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"We are reaching a time in the West when mission in a non-Christian environment is again the primary mission of the Church, and that's a time when the gap between the Gospel and human judgments of worth will become evident again.

The Good News is once again liberating in this sense of redeeming people from the false assumptions that if they are not good enough by some empty reckoning  of human success or some cultural token of worth, that they are literally worthless.

The Christian Good News is not embrace who you are, but be embraced by the unconditioned grace of God. But as we all know, saying it is one thing, living it is another….

We can all have the right words, but if the actions of our church say that racial difference, or social difference, really does matter, that Christianity doesn't really belong to people who are not like us, then we fail to communicate what grace is about.

It's a hard and costly thing to show people that they have worth in Christ and not just to tell them that. But the fact is that the amazing grace of God in Jesus Christ boils down all my assumptions about what is my own or other people's worth, in order to give me  the only worth that counts in Jesus Christ. 

To communicate that in a generation caught in the cross-fire of a cruelly judgmental world, and struggling from loss of self-esteem, would be to render the Good news good indeed." 

Transcribed from a lecture by Professor John G Barclay pn 'Paul, Grace and the Contemporary Crisis of Self-worth.' Delivered in Australia, 2018.

Full lecture, which is well worth your time, can be found on Youtube here

I was meeting a friend at the famous Horn Restaurant between Dundee and Perth. I arrived far too early and decided to have a good walk along the single track road that opens into the Tay valley. There were two hares in the recently harvested field, swallows line dancing on telephone wires, early morning sun feeling warm but a cool breeze hinting at autumn. I know, sounds idyllic.

It was, until a car appeared from behind me, creeping silently alongside, one of those electric vehicles that glide with a gentle hum. The driver rolled down his window and I apologised – I hadn’t heard him. No problem, he was used to pedestrians in a reverie! We talked, I told him I was having a walk to counter the substantial bacon roll I would soon be having with my friend. Given the legendary size of said bacon roll he suggested I might need to walk to Perth to be calorie neutral!

In a world that rushes and pushes, and can be abrasive and impatient, a quiet morning walk could have been wasted by an annoyed driver demonstrating the effectiveness of another kind of horn! Instead, a conversation, some humour, and all was still well with the world.

My point? Consideration of other folk is a low key form of loving our neighbour. There is a cumulative quality to such small acts of kindness. They become a mosaic that builds into the life we show to others, and that God sees. Jesus described such living artistry like this:  “Make sure your light shines before people, so that they will see the good things you do, and praise your Father in heaven.”

So what does Matt Dawson, TV and radio pundit and former English international rugby scrum half, have in common with George Eliot, England's greatest Victorian novelist, and Philip Davis, George Eliot's most recent biographer? I know. It's the kind of question that sounds so unlikely to have an interesting answer, that the person who formulated it needs to get a life, or at least more of a life!

I've just read Matt Dawson's comments on the England v Argentina game last night. Once again an English player was sent off for a tackle considered reckless and dangerous. In explaining the psychology of a physical contact sport played with ferocious intensity and for the highest stakes, Dawson said, "The presence of mind and that split-[second] decision thinking is missing."

With adrenaline pumping, early in a game played with controlled aggression, and in the immediacy of confrontation and collision, mistakes are made – and consequences can be both serious and last much longer than that split-second wrong call. Only if there is presence of mind and good decision making in split seconds, can the rugby player avoid the consequences of getting it wrong. The aftermath is regret, and consequences for the rest of the team. Now, hang on to that thought, and Dawson's advice about presence of mind, split-second decisions, and so making good choices, and avoiding costly mistakes.

Few people saw more clearly into the tangled connections of human motives, decisions, choices, mistakes and regrets, than George Eliot. Her novels provide some of the most morally astute, compassionate commentary on human behaviour and our tangled relationships in all of literature. Amongst the recurring themes is the tension created in our choices and decisions between what she called in one of her letters, "the immediacy of experience, and retrospective reflection."

In other words, every decision we make has consequences, and sometimes the consequences for a split second decision can be far-reaching, and unforgiving. It isn't that we meant to hurt, offend, cause to suffer, but nevertheless outcomes cannot always be foreseen, or controlled once set in motion.

