Sermon on the Mount Page 3
To sketch Jesus’ “theory” I want to suggest first that Jesus “did” ethics from four angles: Ethics from Above, Ethics from Beyond, Ethics from Below, and then setting each of these into the context of Jesus’ messianic ethics designed for the messianic community in the power of the Spirit.20
Ethics from Above: Torah
Jesus emerges out of a history, and that history is Israel’s history. One of the central elements of that history is that God speaks to humans in the Torah—the law of Moses. The paradigmatic story is found in Exodus 19–24, with the Ten Commandments found in Exodus 20, all rehearsed in a new form in Deuteronomy. What strikes a reader is that this is top-down communication from God: God descends to the top of Mount Sinai and reveals divine law for Israel through Moses. That God spoke, of course, was nothing new, nor did God speak only once to Israel. The singular expression of the prophet, still known in the King James Version, is “Thus saith the LORD.” Everything about Jesus’ ethics emerges from this history of God having spoken directly to Israel.
Perhaps the most astounding feature of Jesus’ ethics is that while Jesus clearly speaks for God and Jesus clearly fits the profile of a prophet, Jesus never says, “Thus saith the Lord.” He speaks directly as the voice of God. His words are no less than an Ethics from Above. The Sermon on the Mount ends with words to this effect: “When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law” (7:28–29).
No one in the last two hundred years seems to have grasped this self-authoritative dimension of the ethics of Jesus, namely, the encountering force of God-with-us in Jesus as King and Lord and Savior, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer did in his Discipleship.21 This classical book blows apart the common distinction between justification and sanctification, and that move enabled Bonhoeffer to get closer to the heart of the Sermon than most. (If someone entered my house and stole every book I own, Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship would be the first one I’d purchase the next morning—if I waited that long.)
Classic virtue, Kantian, and utilitarian ethics never make the claim to be divinely revealed words, but this is at the heart of the ethic of Jesus (and the Bible). When Christians express Christian ethics through such philosophical theories, they have to modify and reformulate both the content and the theory to make the theory fit.
Variations on this Ethics from Above are found in the Christian tradition. Perhaps the strongest form is divine command theory. This theory of ethics emphasizes divine revelation as the first word in all ethical discussions, with the added emphasis that what makes a moral demand right is that God issues that demand.22 The ancient philosophical debate in Plato was whether an act was good because God commanded it or whether God commanded it because it was (already) good. But divine command theory today has found a way out of that thicket to make the claim that because God is good God’s demands are good and right and loving.23
The newest kid on the block when it comes to ethical theory is narrative ethics, and by this we mean theories of ethics that contend we are part of a story, that such a story formed our ethics and is designed to shape us yet further. Stanley Hauerwas’s capturing of ethics into an ecclesial narrative is perhaps the best-known example of a narrative-shaped ethic, but our point here is that this story is a revelation, that is, the story in which we dwell comes to us from God, and we appropriate this story as divine revelation through Scripture, the tradition, the Spirit, and the church.24 Christian narrative ethics, then, require an Ethics from Above.
I would contend as well that N.T. Wright’s virtue ethics work so well because of his commitment to Story and a biblical eschatology, one that takes seriously the created order as continuous in some ways with the new heavens and the new earth. Thus, Wright substantively reshapes virtue ethics in part by an Ethics from Above that is shaped by a kind of narrative ethics.25 I have myself framed Jesus’ gospel and the apostolic gospel as making sense only in the context of the Story of the Bible, the Story of Israel, and that the fulfillment of that Story is the Story of Jesus.26 That is, the gospel itself is a way of narrating God’s Story in this world as moving from Adam through Abraham and Israel and David to Jesus and then beyond Jesus into the church of the prophets and apostles. If Jesus is the Messiah of that Story, and that is the gospel itself, then all ethics for Jesus involve at least, as one element, an Ethic from Above in the form of that narrative.
But narrowing how Jesus “did” ethics to a divine command posture or, better yet in his day and in his terms, to a Torah posture won’t adequately capture how Jesus’ ethics operated. Yes, to be sure, God speaks to us through Jesus, no more ethically than what we find in the Sermon on the Mount, but simply a vertical movement of words from God to us isn’t sufficient for the fullness of Jesus’ ethic.
