THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
The Gospel of Matthew's expansive list of Jesus' teachings reflects a much later account of Jesus' life and teaching found in Mark and Luke. The author of Matthew's Gospel pieced together in a systemized collection of Jesus' sayings in what we know as The Sermon on the Mount. As a later gospel, one cannot be sure that the author or later editors of this gospel didn't employ poetic license when formulating the Sermon on the Mount in order to capture the spirit of Jesus' teachings by expanding on the teachings of Jesus found in the other Synoptic Gospels.
An example of this found in the Beatitudes. In Luke's Sermon on the Plain there are only four beatitudes, whereas in Matthew's Sermon on the Mount there are eight with the eighth expanded upon in what can be considered a ninth. In addition, Matthew expands on their meaning. For example, "Blessed are the poor" in Luke becomes "Blessed are the poor in spirit" in Matthew and "Blessed are those who hunger" in Luke becomes "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness" in Matthew. These shifts represent a shift in interpretation over the course of time. As such, the ethical perspective of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew is presented in an a more expansive and straightforward manner than in the Gospel of Luke. For the purpose of this post, I will keep my comments primarily focused on what Matthew presents as Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, as it offers a concise overview of Jesus' ethical perspective.
THE ETHICS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
Beginning with the Beatitudes,Matthew adds to the four in Luke:
"Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth."
"Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy."
"Blessed the pure in heart, for they shall see God."
"Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven"
Salt and Light
These four additional beatitudes that not are found in Luke can certainly be derived from other teachings Jesus gave, and it is quite possible that the author of Matthew's Gospel expanded on this list of beatitudes to serve as an outline for the ethical teachings that follow. Before going on, however, Jesus underscores the importance of leading a "righteous" (ethically oriented) life. He begins metaphorically, "You are the salt of the earth," and " You are the light of the world." The point of these teachings is to underscored the importance of making them a daily practice not only for oneself, but also for others. If you are not flavoring the world and lighting it up with righteousness in the forms mentioned in the Beatitudes, the Kingdom of God remains hidden and untouched. The goodness we produce gives glory to God and will invite others to taste and see the goodness God in their lives.
The Law and the Prophets
In addition to these metaphors, Mathew begins by addressing what appears to be a problem amongst those he had in mind when he wrote this gospel; a problem Christians periodically run into with being Christian. Jesus addresses the purpose of the law and the prophets. Matthew is certifying that what Jesus is teaching in this sermon is rooted in the law and the prophets and is claiming that nothing is taken away from them. While that is primarily true, Jesus will within a few verses make some adjustments to what the Mosaic and Levitical law, in particular, is saying.
The difficulty with reading editorialized scriptures (and all of them have been subject to editorialization) is to recognize editing when one encounters it. If Jesus was giving this sermon in the real time of his day, there would have been no need for Jesus to talk about the law or the prophets in this manner to the Jewish audience of his day because the law and the prophets were an accepted way of life.
Why then is it being mentioned here?
The likely issue appears to be that there were some who were teaching that the laws and the prophets of the Old Testament were no longer valid since Jesus' resurrection and ascension. In what amounts to over-kill the author or editor of Matthew has Jesus going so far as to say not a single bit of the Hebrew lettering of the law is being change until everything is accomplished or fulfilled, meaning that while we're living in the world of our making, the law and the prophets remain in force. Jesus doesn't address every eight hundred plus laws found in Judaism. He is selective in what he is talking about to illustrate a deeper perspective of the law.
EXPANDED DEFINITIONS
Murder
Jesus does not address the Ten Commandments in full, but rather expands on the two of them, murder and adultery. Here Jesus expands the definitions of these terms. Murder involves more than actually taking someone's life. Murder is also disregarding someone's life, demeaning them or holding them in contempt. Jesus basically is saying such judgements will bring hell on earth, will make not only the person's life one is demeaning hell, but also will make the person who says such things or thinks such things a living hell.
Adultery
In a like, manner, Jesus expands the meaning of adultery to include lusting after another person in his or her heart is guilty of adultery. While Jesus is largely talking to the men in his audience, woman would be subject to the same rule.
