This will be my longest of introductions, but I think it is important and hope it will prove interesting.
While my sermon is mostly on Matthew 7, it is really intended to give a rather sweeping overview of the entire Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5-7), in as few words as possible. The operative interpretation behind my message is that, by paying strict attention to the historical, cultural and theological context, the Sermon on the Mount must be taken not as some loose “bouquet” of proverbs, aphorisms, inspiring ideals and “practical applications” but, rather, as a single, coherent, logically developed summons to the nation, to the real people listening to Jesus that day – a radical summons to abandon a worldview grounded in relative (comparative) righteousness, social approbation and cultural identity.
The summons is even more radical and audacious in that, in place of that familiar, more-or-less comfortable worldview, Jesus presents – starkly, without apology – himself as the center, the touchstone, the authority, the very meaning of the new worldview – a worldview to be accepted for no lesser reason than that, very simply, it is reality, the way things actually are.
In short, the “narrow gate” is Jesus and the straight path is the new life of the kingdom upon which one sets out after entering through Him. (Notice, please, how this interpretation diverges from the customary one as depicted on Sunday School room posters, where the straight path leads up to a narrow gate/pearly gates, i.e., into Heaven at the end of life. To me, that interpretation totally misses the stark option Jesus was laying out to his immediate hearers. The gate isn’t at the end of the road but the beginning.)
Before the Jewish nation in about the year 30 AD there are two paths available: 1) the “wide gate” which will (whether they know it or not, but Jesus knows it) lead only to the end of the world, i.e., their world as they perceive and construct it (70 AD), and 2) the “narrow gate”, which is Jesus himself, the living portal of God’s kingdom, where true righteousness both commences and is consummated in knowing him. Having entered the kingdom through him, their true identity before God can never again be threatened, no matter what happens to the temple, to Jerusalem, etc. They will become the genuine kingdom of the Spirit, in Christ.
Understood in this way, the Sermon becomes less the “beautiful”, “inspirational” piece of “literature” some would make it out to be (though ultimately it is far more “beautiful” than that) and more of a scandal and outrage to the socio-religious norms of the time. Jesus’ sermon epitomizes C.S. Lewis’s famous observation about Jesus leaving his contemporaries (and us) very few intellectually honest options, i.e., to take him as “liar, lunatic or Lord”. If, as Jesus says in the conclusion and summation of the sermon, he is actually going to be the One to whom all souls answer on the last day, then the whole sermon is true and the only reasonable thing for his hearers to do that day was to throw in their lot 100% with him, no matter what. If he is wrong, however, then any talk of the “moral beauty” of the sermon is simply nonsense.
Someone might object that I am being naïve taking the Sermon as a conceptual whole – that, for one thing, it is unlikely Jesus actually “recited” these three “chapters,” word-for-word, all in one go just like we have it recorded. And, for another thing, what we have in writing is in any case the composition – no matter how accurately recalled – of Matthew. We can’t interpret the Sermon solely on the basis of what we think Jesus was saying to those people that day or how they took his meaning; rather, we have to take into account what Matthew wanted to say to his audience, too.
My responses to those objections:
1) there is no reason to assume that Jesus did not or could not have pronounced this entire message, virtually as we have it recorded, all in one go. It’s not really that long a sermon, particularly for the pre-television world (when people still had attention spans) and particularly when there is a vital conceptual center driving the development of the thought with passion. We all know quite well that when there is one thing we desperately wish to get across as vividly as possible, it is quite normal to explain the idea at length, with multiple illustrations, applications and extrapolations. The Sermon is a perfect example; in fact, in terms of length or complexity, it is hardly an extreme case. I would even call it a rather compact nugget! Moreover, even if Matthew 5-7 encapsulates teaching pronounced by Jesus over a period of days, that fact doesn't argue in the least against the tight conceptual flow of the Sermon either in Jesus' telling or Matthew's recording. You could make the argument, after all, that Jesus was preaching only one thing for three years.
