(This is another excerpt from my manuscript on the Sermon on the Mount. This is the whole first chapter, so it’s a longer post—about 2700 words.)
For all that I might ever say about the Sermon on the Mount, the most important single point, and the nub of all the rest, is this: The Sermon is gospel, not law. It is the proclamation of the good news that Jesus came that we might have abundant life—which is not just more of the same life the world has to offer. The life Jesus gives is wholly new because it comes from a source outside this world: it’s the life of the kingdom of God. It is life which both flows out of and creates a change of allegiance and citizenship. To be a disciple of Jesus is to be a citizen of the kingdom of heaven, giving our allegiance to the Lord of the universe above any earthly flag and any human government or authority. The Sermon on the Mount shows us what it means to live as citizens of heaven among the nations of this world.[1]
There are two premises here which should frame and control our reading of the Sermon. First, Jesus preached this sermon to his disciples. Though the crowds were present, they were not the primary audience. He was focused on those who had committed their lives to him, not those who were following him to serve their own purposes. This means we cannot interpret the Sermon as if it were addressed to the concerns of the Jewish religious leaders, or to the needs and desires of the common people. It’s teaching for his disciples, who have only just begun to follow him, to help them understand what they have gotten themselves into. Jesus came preaching the kingdom of God and called men and women to enter the kingdom through him. In the Sermon on the Mount, he proclaimed the life of the kingdom of God.
Second, Jesus isn’t giving his disciples law, he’s giving them grace. This is a critically important point, not least because so few people believe it.[2] Even the leaders of the Reformation, the great preachers of salvation by grace alone, read the Sermon on the Mount as pure law. For Luther and his theological descendants, the Sermon confronts us with our utter inability to keep the law of God well enough to satisfy him, and thus forces us to our knees before the cross of Christ.[3] This is what Calvin called the pedagogical use of the law; it may be law in the service of the gospel, but it is law nonetheless. Calvin himself also read the Sermon as law, differing from Luther only in seeing it as a case of the didactic use of the law, in which “the law is to the flesh like a whip to an idle and balky ass,” intended to drive us to pursue righteousness.[4]
Unfortunately, reading the Sermon as law devolves it in our minds into a collection of rules for righteous living that we have to keep by our own effort. This, I imagine, is why the founders of dispensationalism dismissed the Sermon as not addressed to the church age at all. They believed it to be a collection of laws which were relevant for Jesus’ fellow Jews and will be for the kingdom age yet to come, but don’t apply to us.[5] Other readers come hard up against commands like Matthew 5:39 (“Don’t resist the evil one, but if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other one to him also”) and declare the Sermon a farrago of idealistic nonsense that doesn’t work in the “real world.”[6]
Against this, we must insist that the Sermon on the Mount is good news, and should be read as good news rather than as law. This isn’t natural to us. We’re accustomed to living by law. That’s our default mode, both on the grand scale of nations and on the intimate scale of our families. We raise our children by law. I’m twenty years and four children into parenthood, and I have yet to come up with any other way to do it. Law is a blunt object, but it’s simple enough for small children to understand, where much of my theology would fly right over their heads. Law is even simple enough for human governments to manage, more or less.
Naturally, we reflexively interpret any authoritative statement, including the Scriptures, as law. God tells us he wants us to live a certain way, and we unthinkingly take that as a command which we’re expected to obey—which means that if we disobey, we’ll be punished. We live by law in the rest of life, so it seems perfectly natural for us to live by law in our religious faith. If we read the Bible on mental autopilot, we assume what seems natural to us was equally natural for Jesus. We hear what we expect to hear, not what he’s actually saying. To have any hope of hearing him truly, we need to change how we listen—and how we think.
Thinking with the Sermon on the Mount
To do this, we must free ourselves from the unconscious assumption that the Sermon (or any biblical text) was written by someone who thought like we do. Contemporary Western society is a profoundly different thought-world from the cultures of the first century AD and before. The gap is narrowest in the New Testament epistles addressed to the Greco-Roman world, which is one reason why many Protestant churches spend so much of their time there. Once we move beyond them into the Gospels and the Old Testament, we’re into the thought-worlds of ancient Near Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures. There, the gap is greater, and so the task of interpretation is trickier.