Divorce
Jesus then moves beyond the Ten Commandments to Deuteronomical Law and divorce to which Jesus tightens up a loose end that gave men the right to dismiss or divorce their wives at will. Jesus goes far beyond this to say that the only reason to divorce one's wife is if she is her being faithless in their marital relationship. Any other reason will cause his wife to become an adulteress and any man who marries a divorced woman will be considered an adulterer.
This needs some clarification.
Being in a male-dominated cultural and social setting, Jesus seems to be only addressing the male side of the marital equation. There is reason for the because women were very much thought to be and treated as the property of their husbands and could be dealt with anyway the husband saw fit. Jesus is breaking that concept apart. What Jesus is saying here is that if a man divorces his wife without the just cause (i.e. her unfaithfulness) he will wrongly accuse her of being unfaithful by virtue of his having divorced her and any man who marries her will be an adulterer because she, in the eyes of God, is lawfully married to her husband because there is no just reason for her husband to have divorced her.
It would logically follow that a husband who wrongly divorced his wife and married another woman would also have committed adultery, except for the fact that when Jesus was preaching and this Gospel was written men could have more than one wife. We need to be clear, Jesus was not one who defined marriage as between one man and one woman only. Men could marry more than one woman. Nevertheless, Jesus was making a bold assertion for his time and in that culture he lived in that was intended to protect the women of that time and place from wrongful divorce.
The Integrity of One's Word
Jesus then goes on to address righteousness in terms of maintaining one's integrity by addressing being faithful to what one says or agrees or disagrees with. One's word should be sufficient in any agreement. If someone agrees to something, one needs to follow through with that agreement. If someone says no to a proposition, that should suffice. Let your yes and no stand on your integrity. Be a person of your word. There is no need to bring God into the equation to convince someone of your sincerity. People who swear by God to validate their commitments lack the strength of personal commitment.
REDEMPTIVE JUSTICE
Jesus was not a biblical literalist. He took issue with laws and practices that could be deemed draconian if applied, especially, if they conflicted with his promulgation of redemptive justice.
Retributive Justice and Loving One's Enemies
When it comes to exacting justice on someone who has done wrong, Jesus takes issue with the law. I'm not sure who edited the Matthew read what Jesus is saying here, because Jesus totally eliminates the legal practice of "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" sense of justice found in Exodus and replaces it with his sense of redemptive justice. Here we see Jesus replace this law of Moses with a law spoken by the prophet Micah, "O mortal, what is good" And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." (Micah 6:8). Chesed is the Hebrew word for the love of mercy and to be compassionate to the point of what the world of our making would consider ridiculous.
Here Jesus teaches us not to resist evil or what is described as bullying behavior, but counter it with openness. Offer the other cheek when someone slaps you on one cheek. Offer a second coat to one who sues you for your coat. If someone bullies you into do something he or she can do, go the extra mile. In other words, do not allow yourself to be victimized by the bullying behavior of others. Treat the bully with kindness as it reveals such bullying behavior for what it is to the bully and, if not the bully, everyone else.
While Leviticus 19:18 does not specifically tell the people of Israel to hate their enemies, Jesus is addressing an understood fact that Leviticus 19:18 which decrees that one should not seek revenge on one's own people but rather to love one's neighbor, does not extend that decree beyond one's borders or to anyone outside of "one's own people. Jesus sense of loving one's neighbor includes one's enemies, just as the story of the Good Samaritan does in the Gospel of Luke demonstrates.
The Ethics of Personal Practice
Redemptive justice begins with one's personal practices. After telling us to love our enemies, Jesus goes on to say that being righteous is accomplished by being "perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." The Greek word translated as perfect that Matthew uses is τέλειοι, a word that connotes reaching one's goal in life, to living into fulfilling one's purpose, and the word that I associate with that process is to develop a sense of integrity, to be as faithful as God is faithful in all that God does, and thus this becomes and appeal to aspire to be faithful as a child of God in all that we do. In the Gospel of Luke this understanding of perfection was to expressed as being as merciful as God is merciful.
If we are to emulate the grace of God then, like God, the good we do should slip under the radar of most, just as the goodness of God is mostly a silent affair. After all, as Jesus said at the end of Matthew 5 God causes the sun to rise on the both the evil and the good and causes rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous.