Philip Davis has written an extraordinary study of how George Eliot the author has written her inner autobiography into her greatest novels. The chapter I read this morning coincided in insight with exactly what Matt Dawson was saying in the post-match analysis. What the English players lack, at times, is "The presence of mind and that split-[second] decision thinking."

What Davis points our about George Eliot's moral imagination is that she gets it; it is the very nature of moral life that we are all faced with situations that require presence of mind and split-second decision making, and sometimes we get it wrong. And when we do, in the moral discourse of George Eliot it is because in the "immediacy of experience" we make our move, and only afterwards is there time for "retrospective reflection." Followed by feelings of regret, guilt, and the need to live with the consequences.

I am currently writing a paper on the decline of the humanities in education, and asking what we are losing when those subjects that teach us to think reflectively, creatively, intuitively, imaginatively, are relegated to options rather than essentials in human education and formation. Story-telling is one of the ways we learn to imagine, to reflect, to empathise, to encounter alternative ways of seeing the world and of being in the world. Reading stories well is an exercise in moral formation and the opening up of the moral imagination.

That Matt Dawson's diagnosis of a malaise in an international rugby squad, echoes in significant ways the moral universe of George Eliot, I find deeply heartening! And you would think, wouldn't you, that with three red cards in 4 games, the coach will sort this out by re-telling the stories for "retrospective reflection." This followed by instructing those muscled giants in the need to harmonise "the immediacy of experience" (the decision to tackle) with the post-tackle "retrospective experience", (of a red card), and a weakened team.

And as revision before the next game, if they don't quite get what George Eliot was on about, then let the coach quote Matt Dawson, and point out the consequences when "The presence of mind and that split-[second] decision thinking is missing." 

Now and again a book comes along that deserves to have a long shelf life. That happened in 1982 when The Sermon on the Mount. A Foundation for Understanding was published. Written by Robert Guelich Professor of New Testament at Fuller Seminary, it was very warmly received, and described as exactly what readers of the Sermon were looking for.

It became clear as I worked through it, that this book was in a different league to anything else available 40 years ago. It quickly established itself for the thoroughness and thoughtfulness of the exegesis, and for the refusal of the writer to dilute, evade or tame the text.

Blurb on the backs of books can be a minefield of exaggeration and over-praising, and often enough written by scholarly allies. Jimmy Dunn was well above that kind of academic mutual back scratching. Here's what he says about Guelich's book:

This is quite simply the most important full-scale study of the Sermon on the Mount to be written in any language, certainly in the past forty years, and most probably in the last hundred years. It is unsurpassed in the comprehensiveness of its treatment and in its breadth of sympathy, using as it does, all the tools of current New Testament research and taking full account of both the concerns of the man in the pew and the detailed discussions of modern scholarship. It sums up the debates of more recent studies with a sure touch, and its own findings are very balanced and most persuasive. Undoubtedly this volume will provide an invaluable starting point for future research in this area for at least another generation." 

As a stand alone commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, Guelich was miles ahead of any other volume in the field, and by far the most useful guide to the topography and geology, the fauna and the flora, the semantics and syntax, the grammar and theology, and the dramatic contours of the textual mountain that is the Matthean Sermon on the Mount. It remains, as Dunn predicted, a standard study, joined now by various others who bring the exegesis up to date, explore new viewpoints and approaches, and develop further our understanding of Matthew, his community, and the social milieu out of which the Gospel of Matthew emerged.

Of the books I own on the Sermon, Guelich is still one of the first to consult, supplemented by several more recent additions to the literature that match it for considered conclusions and the rounded exegesis that are the quality hallmarks of Guelich's work. 

A quick roundup of significant treatments since Guelich would include:

In 1995 Hans Dieter Betz published his long anticipated volume, The Sermon on the Mount, the Hermeneia Commentary. It is a massive critical commentary that includes comprehensive analysis and comparison of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount and Luke's Sermon on the Plain. It has established itself as the standard critical treatment, with through and detailed exegetical work using the full range of hermeneutical approaches, and with careful attention to both Hellenistic and Jewish contexts. At over 700 pages it does make for hard work, difficulty in seeing the forest because of such concentration on trees, branches and twigs of interpretive interest. But it is indispensable, Though as Eugene Boring warns, (a writer I both respect and whose own commentaries I value): "Betz has only disdain for the "tourist" who wants to understand the Sermon on the Mount in a half-hour-" Quite so!

