Day 1 | A “Sermon on the Mount” Christian

Matthew’s Gospel is organized around five “discourses,” or sections of Jesus’s teachings. These five sections allude to the five books of the Torah and signal that Jesus’s message constitutes a new Torah, a new way of organizing one’s life. This reading plan focuses on the first of Matthew’s five discourses, the famous Sermon on the Mount.

Read: Matthew 5:1-2 The Kingdom New Testament

The Beatitudes

5 When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the hillside and sat down. His disciples came to him. 2 He took a deep breath, and began his teaching:

Consider:

People sometimes call themselves “Sermon on the Mount Christians,” by which they often mean to prioritize the specific virtues of the Sermon over the various dogmas of Christianity writ large. There’s nothing wrong with this on the surface. It’s better to live with kindness, humility, and care than to be cruel and self-serving. But the Sermon on the Mount is about more than just how to get along well with others. It is much more than miscellaneous guidelines for being your best ethical self.

Set in its larger context, the Sermon on the Mount presents a stark challenge. Just before this section, Matthew has set Jesus up as the fulfillment of God’s promises through a series of scenes reenacting Israel’s long struggle. With the crowds gathered, Jesus proclaims a new reality with urgent implications. What is that reality? Nothing less than the beginning of a way of life as God intended. Matthew is saying that with Jesus here, this is how you should and can live.

More than that, the new way of life is one lived at the intersection of heaven and earth, which is the new world God is creating. This is summarized in Jesus’s famous statement, “I have come not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it.” This statement can be scary to some people, especially those raised on suspicion of works righteousness. But for Israel, the Law isn’t a set of moral codes as much as it is the whole story of God, the story which has shaped and guided their entire way of being human. So Jesus is saying, in effect, that he doesn’t mean to destroy his audience’s guideposts for how to be human, but rather that he is the complete and proper outline to a program of how to be human, based on God’s heaven-plus-earth reality.

If we come to the Sermon on the Mount expecting a list of do’s and don’ts - we’ll be disappointed. The Bible gives us a story that helps us discern what God’s reality can look like. The Sermon on the Mount presents a view of life in which heaven and earth are coming together through the renewal of human beings to the Jesus-following way of life outlined in the Sermon on the Mount.

Reflect:

The Sermon on the Mount carried a very specific message for its first audience, yet it is still a beloved passage of scripture today, and rightly so. What can you do to translate some of the original urgency of the Sermon into your own life? Are there challenges in the sermon that you feel God calling you to take up? What might God’s world miss out on if you do not heed that call?