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When I first studied the text of the Sermon on the Mount in the mid 1970s there were several resources which I leaned on and learned from. Pride of place goes to W. D. Davies, The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount, a huge monograph which argued that the sermon originated as a Christian response to the teaching of the Rabbis in Jamnia, following the Fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE.

With Jerusalem fallen and the Temple gone, the focus of future Jewish identity would be the Torah, the Law as light and guide of life – to be studied, revered, taught and lived. The Pharisees and Rabbis developed and entire Torah centred culture expressing the core identity of Judaism as the Jewish people faced a changed future in the world.

According to Davies, Matthew's Gospel, and the Sermon on the Mount as its manifesto, aims to show that Christians too are seekers of righteousness, and people of the law of the Kingdom of God. But that 'law' is now as taught and embodied by Jesus, the higher righteousness of the Kingdom of God, a deeper righteousness of the yoke of discipleship and the cross, carried beyond the empty tomb and into all the world to all peoples. 

Within that detailed technical argument were embedded any amount of exegetical insights and explorations of historical context. This was before Davies and Allison embarked on their three volume commentary which remains the technical benchmark in Matthean studies. 

Warren Kissenger, The Sermon on the Mount. A History of Interpretation and Bibliography was published in 1975 and as a specialist academic volume was hugely expensive. I borrowed it from Glasgow University Library (a library in which I am still a life member, for a cost of £50 in 1976) – I had it on continuous loan for about a year.

Kissenger's book was like being given a pair of high resolution binoculars to gaze at distant layers of landscape and see what otherwise you couldn't have seen. Up to 1975 the bibliography was exhaustive. In one volume there was a history of how people had interpreted, evaded, softened, radicalised, explained and even explained away those three chapters that sit like the North Face of the Eiger, in the Alpine range of New Testament ethics. 

A third book was H. K. MacArthur, Understanding the Sermon on the Mount, yet another eye opener that I read and re-read over the two years I worked away at the Sermon. The historic interpreters were themselves interpreted, and the Sermon came alive as it was placed into the historical contexts of such expositors as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Wesley, the German pietist scholar August Tholuck, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Hitler's Germany. In this one book the reader is given a sense of the diversity of perspectives, and how historical context governs hermeneutical principles and exegetical outcomes. The wide variety of approaches demonstrates the scholarly discomfort with this troublesome text!  

I mention these three books, not because they are still the best ways into the Sermon on the Mount. That wasn't necessarily true in 1976, and it certainly isn't now. No. I mention these books because those many hours reading the Sermon, and reading about the Sermon, and working at a personal exegesis of this 'thickly textured text', – those hours were a large and formative part of my own early apprenticeship as one who was trying to become what Matthew himself called “A scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven [who] is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” (13.51)

In such study and life practice, we remain apprentices, learners, or in Matthew's favourite term, disciples. Before reading a chunk of the Sermon on the Mount, I've found it spiritually reassuring to read Jesus words:

Come to me all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matthew 11.28-29)

In all the reading and study, the thinking and praying, the sermon preparing and sermon preaching, of those first years and the lifetime since, there is still that same sense of dealing with what Joachim Jeremias called "the ipsissima vox" of Jesus, the essential, unmistakable, characteristic, tone and timbre of the Teacher who only amongst all other voices, "has the words of eternal life."

In the half century or so since, there has been an ever-flowing stream of studies and expositions of the Sermon. Those familiar with Evangelical expositions will wonder why Martyn-Lloyd Jones is missing. He isn't, and wasn't in my own reading. But the good Doctor himself would have disapproved as only he could, had his Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, been placed alongside technical exegetical and historical critical works. His approach was different, and requires a different disposition in the reader. I read those two volumes from cover to cover, and they remain the best Reformed exposition of the Sermon that I know. 

Oddly enough, John Stott's Christian Counter Culture. The Message of the Sermon on the Mount, came out just as I was submitting my work for assessment in 1978. I was able to use it and include some notes from it – but here I must remind you of my own historical context. I was using a brother typewriter, with tippex or retyping an entire page if changes had to be made to a finished draft! No cut and paste, no delete, no word processing of the kind now so taken for granted, that those under 30 have never known the delicate anguish of discovering typos on a final draft page that had taken ages to type!

All that aside, Stott's treatment was, and is, brilliant. A bit dated now, but some of those early IVP volumes in the Bible Speaks Today series were exactly the bridge points needed to help hold together critical exegesis and faithful exposition. Motyer on Amos, Stott on the Sermon on the Mount, Kidner on Ecclesiastes, Atkinson on Ruth. Many of them still in print. 

In the forty five intervening years since my probationary studies there has been a deluge of scholarly work on the Sermon on the Mount. My own engagement with some of that I'll save for a later post.

Painting above is by Jan Breughel the Elder, 'The Sermon on the Mount'.

In the previous post I played around with the Beatitude, "Blessed are the peacemakers." The use of compound words like peace-maker, peace-builder, or peace co-ordinator, allows us to offer any amount of perspectives on the attitudes and activities that contribute to the creation of peace in a fragmented, divided and conflicted world. 