Ethics from Beyond: Prophets
The genius of Israel’s prophets was that they revealed God’s will to his people, and at the heart of the prophets’ ethic was bringing God’s future to bear on the present. This is what I mean by an Ethics from Beyond, and it takes us one step beyond an Ethics from Above and one step closer to how Jesus “did” ethics. There is little corresponding ethic in modern ethical theory to this Ethics from Beyond except perhaps in a social contract that sustains a society into its future, or a progressive ethic that hopes beyond hope in some form of a world getting better and better, or a green ethic that urges humans to live now in light of the earth’s future (or catastrophe). But social-contract, progressive, and ecological theories run out of steam just where Jesus began: his ethical posture toward the present was robustly shaped by a certain knowledge of God’s future. Jesus’ ethics flowed directly from God’s kingdom; they are kingdom ethics.
The sheer force of Jesus’ kingdom language, found more than a hundred times in the Synoptic Gospels and then advanced to some degree by John’s conceptualization of kingdom in his expression “eternal life” and then crystallized in several Pauline observations (like Phil 2:6–11 or 1 Cor 15:20–28) and then gloriously sketched in Revelation 20–22, puts the listener of Jesus’ ethic up against an eschatological ethic, a set of norms grounded in his belief of what is to come. What is to come for the person is consequentialist in that the future determines how one lives in the here and now. His ethic was an ethic for now in light of the kingdom to come. In the words of Stanley Hauerwas, “The sermon is the reality of the new age made possible in time.”27 Or, as Joe Kapolyo framed it, “These disciples have the responsibility of living their lives in terms of the values that prevail in the kingdom of heaven.”28 We often call this “inaugurated” eschatology, and that means Jesus’ kingdom ethic is an inaugurated-kingdom ethic.
The most notable element of Jesus’ Ethics from Beyond was that the future had already begun to take effect in the present. This is the point of Matthew 4:17, words that butt up against the Sermon on the Mount and propel the words of Jesus throughout: “From that time on Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ ”
Over and over again in the Sermon and in Jesus’ teaching, the future impinges on the present in such a way that a new day is already arriving in Jesus. Thus, “these are not ordinary ethics, nor are they merely an extension of intensification of Jewish ethics … They are the ethics of the kingdom.”29
The utilitarian, consequentialist ethic of Mill is a dry bone when compared to Israel’s prophets and Jesus, for their consequentialism is not just a better world or even personal happiness, but ultimately the glory of God when God establishes his kingdom in this world. And a virtue ethic with no eschatology, which is what Aristotle offered to the world, can’t be compared to the virtue ethic that one finds in Jesus. Here I think of how NT ethics are unfolded in Tom Wright’s After You Believe, in Oliver O’Donovan’s magisterial Resurrection and Moral Order, and in Glenn Stassen and David Gushee’s Kingdom Ethics. An ethic unshaped by eschatology is neither Jesus’ nor Christian.
But once again, there
’s a dimension of Jesus’ ethics that is neither covered by an Ethics from Above or an Ethics from Beyond, but which is inherent to Israel’s Story and, in fact, have become the predominant form of ethical reflection in the history of humankind.
Ethics from Below: Wisdom
This third dimension of Jesus’ ethic emerges from a dimension of the Bible and Jewish history that is too often ignored in contemporary ethical theory, and it is an irony that a discipline known as the “love of wisdom” (philo-sophia) so rarely today lets itself become absorbed in wisdom motifs. An example of a moral philosopher who does, however, is Martin Buber, whose work I and Thou remains monumental.30 Those familiar with Israel’s wisdom tradition, and Buber was, will know that there is a striking absence, or at least a major de-emphasis, of a Torah-shaped ethic and a revelatory-based set of commands.