Preachers were delighted when Scot McKnight's Sermon on the Mount was published in The Story of God series in 2013. Based on the assumption that the Bible is the story of God and God's people living in God's world, This series, and McKnight's commentary work on three levels: Listen to the Story; Explain the Story; Live the Story. Similar to the NIVAC series, this stand alone treatment of Matthew's text of the Sermon is accessible, lucid, informative and vintage Scot McKnight. For example. There are 15 pages of exegetical, ethical and pastoral analysis of Matthew 5.31-32 where Jesus speaks of permissible and impermissible divorce. This is a hard saying of Jesus, and requires levels of exegetical care and pastoral sensitivity in interpreting such potent texts within a community where people will have very diverse experiences of marriage and divorce. I know of no better explication of the issues, nor a more pastorally careful examination of the experience of marriage failure, its consequences, and possible redemptive avenues for the individuals and the community. The whole volume reflects such excellence and I wouldn't be without it. 

2017 brought us The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing, by Jonathan Pennington. This is a very different kind of commentary. The first half is called Orientation, and is where Pennington lays out his thesis, which is that the Sermon is best understood within the Wisdom Tradition and with firm connections to virtue ethics as a way of understanding human moral behaviour within the context of Christian discipleship and obedience. Only then is the text itself explored as a gathering of guidance intended to enable, facilitate and resource human flourishing. Again this is a fine work, original, erudite, informed by a range of hermeneutical approaches, and guiding the reader to an understanding of a text that is the moral guide for life in the Kingdom of God, centred in Christ, and looking forward to the culmination of God's good purposes for human life and community.

Guelich, Betz (for those up for exegetical mining and / or mountaineering), McKnight, and Pennington. There have been other important contributions, but together these are a good balance of current studies.

Only to add that several of the recent commentaries on Matthew contain valuable resources in their own right – Allison and Davies, ICC, Vol.1; France, NICNT; Hagner, Word Commentary, Vol.1; Bruner, Christbook and Churchbook, Vol1.; and most recently Culpepper, NTL Commentary.   

Periodically, and regularly, I spend a while in the company of my favourite Jewish writers. It's a way of keeping open the conversation between my personal experience of Christ, and acknowledging that Christian faith has deep, continuing and life-dependant roots in the faith of Israel and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. 

My first serious encounter with Judaism as a faith and way of life was in a University class where we studied Pirke Avot, a short Tractate of practical ethics, with the Jewish philosopher Alexander Broadie. A few years later, while studying current academic work on the Sermon on the Mount, I read The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount, by W. D. Davies, at the time a leading scholar of Rabbinic Judaism. By the mid 1970s I had discovered the novels of Jewish writer Chaim Potok, and was fascinated and moved by the intensity and passionate piety at the heart of Hasidic faith.

By the 1980's I had added the writing of the Holocaust survivor and later Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, and began a lifelong interest in the decades of historical, social and cultural history that produced a zeitgeist out of which grew a capacity for total war and industrialised genocide. When Wiesel's two volume Memoirs were published I read them, at times with tears. These volumes, like all his writings, bore witness on behalf of those who died in the Shoah. 

The Jewish voice that speaks most powerfully into the depths of my own faith and life experience is Abraham Joshua Heschel. I have written of him, quoted him and expressed my personal debt to his writing often enough before on this blog. And this post will end with another quotation which, 70 years on, lays open much of what we experience today as cultural malaise.  

This summer I have re-read In the Beginning by Chaim Potok, the new biography of Elie Wiesel by Joseph Berger, the Essential Writings Anthology of Heschel's writings compiled by his daughter Susannah Heschel, a slow reading of The Book of the Twelve ( unhelpfully named in the Christian canon by the misleading title of Minor Prophets!), and the still required reading on the evolution of Nazi ideology in 1930s Germany, Victoria Barnett, The Soul of the People. Each one of those books is a reminder of how easily, and culpably, Christian attitudes can be distorted and co-opted in ways that sow seeds of anti-semitic sentiment, and how vital (and that word is intended to have the full force of its life referring semantic roots) it is to respect and intentionally seek to understand the rock from which Christian faith has been hewn, and shaped.