When it comes to putting chesed, compassionate mercy, into practice one should not turn it into a public show of "how good I am" but rather to allow one's goodness to reflect the goodness of God upon whom we all depend. Giving to the needy should be a routine practice. So much so that the giver hardly pays attention to the amount of his or her giving. Giving to those in need is to become a way of life.
Prayer and Forgiveness
For Jesus, prayer was a private matter more than a public one. In fact, the Gospels portray Jesus as being notorious for going off by himself to some isolated spot to pray. In keeping with the notion that God is not boisterous, God speaks within the silence of our lives and to those who honor the silence of simply being. In this teaching Jesus is channeling Elijah who encountered God in the silence of a passing moment. Prayer is not to be a boisterous affair, but a private and mostly a silent one. People who pray a great deal know this. Jesus also says that prays need not be long. God knows what we are seeking before we ask, which may beg the question, "Why pray at all?"
Prayer is the greatest of all personal acknowledgements of God's presence in one's life. Prayer is one's entry into the paradox of God being both personal and cosmic; of finding oneself as being a being within that Being in which all of creation lives, move, and has being, to paraphrase Paul quoting a prayer dedicated to the Greek god, Zeus.
In the Gospel of Matthew, we come across Jesus' teaching on how to pray, "The Lord's Prayer" or the "Our Father" in the middle of his Sermon on the Mount, which I tend to think was deliberate on the part of Matthew's author. In Luke's Gospel Jesus gives this teaching in response to his disciples request that he teach them how to pray.
Whereas Jesus starts out by instructing us to pray privately, he reminds us that our prayers are communal in nature, that one's needs are connected to the needs of others. At the center of this prayer is embedded Jesus' thesis on redemptive justice, "Forgive us our debts/trespasses/sins as we forgive those who are indebted to us/trespass against us/ sin against us." The "Lord's Prayer" is the ultimate Christian creed because it tells us what it means to be a follower of Jesus, what it means to be a child of God, how to act as one, and how to participate in God's redemptive Kingdom. In this prayer, Jesus underscores that redemption is centered first and foremost on our forgiving others; so much so in fact, that our being forgiven is dependent on our ability to do so. This is how the Kingdom of God is realized in our time.
Piety
Jesus turns our attention to the subject of fasting which broadly speaking is talking about one's personal sense or practice of piety. Fasting is the meditative practice of withholding food to bring to the forefront of one's mind one's dependence on God. It is also used to meditate and commiserate with the sufferings of others throughout the world. While such practices can be helpful on a personal and private level, they can become detrimental to furthering the Kingdom if such practices depict one looking as if one is suffering, being dour figure in one's community, or acting as if the entry into the Kingdom of God is a matter how good one is at giving up earthly pleasures. One's personal piety should not be expected in others or be a challenge to others. Sincere piety is a hidden affair apparent only to God.
Jesus then segues into an esoteric discussion about storing up treasures in heaven rather than on earth and an even more esoteric discourse on the eye being single. These short discourses have been interpreted in various ways; straightforwardly in the case of storing up treasures in heaven as meaning foregoing treasures here on earth or perhaps using (expending) our treasures on earth for righteous causes; such as, caring for the poor, feeding the hungry, etc., which in turn will result in storing up treasures in heaven. This is, of course, a valid interpretation, but coming on the heels of a discussion of being private about one's prayer life and piety and connecting it to our hearts desires keeps this in the realm of private endeavors. Jesus is not being prescriptive here. He is not telling us what to treasure but rather to pay attention to what we treasure, to be alert to where our hearts' true desires lay.
Jesus then moves on to one's eye being single (ἁπλοῦς in Greek) as opposed to double (δίπλους in Greek) its antonym. Much has been made of the single use of the word eye as opposed to the fact the we humans have two eyes. Some of have associated this with the middle eye concept of yogic or far eastern thought. It is an odd construct implying that we are to be focused and avoid being visually duplicitous; to see things for what they are and not what we want them to be; to look at things through a folded lens; such as, lowering the blinds of the mind to cut the glare of truth. Light and truth are synonymous in the scriptures. If our minds are open to the light of truth, we will be filled with it. If one becomes duplicitous in what one is seeing, one is pulling the shades of one's mind down and the light and the truth cannot enter in and one's vision of the life God intends us to live into will fade and will risk life becoming an increasing descent into darkness.