Wisdom was not an Ethic from Above or, since it lacked an eschatological shaping, an Ethic from Beyond. The wisdom writers, and here I’m thinking of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, and the noncanonical Ben Sirach, don’t say, “God says do this”; neither do they say, “Here comes God, better shape up!” No, the wisdom tradition anchors itself in human observation. Wisdom, then, is how to live in God’s world in God’s way, but this kind of wisdom can only be acquired by those who are humbly receptive to the wisdom of society’s sages. As well, a wisdom culture trusts human observation and through intuition discerns God’s intentions for this world.
Jesus, too, frequently teaches his followers how to live in light of inductive observation. In the Sermon this is clear, for instance, in going the second mile in Matthew 5:38–42, or in 6:19–34, where Jesus teaches a single-minded righteousness. Each day has enough gripes, so why engage today in tomorrow’s griping?
Yet this earthy, horizontal, and inductive—dare one say empirical?—framing of ethics too often leads to the elimination of an Ethic from Above and an Ethic from Beyond.31 One sees this in Aristotle, of course, but also in Kant, who wanted to frame all ethics on the basis of reason alone; one sees it in Bentham and Mill; one sees it in the egoistic ethical theory of Ayn Rand, our modern world’s obsession with cultural relativism in which belief in a revelation or a kingdom has been surrendered; one sees it even more in evolutionary ethics that seek to frame ethics on the basis of what is natural to human evolution; one sees it in B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism, which, in fact, all but surrendered anything like ethics. A good example of that struggle is Bernard Gert’s attempt to establish moral theory on reason alone.32 As my friend Greg Clark observed to me, perhaps we first learn about the futility—but ultimate cynical posture—of framing ethics entirely from below in the Bible itself, in Ecclesiastes, which reminds us that so much of human striving is nothing but vanity.
But others are extending through discernment Jesus’ Ethics from Below in light of how the Bible speaks about a variety of pressing topics, and I think here of both William Webb, in his Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals, where he thoroughly maps his “redemptive-movement hermeneutic,” and of Samuel Wells, in his Improvisation, where he contends that the proper posture of the Christian is to improvise rather than simply to perform the script.33 The reason I assign Webb and Wells to an Ethics from Below is because they singularly focus on learning to discern, in wisdom, how to live out the Bible in our world in a way that breaches the script in order to advance a Christian ethic into new territory. Any use of the Sermon on the Mount that does not extend it into our world by plowing new ground converts into a mere Ethics from Above and fails to embrace that Jesus himself “did” Ethics from Below. How we can we “follow” Jesus and not learn to do ethics as he did?
Jesus’ Ethical Theory: Messianic, Ecclesial, Pneumatic
I want to propose, then, that Jesus’ ethic is a combination of an Ethics from Above, Beyond, and Below—the Law, the Prophets, and the Wisdom Literature. But there’s more because those three elements for his ethics are tied to his messianic vocation, his conviction that an ethic can only be lived out in community (the kingdom manifestation in the church) and through the power of the Spirit now at work. The above, beyond, and below are each reshaped because it is Jesus’ ethic, because this ethic is for his followers, and because the Spirit has been unleashed.
Jesus’ ethic is distinct because Jesus saw himself as Israel’s Messiah, and because at its core Jesus offered nothing other than a Messianic Ethic.34 Nothing makes sense about the Sermon until we understand it as messianic vision, and once we understand it as messianic we can understand it all—especially its radical elements.35 Thus, Tom Wright gets it exactly right when he says: “The Sermon … isn’t just about how to behave. It’s about discovering the living God in the loving, and dying, Jesus, and learning to reflect that love ourselves into the world that needs it so badly.”36 Or, as the German New Testament scholar and Lutheran bishop Eduard Lohse, put it: “Jesus’ word is not separable from the one who speaks it.”37
At the core of Jesus’ ethics, then, is a belief about himself, that he indeed was the one who brought the Old Testament Law and the Prophets (as well as Wisdom Literature) to their completion or defining point in who he was, what he did, and what he taught. There is a Torah dimension; there is a Wisdom dimension; and there is a Prophet dimension. But King Jesus pushes each of these to a new level where Jesus himself is the Torah, the Wisdom, and the Prophet who was to come. Only in association or relationship with Jesus does the Sermon make sense. Jesus does not offer abstract principles or simply his version of the Torah for a new society. Instead, he offers himself to his disciples, or, put differently, he summons them to himself and in participation with Jesus and his vision the disciples are transformed into the fullness of a kingdom moral vision.
