Matthew 5 - Introduction

CHAPTER 5.

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT.

This extended utterance of Jesus comes upon us as a surprise. Nothing goes before to prepare us to expect anything so transcendently great. The impressions made on the Baptist, the people in Capernaum Synagogue (Mark 1:27), and the four fishermen, speak to wisdom, power, and personal charm, but not so as to make us take the sermon as a thing of course. Our surprise is all the greater that there is so little antecedent narrative. By an effort of imagination we have to realise that much went before preaching, teaching, interviews with disciples, conflicts with Pharisees, only once mentioned hitherto (Matthew 3:7), yet here the leading theme of discourse.

The sermon belongs to the didache, not to the kerygma. Jesus is here the Master, not the Evangelist. He ascends the hill to get away from the crowds below, and the disciples, now become a considerable band, gather about Him. Others may not be excluded, but the μαθηταὶ are the audience proper. The discourse may represent the teaching, not of a single hour or day, but of a period of retirement from an exciting, exhausting ministry below, and all over Galilee; rest being sought in variation of work, evangelist and teacher alternately. A better name for these Chapter s than the Sermon on the Mount, which suggests a concio ad populum, might be The Teaching on the Hill. It may be a combination of several lessons. One very outstanding topic is Pharisaic righteousness. Christ evidently made it His business in one of the hill lessons to define controversially His position in reference to the prevailing type of piety, which we may assume to have been to Him a subject of long and careful study before the opening of His public career. The portions of the discourse which bear on that subject can be picked out, and others not relating thereto eliminated, and we may say if we choose that the resulting body of teaching is the Sermon on the Mount (so Weiss). Perhaps the truth is that these portions formed one of the lessons given to disciples on the hill in their holiday summer school. The Beatitudes might form another, instructions on prayer (Matthew 6:7-15) a third, admonitions against covetousness and care (Matthew 6:19-34) a fourth, and so on. As these Chapter s stand, the various parts cohere and sympathise wonderfully so as to present the appearance of a unity; but that need not hinder us from regarding the whole as a skilful combination of originally distinct lessons, possessing the generic unity of the Teaching on the Hill. This view I prefer to that which regards the sermon as a compendium of Christ's whole doctrine (De Wette), or the magna charta of the kingdom (Tholuck), though there is a truth in that title, or as an ordination discourse in connection with the setting apart of the Twelve (Ewald), or in its original parts an anti-Pharisaic manifesto (Weiss-Meyer). For comparison of Matthew's version of the discourse with Luke's see notes on Luke 6:20-49.