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3 The Sermon on the Mount Chapters 5 to 7 are devoted to the Sermon on the Mount, and 1-17 of chapter 8 to miracles of exorcism and healing, notably the servant of a Roman centurion and the motherin -law of Peter. The press of the crowds is such that Jesus leaves for the other side of the Sea of Galilee on a ship that is caught in a “great tempest.” Jesus calms the tempest and then lands in “the country of the Gergesenes,” but after driving demons into a herd of swine, he returns to Capernaum. There he recruits a tax collector named Matthew, disputes briefly with the Pharisees, consults with some of John’s disciples, and performs miracles while preaching the “gospel of the kingdom” in the nearby “cities and villages.” When the protest [in Montgomery] began, my mind, consciously or unconsciously, was driven back to the Sermon on the Mount, with its sublime teachings on love, and to the Gandhian method of nonviolent resistance. —Martin Luther King Jr. If Matthew is both “the Jewish gospel” and “the church’s gospel,” it can also be “the Christians’ gospel”—and nowhere more convincingly than in the Sermon on the Mount (5:1–7:29). These three chapters are sometimes called Christianity’s “Constitution,” or at least an early kind of catechism, being derived largely from the sayings of Q, and hence popular among those who prefer “Christianity Light,” with a Jesus who was an itinerant teacher—a kind of first-century Jewish guru—and not the Savior and Redeemer of the Passion Narratives and Paul’s Epistles. For many Christians the Sermon’s apparent emphasis on good works, self-restraint, and personal perfection is preferable to the emphasis on faith, grace, and personal unworthiness in Paul’s theology. As for its OT connection, we see again the “Moses motif,” here a symmetry between Moses receiving the law on Mt. Sinai and Jesus ascending a mountain to preach a “Messianic Torah,” a new law—or, better, a new and radical reorientation of values. In Matthew the mountain is unnamed, but Luke puts his Sermon on a plain, since he is less concerned than Matthew with Jesus’ role as the new Moses (in Luke, Jesus goes to mountains only to pray), and he includes just over half the verses found in Matthew. A traditional location for Matthew’s “mountain” is a hillside near the Sea of Galilee, and this setting was the inspiration for the open-air preaching begun by the Methodist George Whitefield and brought to perfection by John Wesley in the mid-eighteenth century (the Sermon, said Wesley, was “one pretty remarkable precedent of field preaching ”).1 Jesus is sitting, like a Jewish teacher or a Greco-Roman philosopher, as he addresses both his disciples (gathered in the front rows?) and “the multitudes ” (Nicholas Ray assembled seven thousand extras for his 1961 King of Kings film), though it is often unclear which group is meant to be his primary audience. The former may stand for Matthew’s own community; the latter for the wider world still to be evangelized. It is odd that so large a block of discourse should appear so early in Matthew ’s narrative and at a time when Jesus has called only four disciples and has not performed any specified healings or miracles. Over the ages the sentiments of the Sermon have inspired, frustrated, and puzzled its readers; its sudden transitions can upset those who demand—and sometimes claim to discover— the kind of consistency and coherence that is not often found in ancient texts. In a catalogue of interpretations as bewildering as those visited on the “kingdom of God,” Clarence Bauman notes that, among other readings, the Sermon has been dramatized, secularized, universalized, criticized, psychologized, politicized, and radicalized.2 Its counsel of perfection may be elevating and challenging, yet it can also be subversive, since the impossibility of realizing it on earth can induce despair, persuading some—especially Martin Luther (who preferred the radically christological message of John)—that given the reality of human shortcomings, the Sermon is actually an argument for the necessity of divine grace. Albert Schweitzer could justify these radical demands by having his Jesus mandate them for only the few years before the world would end. But still some wonder how seriously Jesus meant what he said, since certain of his injunctions are obviously hyperbolic (“pluck out your eye”); while others seem inconsistent (what must be revealed at 5...

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