2) Yes, we are “getting” the Sermon through a) the “filter” of Matthew, b) the passage of time between event and composition, and c) the materialization of new contexts, i.e., the early Church to which Matthew is writing, a (somewhat) different audience than Jesus’ there on the mountainside (though Israel was, after all, God’s “church” [qahal] and the raw material, the initial stock, of Jesus’ new ‘qahal’). This is hardly an objection. Matthew’s world, and the early Church’s, is still the world, and audience, Jesus addressed on the mountainside. The challenge of Jesus was no less audacious or outrageous expressed through the Church and its writings in the middle first century than when Jesus himself pronounced the words on earth only a few years or decades earlier. The challenge, the import and virtually the entire socio-cultural context was the same. Therefore, Matthew’s “message” is faithful to Jesus’ “message”. It is the same message: the early Church is the “poor in spirit” whom Jesus challenged to enter the “narrow gate” and entrust their eternal lot to Him, seeking first the kingdom and God’s righteousness. They have cut their line to the dock and set sail with the Captain of their salvation, Jesus. (For some, however, the ride eventually proved rather too adventurous and they started looking longingly back to the dock... which is what the whole Epistle to the Hebrews is about. But that’s another story. Sort of.)
To appreciate the meaning and importance of chapter seven, which is the climax of the Sermon on the Mount, we really have no choice but to quickly sum up chapters five and six! Believe me, this will be quick.
The essence of what Jesus is saying to the people around him, starting from the Beatitudes, is this: “People, everything is about to change; it’s already changing. The kingdom is coming, and its laws and principles aren’t what you think. You’ve got to be ready to think in a new way, to see in a new way. For example, blessed are this world's 'losers', the ones whose hearts are broken over the evils around them, and in them. They’re the ones who are ready to receive what's coming: the kingdom. You can’t enter the kingdom unless you’re willing to live for it and be the salt of the earth. How do you do that, you ask? Simple: your righteousness must be greater than even the Pharisees’ righteousness! What? Not so simple? The Pharisees are experts in righteousness? They know every trick in the book when it comes to keeping God’s law? Not so fast. Let’s talk about righteousness. You’ve heard them teaching you about everything it says in the Book: Don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t break your oaths. But I’m telling you today that God’s standard is unbelievably higher. God looks at the heart. God doesn’t look at what you’re not doing; He looks at what you want to do. You’ve all been very well trained to be religious: you know when to fast, when to say your prayers, when to give money to the poor. And you get a nice pat on the back from the world when you do. But I’m telling you today that God’s standard is unbelievably higher. He looks at the heart. It’s time for you to decide what you want more: a nice pat on the back for being religious, or maybe rejection, suffering, even death for wanting what God wants and doing what God does. So decide. Do you want the kingdom? If you’re ready to surrender yourselves totally to God, I promise you, your Father in heaven will take care of you better than anyone could. But you’ve got to put Him... and Me... first.”
And that is my condensed version of the first two-thirds of the Sermon on the Mount. And now we come to the dramatic, even shocking climax. And if you were a Jewish man or woman listening to what Jesus was saying that day, I guarantee you, you would have been shocked.
So we come to chapter seven. Chapters five and six were like a picture which Jesus drew, a picture of a beautiful country, and he is inviting everyone to follow him there. But to go there, you have to get into Jesus’ ship, the ship of salvation. And Jesus is the captain of that ship. It means you have to leave your old country with all its traditions and laws, and you have to obey the rules of the ship. I think this is what Jesus is telling us in chapter seven. I think he’s saying, “Now you know where I want to bring you. Are you ready to go? If so, get in the boat and don’t look back. You can’t live the old way anymore. You can’t think the old way anymore. This is a new life with a new foundation, new responsibilities, new promises and, yes, new dangers.”