Jesus ends his discourse into living a pious life by taking a final swipe at duplicitous living by saying that a person cannot serve two opposing master because eventually there comes a time when one must choose one or the other. Jesus says, one cannot serve God and mammon, often translated as money, but mammon is contextually used to represent that which has no intrinsic value or lasting value in itself.
Staying in the Present
Jesus addresses our anxieties about the future. Jesus points out that most of our worries concern what is going to happen down the road of life or what we are going to encounter as we turn some sort of bend in the road ahead of us. What is unique in his discussion is that he uses the mundane to illustrate the pointlessness of our worries; such as, what shall we wear or what shall we eat tomorrow.
Jesus points us to nature; the birds of the air and lilies of the fields, surmising that all of one's worrying will not add a single second to one's life. The troubles of today is all we need to be concerned with, is what we need to address today. We cannot possibly get ahead of ourselves by addressing the possibilities of a tomorrow that has not yet dawned on us. Likewise, we can't possibly enjoy the moment we're in when we are consumed by worries that haven't been realized and are the products of the phantom memories of past ignored issues projecting themselves into our sense of the future.
To counteract such dilemmas, Jesus advised that we seek the Kingdom of God and God's righteousness and our tomorrows will take care of itself because the Kingdom of God is encountered in the now of every moment.
Judgment
In Matthew 7, Jesus recaps what he has discussed in the previous two chapters with a pragmatic twist given to them. The ethics of righteousness must be worked at. They are not a given in the dystopian world we live, the world of our making, and Jesus is not presenting us with an unrealistic, utopian world view.
The ethics of righteousness are rooted in the faith, hope, and love of God. They are to be practiced as n individuals and as a community of faith. As such, we must strive to understand ourselves as individuals and as communities of faith. Self-righteousness is properly understand selfish-righteousness, blindness to our own faults and failures. To recap what he has already said, Jesus begins by telling us not to judge others.
When our vision is duplicitous, we tend to see the problems obscuring the vision of others quicker than perceiving our own blindness. Judging others as to their worthiness and level righteousness is a treacherous undertaking. We can only help the blindness of others if we are truly focused on seeking the Truth that is God, a Truth that no living human fully possesses. At best we can only catch glimpses of it and understand that we cannot fully hold a Truth that is ultimately is holding us.
Forgiveness is a powerful ethical tool. So many live under the weight of their own self-inflicted burdens, who can't forgive others simply because they can't forgive themselves, yet alone understand the power of forgiveness. Forgiving oneself can be the most difficult undertaking. It is like removing the beam in one's eye. It is difficult to forgive the faults we fail to see in our own lives and once we see them it can be difficult to feel worthy enough to forgive them. Forgiveness begins with oneself and it is best to consign such forgiveness to God whose image we bear, which brings us to Jesus' teaching on seeking, asking, and finding.
This life is about becoming; about seeking, about asking, and about discovery. Sitting smuggly in a pew or on a couch "believing" that entertaining concretized beliefs in what the Bible says is all that is necessary for salvation misses the point of why the scriptures exist. The scriptures exist to be explored. They do not answer our many questions, but help us to formulate the questions that we should be asking. The answers to our questions will be found along the way of our life-journeys.
Jesus concludes with the golden rule of treating others as we would have others treat us. This includes how we view others and how we think of them. Jesus then warns us about false prophets and religious leaders who will claim having authority to speak on God's behalf but whose actions and life style will reveal their emptiness.
Jesus' view of the righteous life is not about obtaining popularity in this world, about sticking with one's tribe, or going along with the crowd. Righteousness begins with introspection, knowing oneself and seeking to do the will of God in one's life by discovering the child God each and every one of us are and by living into becoming that child. This will undoubtedly be a life-long process, just as it was for Jesus. As long as one is alive there is an evolutionary process taking place, an ongoing transfiguration in our perspectives.
The body will wear out because it is a product of the earth, but the spirit will not because it is the very presence of God in us. If we can be kind to ourselves, to the image we truly bear, the transcendent wisdom that accepts and seeks the righteousness of God, we will enable the light of God to shine through us so that others will come to know the light and love of God in their lives
Until next time, stay faithful.
Norm
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