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ANALYSIS OF THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

A relation of continuity 17-19

A relation of supersession 20-48

both of the existing standard of its professors 20

and of the original standard of the law 21-48

the law of murder 21-26

the law of adultery 27-30

the law of divorce 31-32

the law of perjury 33-37

the law of retaliation 38-42

the hatred of enemies 43-48

The approval of God, not of man 1

this applied to almsgiving 2-4

this applied to prayer 5-6

the gift of fasting 16-18

their consequent unworldliness 19-24

and freedom from anxiety 25-34

The uncritical temper 1-5

Reserve in communicating religious privileges 6

Impartial considerateness, based on experience of the character of God 7-12

The two ways 13-14

Character the one thing needful 15-23

Endurance the test 24-27

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

THE SERMON

WHAT is the Sermon on the Mount? It is the moral law of the kingdom of Christ, or in other words it occupies in the New Testament the place which in the Old Testament is occupied by the Ten Commandments. It is thus an excellent example of the relation of the two divine "testaments," or rather covenants, to one another. There is a sentence of St. Augustine's on this subject which it would be useful for every one to have constantly in mind. "We do wrong," he says, "to the Old Testament if we deny that it comes from the same just and good God as the New. On the other hand, we do wrong to the New Testament if we put the Old on a level with it." This is a general statement of the relation between the two covenants, and it applies especially to the moral law. The moral law of the Old Testament, as it is expressed in the Ten Commandments, was the utterance of the same God who now speaks to us in the person of Jesus Christ. It reappears here in the Sermon on the Mount, but deepened and developed. We may say with truth that the Sermon on the Mount supersedes the Ten Commandments; but it supersedes them by including them in a greater, deeper, and more positive whole.

This Sermon on the Mount, then, is the moral law of the new kingdom, the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of the Messiah. We have been used to think of the Messiah, the Christ, as an isolated figure; but the Messiah whose advent is expected in the Old Testament is only the centre of the Messianic kingdom. Round about the king is the kingdom. The king implies the kingdom as the kingdom implies the king. Thus the way in which Christ announced His Messiahship was by the phrase "The kingdom of heaven is at hand." And now--now that He has gathered round Him his first disciples--He takes them apart, and there on the mountain He announces to them the moral law of the new kingdom to which they are to belong. Thus it is a law not only for individual consciences, but for a society--a law which, recognized and accepted by the individual conscience, is to be applied in order to establish a new social order. It is the law of a kingdom, and a kingdom is a graduated society of human beings in common subordination to their king.

But observe, what we have here is law--law, not grace. In St. Paul's phrase, it is letter, not spirit. When St. Paul says that "the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life," he means this--that an external written commandment is capable of informing our consciences, of telling us what God's will is, of bowing us down to the dust with a sense of our inability to fulfil it; but it is not capable of going further. Thus it "killeth"; it makes us conscious of our sin, of our powerlessness, but it leaves it for something else to put life into us to do the thing we ought. That life-giving power is the Spirit. Thus the law, by informing, kills us: the Spirit, by empowering, gives us life. Observe, it is a good, a necessary thing to be thus killed. The perilous state is "to be alive without the law," that is, to have an unenlightened conscience and be living in a false peace. "If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness." The first thing is to know what we ought to do; and the very fact that we feel our powerlessness to do it, makes us ready to offer the cry, the appeal for divine help.

Again I would ask you to notice a sentence of Augustine's, which is full of meaning: "The law was given that men might seek grace; grace was given that the law might be fulfilled."

Thus what we have here, in the Sermon on the Mount, is the climax of law, the completeness of the letter, the letter which killeth; and because it is so much more searching and thorough than the Ten Commandments, therefore does it kill all the more effectually. It makes us all the more conscious of sin; all the more full of the clamorous demand that God, who asks such things of us, shall give us also the power to fulfil them. But just as in many departments of human life "man's necessity is God's opportunity," just as in some well-constructed drama the very culminating moment of difficulty suggests the immediate arrival of release, so it is here. The divine requirement is pressed home with unequalled force upon the conscience, but it is pressed home not in the form of mere laws of conduct, but as a type of character,--not out of the thick darkness by an inaccessible God, but by the Divine Love manifested in manhood and pledging His own faithfulness that he who hungers shall be satisfied and he who asks shall be heard. The hard demand of the letter is here in the closest possible connexion with the promise of the Spirit.