We often fail to realize this, however, because so much of those books is narrative. It’s easy for us to read our own assumptions, concerns, and motivations into the biblical story without even thinking about it, especially as we are trained to do so by our historical fiction—much of which, as Orson Scott Card put it, would be better labeled “People in Past Eras Who Think and Talk Just Like Modern Americans.”[7] The problem is compounded by the common idea that stories can only teach us simple lessons, usually moral(istic) in character. Serious theology, we have been taught, must be propositional in character, like the letters of Paul. Call it the VeggieTales school of biblical interpretation.[8]
Against this, I would like to borrow from William Dyrness and adapt the titular concept of his book Poetic Theology. Where Dyrness’ book is focused primarily on the content of our theology, my concern here is more for its form, but the two are obviously related. I suspect that much of the flattened spiritual imagination among Protestants which concerns Dyrness is due to the overly propositional way in which we typically teach the Bible and the Christian faith, producing a theology which is prosaic to the point of being deadening.[9]
Certainly, prose is an essential mode in theology. Consider Paul in the book of Romans, for instance: he appreciates poetry, but he teaches in prose. He sets out propositions, he builds up his arguments, he lays out his evidence, and he works through them logically to a conclusion. The way in which he does so presents us with its own difficulties, as his reasoning and his use of evidence represent a Jewish way of thinking which is often strange to our modern Western scientific mindset. Even so, he offers us logical argumentation in the classic sense, building a chain of reasoning from the beginning to the conclusion. Paul is a prosaic theologian.
That teaching method is congenial to Western culture. It’s possible to sit in a classroom and take notes on it, then turn those notes into a paper for class or an essay on the final exam. It fits well with the endless bullet points of a PowerPoint presentation. That said, it is not the only way to teach, or to present an argument, and it isn’t the way Jesus used.
Instead, we see Jesus teaching in images and stories, making his points with metaphor and appeals to experience. Where Paul engages in the classic battle of arguments—head to head, strength against strength, and may the best premise win—Jesus turns our strength against us. His teaching is intuitive and evocative, slipping around our rational defenses. Like Paul, he goes after the false assumptions that produce our false beliefs about God, the world, and ourselves, and he does so in order to replace them with truth. Unlike Paul, who attacks them at the head level with logical argument, Jesus subverts them with stories that call our hearts to witness against us.
This means we can’t break down the Sermon on the Mount into a series of arguments and commands, as we would one of Paul’s letters. Jesus’ theology isn’t prosaic in form, it’s poetic. The Sermon on the Mount isn’t a poem as such, but we need to approach it much as if it were. In this, we do well to heed the wisdom of Billy Collins. During his tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate, Collins created a program for teaching poetry in high schools, with an accompanying anthology, called Poetry 180. The anthology opens with Collins’ lyric “Introduction to Poetry”:
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slideor press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.[10]
This should be our model as we seek to understand the Sermon on the Mount. To use Collins’ language, we can’t tie it to a chair and beat it with a hose to find out “what it really means,” because that approach is inherently false to its meaning. Instead, we need to “walk inside [its] room and feel the walls for a light switch.” We need to drop in our questions like mice and watch them find their own way out. If we would hear Jesus truly, we must let him set the agenda, and then listen carefully.
The Structure of the Sermon on the Mount
Part of listening carefully to the Sermon on the Mount is paying attention to the structure. This can be difficult, because it isn’t linear in its argument, and doesn’t flow the way essays and speeches in Western culture do. As a result, there’s little agreement among scholars on its structure—or even if it has one. Some, like W. D. Davies, go so far as to conclude that it has none at all, but is merely “an agglomeration of sources and even of snippets of tradition.”[11] This allows us to read it as a disjointed jumble of topics with little real coherence or unity.
I believe the Sermon has a strong structure which makes sense if we understand and remember the common literary structures of the Old Testament, and particularly its use of parallelism. Parallelism of various types is common in the literature of the ancient world, both for aesthetic effect and as an aid to memory—which was of great importance in those largely pre-literate cultures. The Old Testament is no exception. Most simply, we see parallelism in individual verses, such as the step parallelism (AB A’B’ pattern) of Isaiah 28:17:
I will make justice the measuring line,
and righteousness the plumb line.
In verses like Isaiah 41:9, we see an AB B’A’ pattern, called inverted parallelism or chiasm:
I took you from the ends of the earth,
and from its farthest corners I called you.
(The word “chiasm” comes from the Greek letter X (pronounced khi); if one draws lines between the parallel elements in these lines, they form an X.)
These basic forms can be extended beyond just two lines into more complex parallels. Thus for instance we have the step parallelism (ABC A’B’C’) of Matthew 7:7-8:
Ask, and it will be given to you;
seek, and you will find;
knock, and it will be opened to you.
For everyone who asks receives,
and the one who seeks finds,
and to the one who knocks it will be opened.
