The Sermon on the Mount - an Ethical Eiger in the Alps of the New Testament.

When I first studied the text of the Sermon on the Mount in the mid 1970s there were several resources which I leaned on and learned from. Pride of place goes to W. D. Davies, The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount, a huge monograph which argued that the sermon originated as a Christian response to the teaching of the Rabbis in Jamnia, following the Fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE.

With Jerusalem fallen and the Temple gone, the focus of future Jewish identity would be the Torah, the Law as light and guide of life - to be studied, revered, taught and lived. The Pharisees and Rabbis developed and entire Torah centred culture expressing the core identity of Judaism as the Jewish people faced a changed future in the world.

According to Davies, Matthew's Gospel, and the Sermon on the Mount as its manifesto, aims to show that Christians too are seekers of righteousness, and people of the law of the Kingdom of God. But that 'law' is now as taught and embodied by Jesus, the higher righteousness of the Kingdom of God, a deeper righteousness of the yoke of discipleship and the cross, carried beyond the empty tomb and into all the world to all peoples. 

Within that detailed technical argument were embedded any amount of exegetical insights and explorations of historical context. This was before Davies and Allison embarked on their three volume commentary which remains the technical benchmark in Matthean studies. 

Warren Kissenger, The Sermon on the Mount. A History of Interpretation and Bibliography was published in 1975 and as a specialist academic volume was hugely expensive. I borrowed it from Glasgow University Library (a library in which I am still a life member, for a cost of £50 in 1976) - I had it on continuous loan for about a year.

Kissenger's book was like being given a pair of high resolution binoculars to gaze at distant layers of landscape and see what otherwise you couldn't have seen. Up to 1975 the bibliography was exhaustive. In one volume there was a history of how people had interpreted, evaded, softened, radicalised, explained and even explained away those three chapters that sit like the North Face of the Eiger, in the Alpine range of New Testament ethics. 

A third book was H. K. MacArthur, Understanding the Sermon on the Mount, yet another eye opener that I read and re-read over the two years I worked away at the Sermon. The historic interpreters were themselves interpreted, and the Sermon came alive as it was placed into the historical contexts of such expositors as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Wesley, the German pietist scholar August Tholuck, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Hitler's Germany. In this one book the reader is given a sense of the diversity of perspectives, and how historical context governs hermeneutical principles and exegetical outcomes. The wide variety of approaches demonstrates the scholarly discomfort with this troublesome text!  

I mention these three books, not because they are still the best ways into the Sermon on the Mount. That wasn't necessarily true in 1976, and it certainly isn't now. No. I mention these books because those many hours reading the Sermon, and reading about the Sermon, and working at a personal exegesis of this 'thickly textured text', - those hours were a large and formative part of my own early apprenticeship as one who was trying to become what Matthew himself called “A scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven [who] is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” (13.51)

In such study and life practice, we remain apprentices, learners, or in Matthew's favourite term, disciples. Before reading a chunk of the Sermon on the Mount, I've found it spiritually reassuring to read Jesus words:

Come to me all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matthew 11.28-29)

In all the reading and study, the thinking and praying, the sermon preparing and sermon preaching, of those first years and the lifetime since, there is still that same sense of dealing with what Joachim Jeremias called "the ipsissima vox" of Jesus, the essential, unmistakable, characteristic, tone and timbre of the Teacher who only amongst all other voices, "has the words of eternal life."

In the half century or so since, there has been an ever-flowing stream of studies and expositions of the Sermon. Those familiar with Evangelical expositions will wonder why Martyn-Lloyd Jones is missing. He isn't, and wasn't in my own reading. But the good Doctor himself would have disapproved as only he could, had his Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, been placed alongside technical exegetical and historical critical works. His approach was different, and requires a different disposition in the reader. I read those two volumes from cover to cover, and they remain the best Reformed exposition of the Sermon that I know. 

Oddly enough, John Stott's Christian Counter Culture. The Message of the Sermon on the Mount, came out just as I was submitting my work for assessment in 1978. I was able to use it and include some notes from it - but here I must remind you of my own historical context. I was using a brother typewriter, with tippex or retyping an entire page if changes had to be made to a finished draft! No cut and paste, no delete, no word processing of the kind now so taken for granted, that those under 30 have never known the delicate anguish of discovering typos on a final draft page that had taken ages to type!

All that aside, Stott's treatment was, and is, brilliant. A bit dated now, but some of those early IVP volumes in the Bible Speaks Today series were exactly the bridge points needed to help hold together critical exegesis and faithful exposition. Motyer on Amos, Stott on the Sermon on the Mount, Kidner on Ecclesiastes, Atkinson on Ruth. Many of them still in print. 

In the forty five intervening years since my probationary studies there has been a deluge of scholarly work on the Sermon on the Mount. My own engagement with some of that I'll save for a later post.

Painting above is by Jan Breughel the Elder, 'The Sermon on the Mount'.

Comments

[The Revd Paul Lavender]

Thanks Jim. Humbly approaching the text, I have learned again the truth of a scripture from a different context, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” For myself, my chief conversations partners, Keener, Guerlich, Eckund, have taught me the importance of a slow reading and a quiet heart. And oh, if only we preachers could allow ourselves access to that environment that’s conducive to that precious space…..