But Jesus’ Messianic Ethic is not for isolated individuals. Transcending what Aristotle meant in his discussions of friendship and recapturing Israel’s own sense of family identity, this ethic of Jesus was to be lived out in the context of a kingdom community, the ecclesia. As the Messiah formed a community of followers, so the ethic of Jesus is a messianic and kingdom-community ethic. The Sermon on the Mount is supremely and irreducibly ecclesial. Few have emphasized this theme as central to Christian ethics like John Howard Yoder.38 Or, as Hauerwas said it, “The sermon, therefore, is not a list of requirements, but rather a description of the life of a people gathered by and around Jesus.”39 Church, then, forms the context for the ethic of Jesus.40
But there’s more in the pages of the New Testament as ethical reflection lumbers toward the second century: Jesus’ ethical vision was only practicable through the power of the Pentecostal gift of the Holy Spirit who took human abilities to the next level and human inabilities and turned them into new abilities. This Spirit-driven ethic was to be sustained in the ecclesia by sacraments, by Word, by the gifts of the Spirit, and by memory of our common Story. Much more could be said, but this sketches how Jesus did ethics.
Preliminaries to Reading the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew
There are two versions of the Sermon, one in Matthew 5–7 (the text this commentary will expound) and one in Luke 6:20–49. Since our focus will be on Matthew’s version of the Sermon, we need to sketch a brief introduction to Matthew and its Sermon, though when this series is completed there will be a more complete introduction to Matthew in the volume on Matthew.41
The Question of Authorship
After more than three decades of teaching Matthew and the Sermon, I have come to this conclusion: it is impossible to prove who wrote Matthew’s gospel. By that I mean it is as impossible to prove that he (Matthew, the tax collector of Matt 9:9–13) didn’t do as that he did. It has been customary to lay on the table one’s claim: undeniably, Matthew is the traditional author. Then lay next to that claim the many and various criticisms of that claim, then respond to each criticism—often done with admirable detail—and then conclude that since none of the criticisms are sufficiently demonstrated, Matthew is the author. The logical problem here needs more attention by those who use this approach: disproving cr
iticisms is not the same as proving the claim that the tax collector wrote the gospel. The reason I say that is because the critics of the traditional claim perform a similar procedure: they lay on the table the claim, then argue against the claim by offering their criticisms, and then conclude that Matthew did not write the gospel. Knocking down arguments does not a case make.
The arguments for Matthew, the tax collector, writing this gospel eventually wind down to the simple fact that Matthew has been connected to this gospel from the earliest surviving evidence. The earliest manuscripts of this gospel have Kata Maththaion, “according to Matthew.” Many today have for a variety of reasons chosen to be suspicious of any early church claim like this, but I cannot share that suspicion. In fact, I am inclined to trust early church attributions.42
The authorship question can be rooted in the question of sources. For more than two hundred years, but particularly for the last century, how the Synoptic Evangelists got their material has been a constant discussion. Some think the canonical order is the chronological order (Matthew, then Mark, then Luke), while others argued that Augustine got it more or less right when he said Matthew was first, Luke was second, and Mark combines and reduces Matthew and Luke into a shorter gospel. This theory, today called the Griesbach Hypothesis, is a minority viewpoint. The standard hypothesis, which I prefer to call the Oxford Hypothesis because it was framed at Oxford University about one century ago through the detailed work of B. H. Streeter and others, is that Mark and a hypothetical source called “Q” (from the German word Quelle, “source”) were at the bottom of the Synoptics. Both Matthew and Luke each used both Mark and Q independently of one another, and they each probably had access both to other written sources as well as to oral traditions. I will assume this theory, which is the majority viewpoint today, in what follows. Though this will not be the focus of this commentary, at times we will observe how “Matthew” has edited his sources to reflect the theology we can detect in the first gospel.43