(Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Matthew 7:13-14)

As I said at the beginning of this series, the opening of the Sermon on the Mount, the first two sections, describe for us the faithful disciple of Jesus.  To commit to be a disciple of Christ is to commit to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteous­ness; Jesus begins the Sermon by telling us what that looks like.  It’s the life of the kingdom of God breaking in to the kingdoms of this world, and it’s characterized by the bles­sings laid out in the Beatitudes.  It’s the life of God lighting up the darkness of this world, purifying it and attacking its corruption.  If Christ is our Lord, this is who we are, and who we are being made to be; this is our life, however imperfectly we experience it as yet.

Now, why does Jesus begin there?  In part, it’s to provide the proper context for the central part of the Sermon, which is generally focused on what a faithful disciple of Jesus does and doesn’t do.  If we read those sections in the light of the Beatitudes, as we should, it reminds us that what we do and what we choose not to do flow out of who we are in Christ.  Doing follows being.

I believe, however, that there’s more to the story than that.  You see, the concluding theme of the Sermon on the Mount doesn’t return exactly to the place where it started; where the opening describes one way, the conclusion talks about two.  The way of the disciple is the way that leads to life, but it’s a narrow way, winding and difficult, entered through the narrow gate.  There’s also a broad, easy road, which begins at a wide gate which is easy to pass through and easy to find; that road leads ultimately to destruction, but to many people it looks a lot more like the good life along the way.

Why does Jesus talk about this?  That might seem like an odd question, at least if you’ve grown up in the church.  If you have, you’ve probably heard sermons on this, and you probably also had Sunday school lessons on this as a kid, if you went.  I know I did.  If you grew up in the church, this is probably familiar to you, so you just accept it.  There are those who follow Jesus, and there are those who don’t, and those who follow Jesus go to Heaven, and those who don’t, don’t.

Now, I don’t disagree with that conclusion, but is that actually what Jesus is saying here?  The problem is, everyone who hears this sermon is there because they’re following Jesus.  He’s up in the high country, well outside of town—nobody’s there by accident.  But many there need to hear the summons to enter through the narrow gate, because they haven’t.  They’re following Jesus, yes, but not for the right reason.

To see what I mean, flip back a couple pages in your Bible—or if you want the pew Bible, they’re under the seat in front of you, right there where you’re supposed to store your carry-on for takeoff—and look at Matthew 4.  This is the immediate context for the Sermon on the Mount.  In verse 17, we see the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, as John the Baptizer has been put in prison.  The rest of chapter 4 shows us two groups of people who are following Jesus.

In verses 18-22, Matthew gives us his first account of Jesus calling his disciples.  From the other gospels, we know this wasn’t his first contact with these four men, and it may well be that he’s already called other disciples as well, but that doesn’t matter; this was the decisive step for Peter, Andrew, James and John, as this was the point when they broke with their families, left their lives behind, and followed Jesus.  They did so because this was the point when he commanded them to do so.  It wasn’t because they wanted to get anything from Jesus, but simply because he called them to come.

In verses 23-25, we have a brief account of Jesus’ ministry:  he’s teaching in the synagogues, preaching the good news—a message which begins with the word “Repent,” as verse 17 tells us—and healing every kind of sickness.  Do people respond to his call to repent?  Some probably do, but by and large, that’s not what gets the response.  Instead, it’s the healings that draw people; they flock to him, bringing epileptics, quadriplegics, the demon-possessed, and generally every sick friend and relative they can carry.  The crowds are getting bigger every day, people are excited to follow Jesus, and why?  Because they’ve been captured by his call to repent of their sin and leave their whole lives behind?  No—because they want something.

