IT IS PROBABLY SAFE to say that the most-often read part of the Gospel of Matthew in our day is the Sermon on the Mount (chs. 5–7). The Sermon on the Mount may even be the most read portion of the whole New Testament today. It is easy to imagine why. We live in a moralistic, legalistic, individualistic age. The Sermon on the Mount can be read as a guidebook for ethical living, to be followed regardless of what you think of God, the Jewish community, or the Christian church. Indeed, one of the best thinkers of our age, one of the twentieth-century’s finest human beings, Albert Schweitzer, read it this way and said that the Sermon on the Mount captured the essence of Christianity. Unfortunately, this is the wrong way to read the Sermon on the Mount and the Gospel of Matthew as a whole.
Why? Because reading it this way assumes that the way we choose to behave determines who we are and determines our identity. And that’s not true at all. What the Gospel of Matthew teaches us in general and what the Sermon on the Mount teaches us in particular is that who we are (or more precisely, whose we are, i.e., whom we choose to follow or identify with) determines how we behave. If we choose to follow Jesus as Messiah, Matthew tells us, then the Sermon on the Mount is a description of how we will behave.
Does this sound like too fine a distinction to make? Does it sound like splitting hairs, like making a mountain out of a molehill? Perhaps it is overstating it just a bit. But the point is worth making simply because viewing the Sermon on the Mount this way changes it from a sermon to an ethical treatise, and it takes the essence of Christianity as a gift of grace and turns it into a modern philosophy. Three important things happen, all of them bad, when we read the Sermon on the Mount incorrectly.
(1) We overestimate our goodness. It is tempting to think of our characters as something we carefully craft, using a brick of honesty here, a two-by-four of generosity there, built on a cement foundation of discipline and energy. In such a scenario we choose the goal and we choose the building methods and materials we need to achieve the goal. And it is up to us to make the grade. Matthew says we are not that good.
(2) We underestimate our capacity for evil. The reason we cannot let our innate, God-created goodness dominate our personalities is because we have been infected with a pervasive force that has radically impaired our ability to let our lights of goodness shine. We all feel this force and perhaps wish it weren’t true. Matthew says we choose to identify with the Messiah because when it comes right down to it, we have no other choice. “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
(3) We rely less on God than we should. Because we are tempted not to choose first of all to identify with the Messiah and let our characters emerge as a result of that choice rather than vice versa, we decide to do a little remedial work to make ourselves a little more acceptable to God before we submit. When we make that choice, however, we make it impossible to rely on God as we should. We reserve a bit, usually quite a bit, of what we think is self-creative energy to make ourselves acceptable in God’s sight. In that reserve, we change the message of the gospel.
The Sermon on the Mount is an impossible ideal if read as an ethical treatise to which we need to measure up. It is a wonderful description of what we can become if we identify ourselves with Christ and allow his love to express itself through us. Read that way, it is a glorious promise of what we are and what we will become: the hope of Christian living that Matthew saw so clearly.
Terry C. Muck