Now please remember: these events we read about in scripture aren’t just words on paper; these aren’t people in a painting by Leonardo Da Vinci or statues who never change, never feel anything. These are real people, who cough and sneeze, who scratch where it itches, who get sunburned – for instance, when they’re standing outside listening to a carpenter from Nazareth preaching. These are specific people who love other specific people, probably hate a few specific people, too, and don’t spend much time at all thinking about the rest. And now picture Jesus there on the mountain surrounded by his disciples and this crowd – there are no halos in the picture, by the way – and he is announcing that a kingdom has come, though nothing seems to have changed very much if you look around. But Jesus sits there and teaches the nation from the mountaintop, almost like, well, like God giving Moses the law on Mount Sinai. And in that crowd there are most likely some Pharisees and other bigwigs, and they’re not dumb. They get it. And they’re probably thinking, “Who does he think he is?” And Jesus’ subtle hints – and not-so-subtle hints – about the Pharisees’ so-called righteousness don’t fly over their heads, either. There are extremely uncomfortable moments during this Sermon, especially for any bigwigs who happen to be in the audience.
I think chapter seven begins with exactly such an uncomfortable moment, when Jesus talks about judging. Now, we usually understand this section to mean that we shouldn’t criticize each other. Some people even think this part of the Sermon says that we should never say that anything is a sin. The words, “Judge not, lest you be judged” are the favorite slogan of different groups who organize big demonstrations in support of sinful lifestyles. You’ll see Jesus’ words “Judge not!” painted in big letters on the signs they carry in their parades: “Since Jesus said, ‘Do not judge’, you have no right to say that anything is a sin!”
Now we have to ask, is that, can that, really be what Jesus meant? That it is always wrong to identify an action of any kind as sinful, or even just plain wrong? I don’t think so. In fact, when we look at Jesus’ own life and how he condemned evil acts, we know that can’t be what he meant. Otherwise, he broke his own rule!
No, the whole logical flow of the Sermon on the Mount, and the situation in that society where Jesus was speaking, make it very clear that Jesus is simply continuing the central thought that started from chapter five, verse one: it's time for you to abandon your old life. And what was that old life? To a great extent, it was a religious system, very much run by the Pharisees, based on comparing: who’s the best keeper of the law, all 613 laws of it, not to mention thousands and thousands of interpretations. The Pharisees were the Taliban of Jesus’ time, the religious watchdogs: judging was their job. And if you wanted to be anybody in society, you’d better get yourself a degree in judging, too! For us, the word “judging” has a very negative connotation – in fact, precisely because of the Sermon on the Mount. But I think the Pharisees would have been delighted with that job description, just like the women in Iran who walk the streets with their sticks ready to give a good beating to any female who isn’t sufficiently cloaked. I think the Pharisees would have boasted, “Yes, we’re the ones who make everybody toe the line, who make sure nobody breaks God’s law... as we interpret it.” In that specific, suffocating environment, Jesus’ meaning is very clear, and it’s also radical, dangerous and threatening to the religious big shots of the time. He is saying, “No. No. God never made you His enforcers. In His kingdom, you’re out of a job, guys. And your whole system has completely the wrong focus.” As soon as Jesus brought up judging, the crowd had to know what the subtext was; they lived in it all the time. I bet there were a few carefully hidden smiles among the simple folk, and maybe some scowls and glares among the Pharisees in the crowd. “Instead of making judges out of yourselves,” Jesus tells them, “what you really have to do is become experts in personal holiness, and if you can’t see the difference, then you haven’t understood a word I’ve said so far.” Of course I’m paraphrasing, but I genuinely believe this meaning was obvious for those people there in that place at that moment. Let’s look closer at the allegory Jesus presents – a very famous allegory.
“How can you see the splinter in your brother’s eye and not see the plank in your own?” I think it’s fair enough to say most people interpret that to mean, “How can you see the eensy-weensy little fault in somebody else and totally miss the monstrous flaw in yourself?” I have to tell you, I don’t agree with that interpretation, popular though it is. If that’s what Jesus is saying, it completely contradicts his whole point. It doesn’t actually make sense. For a lot of reasons.