And in response to the crowds, 5:1 tells us, Jesus went up into the hills, sat down on a mountainside, and began to teach.  His disciples came to him, Matthew says; they were the focus of his preaching, and we see this in the fact that the opening of the Sermon is addressed particularly to them.  They were not, however, the only ones there:  the crowds came along as well.  We know that from the end of chapter 7.  So Jesus is preaching to two groups of followers, who are following him for two very different reasons.  The disciples, as confused as they often may be, are seeking Jesus.  The crowds are seeking miracles, whether for themselves or just for the excitement.  They have expectations, and they’re with him as long as he meets those expectations.  The disciples are with him even when he doesn’t, whatever comes.

Put another way, for the crowds, Jesus is just a means to an end; for the disciples, he’s the end in himself.  The goal for them in following Jesus is just to be with Jesus—and that right there is the narrow way.  That’s what it means to be a disciple.  Remember what Jesus said in John 14:  “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”  He’s the way because he’s the life; he’s the way who is life.  The narrow way is narrow because it leads nowhere and to nothing and no one but Jesus—and that’s why it leads to life, because life is to be found nowhere and in nothing and no one but Jesus.  He alone is life; everything else is a counterfeit, a mirage, and a deception.

The crowds aren’t following Jesus for Jesus; they’re following him for something else.  That’s why they stop following him when things get rough.  That was true back then, and it’s true now.  There have been a lot of crowds in the American church over the years; there have been a lot of leaders who have attracted the crowds by putting a Christian face on their desires.  “Follow Jesus and you’ll get what you want,” goes the refrain.  That’s not the way of the disciple; that’s not the way of the kingdom.  That’s the world’s way dressed up in religious clothing and Christian accessories.  The gate is wide, and the road is broad and familiar to anyone used to walking the ways of the world; it’s comfortable and affirm­ing, most of the time, and it makes most people feel good.  But it doesn’t lead to life.

If we would be disciples, we’re called to go a different way.  We’re called to set aside our expectations, take our eyes off our desires, and fix them on Jesus.  We’re called to have a single focus on him, that he may fill our lives with his light; we’re called to set our hearts wholly on him, with no division and no reservation.  We can’t do that on our own, of course.  It’s only the work of the Holy Spirit in us that enables us even to desire this, let alone to grow in this way, in purity of heart and eye.  But as he enables us, step by step, this is the way of the disciple.  This is the way the world cannot understand.  This is the road less traveled; and believe me, it does make all the difference.

(Deuteronomy 6:4-5; Matthew 7:12, Matthew 22:34-40)

If you’ve been here for many of the sermons in this series, you know that I’ve done a fair bit with the structure of the Sermon on the Mount.  I believe it to be a large ring composition, structured in parallel sections from the ends toward the center, and you’ve heard me say this makes a difference for how we interpret the various sections of the Sermon.  If you were here last week, though, you might have noticed that I didn’t talk about this at all—I don’t know if anyone did, but you might have.  This is because, as I understand it, verses 7-11 are an anomaly in the structure.  They break the pattern, standing in parallel with the sections on prayer in chapter 6.  I didn’t mention that last week because I don’t think it changes how we read that passage.  Instead, I think it changes how we interpret verse 12, which we know as the Golden Rule.

As a side note, it’s possible that 7-11 don’t fit neatly into the structure I’ve outlined because I’m wrong.  I don’t think so, though, because biblical passages often don’t have neat and tidy structures with everything fitting perfectly into place.  The biblical authors use various literary structures to help express their meaning, but they never make the mistake of turning those structures into straitjackets for the text.  Indeed, inserting a verse or a paragraph that doesn’t fit the structure can be an effective way to get people’s attention, because it’s unexpected—it sticks out.

I believe that’s the case with last week’s passage, and that it’s there for two reasons.  One, it’s the very last word before Jesus brings the central section of the Sermon to a close with verse 12, and as such it changes how we understand this section.  Without it, we would go right from verse 6 to verse 12, and that would make perfect sense.  Don’t judge lest you be judged, take the beam out of your eye before you take the speck out of your neighbor’s, don’t cast your pearls before swine, do to others as you would have them do to you.  It would all fit together, and that would be that.  Instead, Jesus breaks that connection by going back to talk about the importance of trusting God in prayer, which reminds us that prayer stands at the center of everything he’s been saying.