You will often see it noticed that a resemblance to some of the precepts in the Sermon on the Mount is to be discovered, not only in the Old Testament, on which the whole is confessedly based, but in the sayings of Jewish fathers, or in heathen philosophers and writers, like Confucius among the Chinese, and Socrates or Plato among the Greeks; and this has at times distressed Christians jealous of the unique glory of their religion. Thus they have sometimes sought to account for the coincidences between "inspired" and "uninspired" authors, or between the divine and the human speakers, by supposing that even heathen writers borrowed from the Old Testament. They were forgetting surely a great truth, a truth of which in the early centuries the minds of men were full: that Christ is the Word; and it is through fellowship in the Word, who is also the Reason of God, that all men are rational. Christ, therefore, is the light which in conscience and reason lightens every man from end to end of history. Christ has been at work, moving by His Spirit in the consciousness of man, so that the whole moral development of mankind, the whole moral education of the human race, is of one piece from end to end. There moves in it the same Spirit, there expresses itself the same Word. So that, as we should expect, there are fragments of the moral truth which in the Sermon on the Mount is completely delivered, fragments--greater or smaller, we need not now discuss--to be found among the Chinese, the Japanese, the Greeks, the Indians, because God left Himself nowhere without witness, the witness of His Word and Spirit in the hearts of men.

But what we also find to be true is, that the moral law here given supersedes the moral law as it is found among heathen nations or even among the Jews, by including it in a greater whole. We may compare the morality of this Sermon with that expressed by other religious teachers in several ways.

I must say one word about a problem which could not by any means be satisfactorily dealt with in the space now at our disposal.

We know that the critics of the Gospel narratives are in our time occupied with nothing so much as with the difficult problem of the relation which the Gospels bear to one another. This problem presents itself in connexion with our present subject.

The Sermon on the Mount as given in St. Matthew corresponds, though with many differences, to what you find scattered over a great number of different chapters in St. Luke--vi. 20-49, xi. 1-4, 9-13, 33-36, xii. 22-31, 58-59, xiii. 24-27, xiv. 34-35, xvi. 13, 17-18. Now what are we to say about the relation of these two accounts of the same teaching? There is a good deal that is most characteristic in St. Matthew's sermon which has nothing corresponding to it in the other evangelist, e.g. the spiritual treatment of the Commandments and of the typical religious duties of prayer, almsgiving and fasting; but where they are on the same ground they are often so closely similar that it is plain they are drawing from the same source. Whether this source was oral or written is a question we need not now discuss; but what are we to say of the different treatment of the same material?

It is throughout the method of St. Matthew to collect or group similar incidents or sayings. Thus he gives us a group of miracles , a group of seven parables , a long denunciation of the Pharisees which is represented in two different passages of St. Luke's Gospel , and a great group of discourses about "the end" of which the same thing may be said . Judging from his general method, then, we should conclude that in the Sermon on the Mount we have grouped together sayings which probably were uttered in fact, as St. Luke represents, on different occasions. For it is St. Luke's intention throughout to present events "in order," and the sayings of Christ each in its proper context.

But it must not be forgotten that a teacher who, like our Lord, teaches by way of "sentences" or proverbs, is sure to repeat the same truth in different forms and from different points of view. Those who have examined Francis Bacon's note-books and published works tell us how those weighty sentences of his were written down again and again and reappear continually in slightly different shapes. So we may suppose it probable that our Lord frequently repeated similar utterances.

Thus if St. Luke truly represents that our Lord on a certain occasion consoled His disciples by short and emphatic benedictions pronounced on the actual poverty in which they lived and the actual persecutions which they endured--"Blessed are ye poor, blessed are ye that hunger now, blessed are ye that weep now, blessed are ye when men hate you"--it does not by any means follow that He did not on another occasion pronounce, as recorded by St. Matthew, similar benedictions, more numerous, more general, and more spiritual, beginning with one not now on certain actually poor men, but on the "poor in spirit" in general. Thus on another occasion He repeated the saying, "How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God," in the more spiritual form, "How hard it is for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God." Again, it does not follow that because He gave the pattern prayer in a shorter form, as recorded by St. Luke, He should not also have given it in the longer form, as recorded by St. Matthew.

The collection of our Lord's discourses which characterizes the first Gospel is--there is every reason to believe--the work of the apostle St. Matthew. If so, we need to remember that it was the work not only of a first-rate witness, but also of one whose memory, naturally retentive, was quickened by a special gift of the divine Spirit bestowed on the apostles "to bring to their remembrance all that Christ had said unto them."

THE BEATITUDES IN GENERAL

"And seeing the multitudes, he went up into the mountain: and when he had sat down, his disciples came unto him: and he opened his mouth and taught them, saying,

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called sons of God.

Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall reproach you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you."

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