For example, there have got to be cases where the tables are turned (right?) and the fault in my life isn’t nearly as terrible as the next guy’s – like, maybe he’s a murderer or something. In that case, Jesus’ allegory doesn’t apply to me. I get an ‘out’, a free pass, I can judge my brother because, this time, he's got the plank and I've only got the splinter.... But we know that can’t be right. Jesus was laying down a principle that applies to everyone. So there’s got to something more in this besides simply comparing how big one sin is against another.
And that brings up another reason why I can’t accept the usual interpretation. The whole point here is that it’s time to leave that old religion of proving who’s better than whom. Now, how does it make sense if Jesus bases that whole point on an illustration that depends on comparing one person’s sin against another’s - that is, the plank vs. the splinter? If Jesus is saying “You can’t judge, because your sin is bigger”, that’s already a comparison! It doesn’t make sense.
Finally, it doesn’t make sense because Jesus says, nevertheless, that when you take care of the plank in your eye, you can help your brother get his splinter out. So, obviously, the point is not that you must never recognize where someone else needs correction.
For all those reasons, the usual interpretation just doesn’t work for me.
Here’s what I believe Jesus is actually saying to those people, in that time, in a way they would really get, and good. If I have a speck of wood in my eye and you have a speck of wood in yours, and they’re the same size (because nobody can really have a plank in their eye), which speck should be more obvious to me: the one in my eye or the one in yours? Of course, the one in mine. It’s in my eye, after all. I can feel it, it hurts, it should be my main issue of the moment: how do I get this thing out of my eye? Because it’s in my eye, it should be like a plank to me, the biggest thing in my field of vision. If it’s not, there’s something wrong with me. And the very idea that I wouldn’t even notice it and at the same time look at you and say, “Whoa, have you got a tree trunk in your eye” is crazy. And yet, Jesus is telling the people of his time that that’s precisely what they’re doing, and it is crazy. It’s not a matter of whose sin is bigger. Comparing isn’t the issue; in fact, that’s what they’re supposed to stop doing. It’s a question of whose sin you notice most of all- yours or other people’s. Jesus is saying that, in this kingdom of righteousness where he reigns, we must each become an expert in splinter removal, first from our own eyes. In other words, experts in personal holiness. Because we belong to Him. Because those splinters don’t go with love for Him. The subject is the hunger and thirst for righteousness. It is the love of God, and the priority on living the life that brings Him joy – and not only Him, but us, too. When we do that in our own lives, then, yes, we certainly will become examples and a help to others with their “splinters”. In fact, your example might be so powerful that you’ll help your brother or sister grow in spiritual purity and the knowledge of God with hardly a word.
And then we run smack into a very difficult statement to interpret (read v.6). But I have to say that if we stick to the whole flow of thought that started in chapter five and is now reaching its climax, this verse suddenly becomes much clearer. Usually we take it out of context and make it mean, “Don’t waste your time witnessing to people who are only going to make fun of the Gospel.” That’s what I’d call a “good try” interpretation, but it really has no connection at all to anything that Jesus is talking about here. So I think there must be a better one. If Jesus has been talking about saying goodbye to the old world and welcoming the kingdom in him, then this odd, mysterious allegory certainly continues that thought. And I do believe that the crowd standing there would have caught the gist right away. Jesus is saying, You can’t mix the new with the old. You can’t take what I’m giving you now and go back home and try to mix it in with the religion of the Pharisees and all that way of thinking. It won’t work. In fact, it will be a disaster. It will be like coming to a pigpen full of hungry pigs with a basket full of pearls. You throw the pearls to the pigs and they greedily go running for them... till they realize, “We can’t eat these”. Then you’ve got some really angry pigs on your hand, and they might start looking at you like dinner. That’s what will happen to you if you try to follow me and at the same time keep dancing to the Pharisees’ tune, trying to keep them happy, too. It won’t work either way. You won’t really be following me, and you won’t keep them happy, either! It’s a lose-lose proposition. Spiritual compromise is never “win-win”. Jesus’ message to the people on the mountainside that day, and to us today, is: if you’ve gotten into his ship, it means you’ve cut your ties, you’ve left the dock, and the new wine will never fit in the old wineskins. You can’t go to the world for your dose of “relevance”, of popularity, acceptance, significance, self-esteem, whatever. It’s not there anymore. Now, Jesus explains as he continues this message, you depend totally on God for all that, and the Father is ready to give you every truly good thing that you need: ask, and it shall be given to you. He loves to give, and your task is to be like Him – to love giving and doing to others as you would like them to do to you. That’s life in the kingdom.