Two, this has a further specific implication for the meaning of our verse this morning.  The Golden Rule requires trust—indeed, it’s a way of life grounded in trust.  If we take Jesus’ words seriously, we can’t wait to see who does good to us before we do good to them.  This isn’t like Christmas in some families where the value of every gift is precisely calibrated so that everyone gets back as much as they spent.  Rather, Jesus calls us to do good to others even before they’ve done anything for us at all, knowing they very well might not.  Anyone who lives this way in trust that they’ll get back what they give is going to have some rude shocks, and probably end up cynical and rather depressed.  But if we put our trust in God, that the Father will provide for us and reward us for our faithfulness, then living this way makes sense.

Now, that said, verse 12 raises questions of its own.  One struck me back in January as I was laying out this series:  if the Golden Rule sums up the Law and the Prophets—which is another way of saying, the whole word of God—then what do we do with the Great Commandment?  If the command to love God with every­thing you have is truly the most important one, why don’t we see it here?  Is Jesus contra­dicting himself?  Is he really saying that all the Bible tells us is to be nice to each other?

The first thing we need to see here, I think, is a key difference between 7:12 and 22:40.  In chapter 7, Jesus says, “This sums up the Law and the Prophets.”  In chapter 22, after laying out the two greatest commandments—both quoted from the Old Testament, note—he says, “The whole Bible hangs on these two commandments.”  In other words, to flip the metaphor, the command to radical love of God and neighbor is the root from which everything else in Scripture grows; the command to do to others as we would have them do to us is the one-line summary of what that looks like in practice.

The second point is illustrated by an episode from the life of the great rabbi Hillel, who taught Gamaliel, who taught the apostle Paul.  On one occasion, the rabbi was challenged by a potential convert to summarize the Law while standing on one foot.  Hillel responded, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.  This is the whole Law; the rest is commentary.  Go and learn it.”  Slightly differently put, but the same intent; some folks call this the “negative version” and think it’s less demanding than the “positive version” Jesus offers, but if you look at them closely, I think he’s truly saying the same thing.  And remember, this is coming from a Pharisee, and one of the greatest of them.  There’s no way he meant to exclude Deuteronomy 6, with its command to love God with all that is in us.  We may see a contradiction, but he didn’t.

Our problem comes, I think, from our practice of separating everything out into discrete categories, each with its own label and fact sheet.  We think of “worship” as one thing and “how we treat people” as something totally different; and so we read verse 12 and we assume it doesn’t have anything at all to do with worship or how we relate to God.  I don’t believe Jesus thought that way, and I don’t think Hillel or the other Pharisees did either.  They saw the Law holistically—that’s why they were so fond of reducing it to one-sentence summaries.

They understood that the Law works in the vertical and horizontal dimensions simultaneously.  Everything the Law commands us to do for others flows out of what it commands with regard to God, and neither can exist without the other.  We can’t love our neighbors as ourselves if we don’t love God with everything in us; and while we never really get to the point where we truly love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, the closer we get, the more we will love those around us as ourselves.  The Golden Rule doesn’t ignore worship or exclude prayer—it presupposes them.  It is the expression in our relationships with others of a pure heart which hungers and thirsts for righteousness and seeks first the kingdom of God; it’s the fruit of a life that is characterized by worship and prayer.

We can see this if we look at the context in which this verse sits.  Again, we have this tendency to separate everything out, and so we take the Golden Rule and put it on a plaque all by itself and hang it on the wall—but that’s not how it comes to us.  I noted a few minutes ago that Jesus has inserted a section on prayer into the Sermon right before saying this, to help us understand that the Golden Rule only makes sense if we trust God absolutely, for everything; we saw last week that that’s only possible if our lives are filled with prayer, if we give God all our desires and hopes and wishes and dreams.  More generally, remember that verse 12 closes out the great central section of the Sermon on the Mount, and remember what sits right at the center:  the Lord’s Prayer.

