Understanding the Sermon on the Mount

The Sermon on the Mount, continuing in this week’s gospel, has generated more comment and commentary, as well as criticism, both within and outside the Church, than any other part of the gospels.

One of the earliest Christian texts, the Didache or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, a second-century (possibly first-century) handbook, discovered only in 1873, for instance, refers to the sermon eight times in its opening section alone. And when Justin Martyr (100-165), the first known philosopher to have become a Christian, defended Christianity’s noble and humane morality before the Roman emperor, Antoninus Pius (86-161), he too quoted copiously from the sermon.

Nietzsche (1844-1900), on the other hand, despised the “slave-morality” he descried in its ethic of non-resistance, self-denial and neighbourly love, seeing these “weaknesses” as obstacles to true human greatness, exemplified in Übermenschen who say “Amen to life, not the words of a god”.

In this particular passage of Matthew’s gospel, the most Jewish of the four, Jesus makes it clear that he is fulfilling the Law of Moses, not replacing it: “Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish but to complete them. I tell you solemnly, till heaven and earth disappear, not one jot, not one tittle, shall disappear from the Law until its purpose is achieved.” (A “jot”, the smallest letter in Hebrew, a “tittle”, the dot over a letter.)

But what Matthew also makes clear is that this “fulfilment” of the Law is a restoration of its spirit, for so long obscured by slavish observance of its letter.

Matthew was countering, however, not just Jewish legalism but early Christian antinomianism. There were some, Marcion (100- 160) for instance, a wealthy Black Sea convert, who would later reject the Old Testament entirely, arguing that the Law and the gospel were incompatible.

For Marcion, even the gospels were unsatisfactory texts: he wanted to rationalise what he considered embarrassing inconsistencies among them by retaining Luke’s alone, the most elegant, and Paul’s letters.

Steering a middle course between legalism and antinomianism, Matthew illustrates in a set of antitheses that mirror the Beatitudes how Jesus’ teaching, far from opposing the Law, deepens its meaning by distinguishing between external behaviour and the inner disposition from which our behaviour emerges.

The actual topics raised had been hotly debated in Jewish circles and were still controversial in Jesus’ day. Characteristically, Jesus cuts to the heart of each. So, for instance, he makes it clear that the point of the command not to kill wasn’t just that we should refrain from killing, which had suggested to some that everything up to that point is permissible, but that we should never even wish someone dead.

It is the wrath that would wish someone dead that is the root of the problem of violence.

There is, of course, such a thing as “righteous anger”. Aquinas, for instance, thought that it is the mark of a virtuous person that they are angered by injustice. But this is entirely different from the seething anger that leads so easily to violence of one kind or another.

And quite apart from the harm done to others, we ourselves are diminished, rendered less than human, by bearing such ill-will towards another person. At the very least, anger is often simply counterproductive. “Be calm in arguing, for fierceness makes error a fault and truth discourtesy”, as George Herbert in The Church Porch advises.

The reference to sexual impropriety would have been even more counter-cultural in Jesus’ time than it is in our own. Saying “no” to lustful thoughts and desires would now strike many as unhealthy repression; indeed, some would doubt the very existence of lust, as such.

But Jesus teaches here that the damage is done not just by acting on such thoughts: the thoughts themselves, whether they materialise in action or not, de-humanise the thinker as much as they demean the other person, as do hateful and bitter thoughts.

The key, however, is not merely restraint, but to see with different eyes; to celebrate the goodness and beauty of God’s creation in everybody.

Restraint and discipline play their part, of course, given both lust and anger can be overpowering and all-consuming, skewing judgment and issuing in the unthinkable, as Shakespeare and John Donne knew well:

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

(Sonnet 129)

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

(Holy Sonnet 14)

Jesus’ opposition to the swearing of oaths was a deepening of what was already said in the Ten Commandments about not taking the Lord’s name in vain.

Jesus is not suggesting that oaths demean God, but, rather, that they should be redundant. Honesty, integrity and simplicity should obviate need of them. We should always mean what we say and say only what we mean; with the caveat, of course, that speaking honestly sometimes means saying less rather than more.

So, in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus is not just delivering novel moral prescriptions but unveiling a new understanding of what it is to be human. His teaching directs our attention to good interior dispositions, the work of the Spirit, transforming us from within, giving rise to a way of living that fulfils our God-given nature, as opposed to conforming to an arbitrarily imposed law from without.

At the heart of his teaching is the New Law, the law of love, which is “the grace of the Holy Spirit…shown forth by faith working through love.”

Jesus will later say that the whole of the Law is summed up in love of God and love of neighbour; and in John’s gospel he makes it explicit: “I give you a new commandment: love one another as I have loved you.”

But so as to dispel any hint of sentimentalism in his use of the word “love”, he will also tell us that we are to love even our enemies, as he does.