It’s very hard, it’s not natural for us to live like this, but it’s the only way. Most people are going the easy way, the way of the flesh, but God calls us to go through the narrow gate and follow the straight way. Jesus is the gate and following him is the straight way. It’s not easy and it requires total devotion, but it’s do-able, because He walks the way with us. Yes, there will be fraudsters who try to lure you off the path, but you will know them for what they are, because they don’t line up with the truth. By their fruits you will know them!
And then Jesus says this amazing thing: On that day many will come to me and say, Lord, Lord.... We read these words and hardly even bat an eye. We think, “Well, yes, of course!” But imagine what this sounded like to the people standing there, listening to this young man, around thirty years old, from a poor village, without much education, no connections, no status, probably even talks with a lower-class accent – and here he is telling them, “On the last day humanity’s judge will be... me!” Some listeners may have thought it was a joke. Others may have thought it was craziness. And certain ones may have begun thinking that very day: “This Jesus is a person we must get rid of.” It is hard for us to really grasp how big a risk Jesus took, from a human point of view, by saying these words, because we only see the words on the page. And we believe that Jesus truly is Lord. But we don’t see the actual scene where Jesus pronounced these words, where people had no idea who he was, where they could have arrested him on the spot, or even stoned him. To really get in touch with that is to begin understanding what a powerful show of courage and faith this is; it’s the model of truth-telling, no matter the cost. You’ve got to have confidence to tell truth like that. Jesus has total confidence in the authority of His beloved Father in heaven and the concrete reality of what he was saying. With faith in Christ, we can have similar courage to speak truth, even when the world calls us crazy, or worse.
So you can see why the people were so amazed that Jesus spoke as one having authority. He even said he would judge the world! This is a huge declaration. Such a declaration certainly requires proof. In the following chapters of Matthew, we see this proof over and over again, where Jesus demonstrates his authority in many ways. Isn’t it interesting that the very first word someone says to Jesus after this great sermon is “Lord”? That was the leper whom Jesus healed. And after him the centurion also says, “Lord, I know that you have authority” and Jesus heals the centurion’s servant from far away, with just a word. And then Jesus prove to the Pharisees that “the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” Then Jesus sends his disciples out on a preaching mission and he gives them – what? – authority. You see, this idea of authority was very important for the people of Jesus’ time. I think it’s very important for us, too. Probably none of us wants to have total authority. None of us wants to be president, for example. Sometimes I worry that the only people who want to be president are crazy –and that would mean we elect crazy people to govern us! But all of us deeply desire the assurance and security of knowing that we have honest, strong and benevolent authority over us. When we hear about corruption in government, when we think our leaders have lied to us, we get very upset and angry. If we can’t trust the authorities, then everything in life seems shaky and uncertain.
But Jesus has proven his perfect and trustworthy authority and power. We will all answer to him some day. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus promises that if we devote ourselves to his kingdom, if we make him captain of our ship and author of our salvation, then we’ll be like the house on the rock that stood firm even when the wind and waves beat against it. We won’t fall. How do we do that? Believe in Him, don’t look back, don’t mix the new with the old, grow into experts in personal holiness and devotion to God, trust your heavenly Father for all that you really need and, most of all, grow more like Him all the time, because He is perfect.