The Golden Rule doesn’t sum up the Law and the Prophets because it’s all the Law or the prophets care about.  Rather, it sums them up because it’s the fruit of a life lived according to the Law and the Prophets.  This isn’t what you do in order to live a life pleasing to God; it is the result of living a life pleasing to God.

(Psalm 40:1-5; Matthew 7:7-11)

Jesus said, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.  For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who seeks finds, and everyone who knocks has the door opened for them.”  And the people of God said, “Um, Jesus, we asked that our sick would get better, and some of them died, and others are still in pain; and we went seeking for new jobs for those who are jobless, and some of them are still unemployed; and we knocked on the door of opportunity, and it’s still bolted shut.”  And the preachers of the prosperity gospel rose and said, “Ahh, but you weren’t really asking, seeking, and knocking, because you didn’t have enough faith.  If you didn’t get what you asked for, don’t blame God—it’s your fault.”  And the people of God hung their heads and went away, depressed.

So goes much of the discussion about this passage, and so all too often the preaching of it is not good news but a stumbling block; many have fallen here, and some have never gotten up again.  I don’t believe the problem is with Jesus, however, or with the actual meaning of the text; I think we misread it because of a couple assumptions we make that don’t actually fit with Jesus’ intent.

First, this passage is not about faith.  It’s a subtle distinction, but important:  this passage is not about faith, it’s about trust.  These concepts are closely related, but think about the way we use them.  When we talk about faith, we tend to be thinking about what God is going to do, or what another person is going to do; I have faith that so-and-so will do what I tell them, or that God will give me what I ask.  It’s outcome-based.  That’s why, when we pray for something and God doesn’t give us what we ask for, we call it an unanswered prayer.  It’s also why our focus shifts so easily from God to our faith—we come to see faith as a power we exercise to make our desired outcome happen.

Trust, by contrast, is more oriented to the character of the person.  I don’t trust my wife because she does what I want her to do; sometimes she does, sometimes she doesn’t.  You know her, she’s not exactly a pushover, and she definitely knows her own mind about things.  But while I have faith that she will do what she needs to do and what God has gifted her to do,  I trust her because of who she is in Jesus Christ:  a woman of integrity, honor, and wisdom who does not play people false.  If I ask her for something, it isn’t in faith that she has to say yes, or that she’ll say yes if I just want it badly enough; rather, I ask in trust that she wants what’s best for both of us, and that her judgment in such matters is sound.  So it is with God, only far more so, for his judgment is infallible, his wisdom is infinite, and his love for us is limitless and perfect.

Praying in trust, then, means setting aside the second assumption we typically make:  that Jesus means, “Ask, and you will be given exactly what you ask for,” and so on.  He doesn’t actually say that.  He says “it will be given to you,” but he doesn’t say what it is—there’s not even a subject there in the Greek, just the verb.  He says those who seek will find, but not what they’ll find; for those who knock, something will be opened, but he doesn’t even say it will be a door, let alone the same door.

As I say this, you might think I’m just splitting hairs for no good reason, but look at verses 9-10, because there’s more going on than we see at first.  There are two pairs here—bread/stone, fish/snake—and the parallel passage in Luke 11 adds a third one, egg/scorpion.  These look like random pairings, but they aren’t.  One, bread, eggs, and fish are staple foods in the Near East.  Two, as the Arabic Christian commentator Ibrahim Sa‘id points out, the round loaves of bread villagers would bake in their ovens look very like common round stones, and what looks like an egg on the table might very well be one of the scorpions of the region curled up to sleep.  As for the fish, there’s a type of catfish in the Sea of Galilee called the barbut which grows to about five feet long and looks very like a snake; by the Old Testament law, it’s an unclean fish and not to be eaten because it doesn’t have scales.