Isaiah 6:10 gives us a fine example of inverted parallelism (ABC C’B’A’):
Make the heart of this people fat,
make their ears heavy,
and shut their eyes,
lest they see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their heart, and turn and be healed.
Beyond this, the biblical authors use parallelism on an even broader scale. This is especially true of inverted parallelism, which scholars like Kenneth Bailey argue is used to structure paragraphs, whole passages, and perhaps even entire biblical books.[12] These larger forms are also commonly referred to as chiasms or chiastic structures; since the original visual metaphor is lost on this scale, however, I prefer the term “ring composition” for these texts. In such literary units, the parallelism serves a purpose beyond the aesthetic or the mnemonic: it also functions in part to shape and reinforce the message and meaning of the text. The climax of the piece typically comes not at the end but in the center section around which it turns. The opening and closing sections are next in importance because they set the theme of the composition and provide the context for its argument.[13]
I believe the Sermon on the Mount is a ring composition, and that understanding this opens up the meaning of the text and helps us make sense of its more obscure parts.[14] Viewed in this way, for instance, it isn’t necessary to say, “The connection of Matt. 7:1–11 (cf. Luke 6:37–38, 41–42) to the preceding context is not easy to discern,” or to conclude that Matthew 7:6 is a “detached unrelated saying,”[15] because the structure shows us the connections.
If this structural interpretation is correct, what is the central pivot of the Sermon on the Mount, on which the greatest emphasis falls? The Lord’s Prayer. At the beginning come the Beatitudes, paralleled at the end by the parable of the wise and foolish builders. The initial and final sections tell us what the Sermon is about: the way of the disciple of Jesus. Those who follow Jesus live in this world but not according to this world, for he has given us the life of the kingdom of God. Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount to show his disciples what that means, and we need to understand everything he says about the law in light of that fact. The climax comes with the teaching on prayer, with the Lord’s Prayer at the center. This is as it should be—indeed, as it must be, practically speaking. Prayer must be at the heart of everything we do, for we cannot be disciples of Jesus in our own strength. As the Beatitudes show us, the life of a faithful disciple of Jesus is only possible by the power of the Spirit of God.
Photo © 2007 Torben Schink. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.
[1] See also William D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (3 vols.; rev. ed.; ICC; London: T & T Clark, 2004), 1:439-440, 466.
[2] Michael J. Wilkins, Matthew (NIVAC; Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004), 194-97.
[3] Martin Luther, Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, on Matthew 5:19 [cited 3 October 2013]. Online: http://www.godrules.net/library/luther/37luther1.htm.
[4] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Library of Christian Classics XX-XXI; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), II.vii.12-14.
[5] Craig L. Blomberg, Matthew (NAC 22; Nashville: Broadman, 1992), 94.
[6] See Walter Wink, The Powers that Be: Theology for a New Millennium (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 98.
[7] Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest, 2001), 5.
[8] This isn’t to deny the virtues of VeggieTales as children’s entertainment, but the church as a whole needs a much deeper understanding of the biblical narrative than those videos offer.
[9] William A. Dyrness, Poetic Theology: God and the Poetics of Everyday Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010).
[10] Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry,” from The Apple that Astonished Paris (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1996) [cited 25 July 2013]. Online: http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/001.html.
[11] W. D. Davies, The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 4.
[12] Kenneth E. Bailey, Paul Through Mediterranean Eyes: Cultural Studies in 1 Corinthians (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2011), 25-26. I am indebted to him for the term “ring composition.”
[13] Gary D. Martin, “Ring Composition and Related Phenomena in Herodotus,” 28 [cited 25 July 2013]. Online: http://faculty.washington.edu/garmar/RingCompositionHerodotus.pdf; Kenneth E. Bailey, Poet & Peasant (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976), 48, n. 26; Bailey, Paul, 43.
[14] I am not the first to make this argument, but the particular structural interpretation presented here is my own. After I developed it, I found it aligns fairly closely with that of Ulrich Luz, Matthew 1-7: A Commentary (rev. ed.; ed. Helmut Koester; trans. James E. Crouch; Hermeneia; Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007), 172-74. For others, see e.g. J. C. Fenton, “Inclusio and Chiasmus in Matthew,” Studia Evangelica Ι, ed. F. L. Cross (TU 73; Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1959), 178; Charles Hefling, “Farrer’s Scriptural Divinity,” in Captured by the Crucified: The Practical Theology of Austin Farrer, ed. David Hein and Edward Hugh Henderson (London: T & T Clark, 2004), 162.
[15] David L. Turner, Matthew (BECNT; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 203.