionary movement throughout the world, what has probably been the predominant viewpoint, especially as an older dispensationalism moves much more closely to this perspective, is what might be called a kingdom ethic. The slogan is used “already, but not yet.” Jesus repeatedly said, “The kingdom has arrived.” “The kingdom has come.” But then He talked about people still entering the kingdom in the future. God’s royal reign, His kingship, His kingly reign, His dominion over the earth is not yet fully established, not by any long stretch of the imagination. But two thousand years of church history have shown how much God, through His Spirit through His people have done to bring others to Himself: two billion who claimed the name of Christ, if not more than that today, as well as countless developments for the improvement of humanity. Jonathan Pennington, perhaps this past generation’s leading interpreter of the Sermon on the Mount, adds at this point that what Jesus gives here is a model for human flourishing, flourishing, even through suffering, which is its countercultural perspective.

There are a few other larger interpretive issues we need to settle. And then in our next video, we will tackle Matthew 5:3–12 correctly. Why does Jesus go up on a mountain in Mathew? Mountains are consistently the place of God’s revelation. Think about the transfiguration. Think about the Mount of Olives and others, this sermon, and therefore the ethics of the Beatitudes to be applied just to individuals. Is it a blueprint for society or the government, or is it a mandate for the church? Ever since Martin Luther, application to individuals has been very popular in some circles. And as we saw earlier, there are people who’ve tried to apply this to governments, but again, from the context in Matthew 5, as Jesus is gathering His followers around Him, it seems that it is, first of all, primarily a mandate for His people in community. What we call the church.

What does it mean to call people blessed? Certainly not the prosperity gospel’s health and wealth meaning. It means that God deems them fortunate or favored or, to use Pennington’s word, flourishing even in countercultural contexts. What is the relationship between “blessed are those who are or do such and such,” and the causal statement that follows “because something is . . .” Probably that second part is explaining what the blessing involves, not two separate pieces.

Are the Beatitudes in a particular order, apart from the first and last (which we’ll come back to)? Probably not. People have made such suggestions, but there’s been no agreement. Do they divide into two or more subgroups? Here, there have been two very popular theories. One that points out that there are nine and recalls in our Sermon on the Mount outline how many times Matthew groups three things of Jesus; and so they see three groups of three. But perhaps better is to see two groups of four, because the ninth beatitude is really just a repetition and extension of the eighth: “Blessed are those who are persecuted.” And that’s how we will unpack the Beatitudes in the next three videos. Do these include unbelievers? Many were listening to Jesus, but probably Jesus was saying, “If you want to be one of my followers, this is the life in essence that you’re signing up for.”

With all those preparatory remarks, we’re ready in the next video to tackle the first half of Matthew 5:3–12.