Taking in the Sermon on the Mount
- Todd Hall
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
The Journal of Christian Studies volume 4, issue 3, will be shipping soon! Below is the table of contents for the issue, and an excerpt from Nathan Guy's article, "Our Way of Life: A Virtue-Based Approach to the Complete Art of Happiness." Be sure to subscribe today to receive this issue!
Sermonizing the Sermon: Aims and Assumptions for Preaching Matthew 5–7
Brett Vanderzee
Our Way of Life: A Virtue-Based Approach to the Complete Art of Happiness
Nathan Guy
Preaching the Blessing of Christ
Matthew D. Love
Walking in the Way of Jesus: The Sermon on the Mount and Formation of Character
M. Todd Hall
“Among Christians, Is there a Christian?” On the Meaning and Means of Being “Perfect” in
Matthew 5:48
Sam Peters
The Lord’s Prayer: Praying for All It’s Worth
Mark A. Matson
To Judge or Not to Judge?
Keith D. Stanglin
“[It] has been a blockbuster bestseller. It spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list, including hitting # 1, has sold more than 1.5 million copies, and has been published in more than thirty languages.” So reads the blurb advertising a highly sought-after book. What is the subject matter that garners such interest? How to be happy. Gretchen Rubin titled her book, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. That “reading Aristotle” bit in the subtitle was intentional on her part; Aristotle thought that learning what happiness is, and doing whatever it takes to find it, is the secret to the meaning of life.
Think of it as our “ultimate” goal—the endpoint of every road we intentionally choose to travel. Why do we go through the pain, the sweat, the tears? Why endure the years of pressure, experience the daily grind, or take the nervous leap? You may name some intermediate good (the perfect house, the perfect car, or the perfect job), but even those things are in pursuit of something less tangible but more important: a sense of happiness.
The problem is that no matter how hard we try, happiness seems to elude us. The wise and rich king Solomon spent years chasing after happiness, only to conclude that it cannot be found in wealth, fame, or legacy—the right job, the right spouse, the right retirement plan or the right vacation (Eccl 1:14; 2:3–11). I think we know—deep down inside—that happiness does not come pre-packaged with gadgets or glam. We know that happiness is more than just a positive attitude, making lemonade out of the world’s lemons. That is, of course, a nice way of thinking, but one that is made available to a truly happy person, not one that makes a truly happy person.
We also know that happiness is not the same thing as pleasure and shouldn’t be confused with it. When given the choice to live in blissful ignorance, or to know the truth, we often opt for the latter. There are lots of things that appear to bring pleasure into our lives which we avoid for other, deeper reasons. Ask any body builder: they will go through intense pain and avoid what “feels good” in the moment in order to have long-lasting happiness. We sense that happiness is not a thing to be bought, or an event to attend; it is, as Rubel Shelly puts it, “a quality of spirit rather than a circumstance created by the right combination of gadgets, bucks, and glamor.” It refers to a quality of life—being and doing—that is not based on how much, or how little one has. Happiness is actively living in a state of blessedness.
Would it surprise you to learn that in the first century of the common era, a sermon began circulating containing the teachings of Jesus Christ, which offers a description of the “blessed,” “fortunate,” or, in some translations, “happy”? John Wesley told his audience that the whole point of Christ coming into the world was “to bless men; to make men happy.” For this reason, Jesus preaches a sermon to begin “his Divine institution, which is the complete art of happiness, by laying down before all that have ears to hear, the true and only true method of acquiring it.” Imagine that. A sermon given by the Lord himself describing “the complete art of happiness”? You would think such a sermon would be a best-seller and claim millions of disciples.
But experience tells us otherwise. Forty years ago, John Stott said, “The Sermon on the Mount is probably the best-known part of the teaching of Jesus, though arguably it is the least understood, and certainly it is the least obeyed.” Or as Daniel Doriani updates, “The Sermon on the Mount is perhaps the most beloved, the best known, the least understood, and the hardest to obey.” William Mattison, a virtue-ethicist and philosopher, claims the Sermon has long been neglected among Christian ethicists and moral theologians, is often skipped even by New Testament ethicists, and is missing not only as a text in ethics classes, but as a rule of parenting in most Christian homes.
Why? The answer is quite simple: there is a yawning disconnect between what Jesus says and how we tend to experience the world. “Jesus’ idea of the blessed life and our idea of the blessed life have almost nothing in common,” writes Randy Harris. Christ connects the words “blessed,” “fortunate,” and “happy” not with the rich, powerful, satisfied, and well-fed, but with the poor and humble, the mourning and the hungry. Against the Hollywood trend of “love ’em and leave ’em,” Jesus calls for fidelity in marriage. Contrary to what many consider advertising genius and “good business sense,” Christ tells us never to engage in verbal manipulation, or make grand claims about mundane things in order to get people to do, buy, or believe something. Instead of offering “good political sense” about protecting oneself against one’s dreaded enemies, Christ calls the good life one in which anger, hatred, defensiveness, and retaliation give way to love, service, and generosity. In short, we are called to love the person more than the product, more than performance, and more than profitability. It seems so absurd.
As a result, Christians have notoriously found interpreting the Sermon enormously difficult. In the history of interpretation, few passages have spawned more theories and garnered less agreement than this. One commentator said the history of scholarship on the sermon might be called “Versions and Evasions of the Sermon on the Mount.” Is this a literal list meant to be literally kept? Is this metaphorical and hyperbolic, providing a nice wish list but never actually intended to be kept? Is this counsel for monks and nuns alone? Is this some sort of interim ethic for apostles, but not for lay people? Are we to take one look at this sermon, find it unobtainable, and praise Jesus for doing what we could never do? The option list is so long, and so diverse, Luther memorably named the interpretive confusion “the devil’s masterpiece.”
When I read the Sermon, I see how nearly every interpretive strategy has something going for it, and something missing. Yes, Jesus expects the Sermon to be obeyed. Yes, there seems to be hyperbole involved. Yes, there are elements that may be kept by degrees. Yes, attempting to follow the Sermon reminds me of my sinfulness and causes me to praise Jesus, the only sinless one. So, what is the right (or most helpful) interpretive strategy? Surely the answer is some sort of combination theory, one that expects us to live it out and to keep our eyes on the only one fully described by this text. What is needed is a way to interpret that is sensitive to the history of interpretation, but one that can chart a course using the best our Christian tradition has to offer to forge a consistent approach that combines both hope in God’s gift of grace and summons to an obedient life.
Comments