Jesus’ point here is not simply that if your child asks for something good, you won’t give them something bad instead.  When my son asks for candy and points at one of my pill bottles, am I going to give him a pill?  No way.  (I might not give him candy either, but that’s another matter.)  If he asks for food and points to something that isn’t food, am I going to give that to him?  No, I won’t, because for all my faults, I know how to give good gifts to my children.  He asks wrongly, not because it’s wrong for him to ask or because I don’t want to give him what he wants, but because he doesn’t understand what he’s looking at.  I’m not going to give in to his misunderstanding; instead, I’m going to tell him no, and then give him something else that will actually meet his need.

Again, so it is with God, only far more so, because he knows far better than we do what’s good for his children, and how to give us good gifts.  Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and you will see something open up.  It may not be what you wanted, or what you thought you needed, but it will be what you actually needed.  Seven years ago, I was praying hard that things would work out in Colorado; I pointed to that, over and over, and said, “Father, that’s bread—I want it.”  God knew it was really a stone, and said no.  I hammered on that door as hard and as long as I could, and it didn’t even dent, let alone budge; instead, God opened up a trap door, and I landed here.  I only realized after we’d been here a while how badly we had needed God not to give me what I was asking; if I could go back and change the ending to that story, I never would.

Jesus’ purpose here isn’t to promise us that God will give us whatever we ask for if we do it “right”; it’s to free us from the idea that prayer is about us doing it “right.”  The prosperity-gospel types teach you to ask for anything and everything so that God can give you anything and everything, because he wants to say yes to whatever we ask.  On the other end of the spectrum, you have the folks who say that we really shouldn’t ask God for anything much, and they’re making the same basic assumption.  As they see it, asking God for things is dangerous because we’re liable to ask wrongly—for something that isn’t good for us, or out of selfish motives—and so he’s only going to say no.  Either way, our prayers are really about us and how we’re praying.

Jesus wants us to see that prayer is really about God, and he invites us to ask freely.  He doesn’t set any limits at all, he just says, “Ask—seek—knock.”  Ask for whatever, and trust the Lord for what he gives.  Seek, and let the Father lead us.  Knock, and be confident that God will open up our way.  If we’re asking, seeking, and knocking, we might have the wrong idea, but at least we’re moving, and moving toward him.  God can always fix our steering problem.  We don’t have to figure out in advance what we ought to ask for, because he doesn’t only answer prayers that are in accordance with his will, and he doesn’t punish us if we ask unwisely.  If we ask him for bread, he intends to give us bread—if the particular loaf we want is actually a boulder in disguise, he won’t give us the boulder, but he will still give us bread.  His answer might come in a different way than we expect, from a different direction, but it will come.

The key, again, is trust.  Jesus is teaching us to depend on God and God alone—not our resumé, not our income, not our family and friends, not our skills, not our invest­ments, but only our Father in heaven.  If things are going well and we have more money than we need, still we put our trust in God to meet our needs—money is fickle.  If things are going badly and our income is dropping, still we put our trust in God to meet our needs—he has more than enough money, even if we can’t see it at the moment, and he will never leave us in the lurch.  We should strive to live our lives in such a way, and to live as a church in such a way, that if the Father ever failed to come through for us, we would be ruined; because everything else will fail us in the end, but he never will.

This is why Jesus tells us to ask freely, for anything and everything, because it teaches us to depend on God for anything and everything.  It sounds very spiritual to say that we shouldn’t ask God for stuff because that’s selfish and materialistic—but the fact is, we still want stuff even if we don’t ask him for it.  That just means we put our trust in our­selves to get ourselves the stuff we want, and the stuff we think we need.  Asking God for all of it teaches us to put our trust in him instead of ourselves.  The more we trust him, and the more we see him answer our prayers—and the more we see him do things that are better than what we asked him to do—the less we think of God simply saying yes or no to our requests, and the more we trust him to answer our prayers however it may be best for us.  The more all of this happens, the stronger our relationship with him grows.