Which brings me to Heschel again. Reading an extract from one of his essays published in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, I felt again the full force of Heschel the Jewish prophet, speaking into Western culture (in 1969!) with that defiant hope which is the primary hallmark of all his writing. It is a long quotation, to be read slowly, and humbly, as learners rather than critics:

The spiritual memory of many people is empty, words are diluted, incentives are drained, inspiration is exhausted. Is God to be blamed for all this? Is it not man who has driven Him out of our hearts and minds? Has not our system of religious education been an abysmal failure?

This spiritual blackout is increasing daily. Opportunism prevails, callousness expands, the sense of the holy is melting away. We no longer know how to resist the vulgar, how to say no in the name of a higher yes. our roots are in a state of decay. 

This is an age of spiritual blackout, a blackout of God. We have entered not only the dark night of the soul, but also the dark night of society. We must seek out asy of preserving the strong and deep truth of a living God theology in the midst of the blackout. 

For the darkness is neither final nor complete. Our power is first in waiting for the end of darkness, for the defeat of evil; and our power is also in coming upon single sparks and occasional rays, upon moments full of God's grace and radiance.

We are called to bring together the sparks to preserve single moments of radiance, and keep them alive in our lives, to defy absurdity and despair, and to wait for God to say again, Let there be light. 

And there will be light.

(Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, from the page 267)

Amongst the most formative encounters at the University of Glasgow in the 1970s was the time I was privileged to spend as a student with several remarkable teachers. First year Moral Philosophy, a young Alexander Broadie had us reading Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, that scary political study of power, commonwealth and society. For those who may not know, Hobbes is the one who described human life in the state of nature and deprived of the comfort of Government, as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Strong and stable government was therefore a matter of life and death, Hobbes argued, and a commonwealth based upon a social contract an essential for any kind of human life in community to flourish. 

For a whole term, at 9,00 a.m., we came in and heard Broadie expound and explain this text of terror. It was the rudest of awakenings for students in first year encountering philosophical thought for the first time, and through one of the toughest political discourses in the English language. Broadie was a brilliant lecturer. He took us through Kant's The Moral Law, and John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, but it was his lectures on Leviathan I remember most clearly. Analytic logic, precise terminology, a clipped and controlled voice, a glass of water clutched in front of him from which he occasionally sipped, paused, then continued to stroll from lectern across the platform, and back. He never broke stride and he seldom faltered in his lectures, most of them apparently without notes. He was, to use a word far too often trivialised by misuse – he was awesome. The group I mixed with were unanimous that Broadie was the real deal, an intellect of such power you could almost feel the soft vibrations of mental machinery working with efficiency and without friction.

It was therefore a pleasant surprise when in second year I discovered Broadie was teaching part of the Principles of Religion course. The text was Pirk Aboth, the edition was by R Travers Herford, and we were introduced to halakah and haggadah, to rabbinic pedagogy and the ethics of the Talmud, and to the piety and wisdom of the Pharisees. These were conversational seminars, question and answer, Broadie performing like a virtuoso on the text as instrument, and an ethos of reverence laced with humour, and enquiry as an activity of the mind learning to be receptive to the moral and spiritual content of ancient words. I've never forgotten those afternoons chasing through Deuteronomy, following clues in the commentary and references in Pirke Aboth, and the heart and mind revelling in the discovery of a deep faith akin to my own but different, and the requirement upon each of us to respect that difference and the integrity of its truth.

Somewhere along the way, in the inflow and outflow of books from my study, I lost my copy of Pirk Aboth. I've only recently found another copy of the exact same edition, with its blue and white covers, black Hebrew script, published by Schocken, and printed in the late 1960s. I know it won't recreate the excitement and intensity of those afternoons in a room lined with books and a teacher demonstrating a method of learning as ancient as the text, and as a matter of genuine importance, a text dating from around the time of the New Testament documents. 

It's no coincidence that my current engagement with the sermon on the Mount, and the wider Matthean presentation of Jesus' teaching, that my mind turns back to another document, compiled by Pharisees seeking to establish the foundations of Judaism in the changed world of no Temple, and a violated Holy City. These sayings were 'in the air' just as the oral traditions of the sayings of Jesus were circulating and coalescing in documents that eventually gave us our Gospels.

I've written about Professor Broadie before in 2010, and you can read it on this link over here. It is a fuller account of my own intellectual development, and the influence of a teacher to whom I still feel a sense of indebtedness for setting me up for years of enriched thinking.