However. "Blessed are the peacemakers" is more than praise for peaceable people. Jesus ties the blessedness to the present practices and future identity of those for whom peace is a life project, a way of life, a habit of the heart, a work of both industry and art. But above all, peacemaking is a labour of love to God and to all children, women and men whose claim on our goodwill is quite simply because that is what God requires of us.

Peacemakers are "Blessed" because they are acting towards others just as God has acted to them. Peacemakers are called the children of God because they bear and demonstrate a family resemblance to the God of peace, they do unto others as God has done unto them. Peace is what they do, and peacemakers is who they are; our character is exposed in those actions of ours that tell the honest to God truth about us.  

After a full exegetical analysis of this saying of Jesus, Robert Guelich concludes:

Peacemaking therefore is much more than a passive suffering to maintain peace or even bridge-building or reconciling alienated parties. It is the demonstration of God's love through Christ in all its profundity. The peacemakers of Matt 5.9 refers to those who, experiencing the shalom of God, become his agents establishing his peace in the world." ¹

This is both present reality and future promise, this family likeness and declared status as children of God. When all the life is lived, and all the results are in, and we stand before God to have our say about what life has been about, what has mattered most to us, what we have given ourselves to and cared about, God is going to be interested in how far we have been makers of peace with others and between others and for the sake of others. 

My guess is that peacemaking isn't the first quality assurance test we would apply to how we go about our lives, and how we conduct our relationships, business, conversations and friendships. But it is a defining identity marker of the child of God. And here's the scary bit. To be called out by God in order to be announced as those worthy of the peace prize in heaven, well, says Jesus, that is to be Blessed! As Scot Mcknight comments, "The Beatitudes look at people now, through the lens of an Ethic from Beyond. Kingdom realities are now occurring through the peacemakers." ²  

All of this is fine, until the next time we know the uncoiling of resentment from offence, or the remembering of past hurt, or simply that eruption of self-will that isn't prepared to give in without an argument. We all have powerful drivers and hair triggers, our own ways of filing and indexing grievances, and feelings of vulnerability and insecurity that make us defensive.

And Jesus says, "Blessed are the peacemakers".

Blessed are you, all of you, who get to know yourselves well enough to know you are already loved beyond your imagining, who have heard the God of peace bid you welcome, who believe and realise the Kingdom of God is amongst you, within you and ahead of you – so get on with it, live it!

Forgive, show mercy, love, walk humbly, love mercy, and make peace as God's child. To be called the children of God is to know ourselves acknowledged by God as those who are known fully, and drawn into the intimacy of fellowship with God, who is the God of Peace – peace on earth and good will to all people. Aye, that!   

1. ^{Robert Guelich, The Sermon on the Mount. A Foundation for Understanding. (Waco: Word Publishing, 1982) 92. In my view this is still the first choice commentary on the Sermon on the Mount. I'll explain why in another post.}
2. ^{Scot McKnight, The Sermon on the Mount. Story of God Commentary (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 2013) 46.}

A long time ago, (1976-78) in a galaxy far away (Partick) I completed my probationary ministry studies by writing (actually typing!) an exegesis of Matthew's Greek text of the Sermon on the Mount. It was a mind and life changing immersion in the teaching of Jesus, and what is involved in faithfully following after the finest Teacher the world has ever known.

I've tried to stay current with both the scholarship and continuing interpretation of Jesus' Kingdom manifesto. But the more difficult call is to interpret the Sermon through the performance that is our own life trying to faithfully follow the script – and the script writer.

"Are the teachings of the SM for all Christians or only for the 'apostles'? Are they meant to be taken literally?… In one respect, the history of interpretation can be viewed as a succession of ingenious evasions and responses to these evasions." (Alan Culpepper, Commentary on Matthew, p. 81)

The early form-critic Hans Windisch mentioned Tolstoy and Baptists as "those who regard the Sermon on the Mount as presenting demands that are to be literally understood and literally fulfilled." He went on to say, "The unmistakable conclusion of our exegesis is that such people have correctly understood the Sermon on the Mount." p. 82 ( Windisch was referring to Anabaptists)

Over the next few months I'll be writing several posts here on the Sermon on the Mount as a text for our times. Actually it's a text for all times, but in our own time of political uncertainty, economic anxieties, fear of the other, moral confusion even about what it means to be human, this text comes to offer another way of life that begins with the word "Blessed.

"But that word doesn't encourage superficial, escapist, or self-generated positivity. It is a call to a life differently modelled, differently oriented, differently resourced, and differently motivated. "Seek first the Kingdom of God, and everything else will fall into place."

The two volumes of Wiesel's autobiography are titled, All Rivers Run to the Sea, and The Sea is never Full. They are the writing of Wiesel's mature years, retrospective and reflective, honest so far as any one of us can claim honesty in our deepest and most difficult to process memories.

Reading this biography is an exercise in hearing a gentle and respectful corrective, as the biographer helps the reader understand why the autobiography is written as it is. Berger is a journalist, skilled in examining motive, adept at interpreting human narrative, with an eye for the significant facts, and also with the benefits of hindsight.

Autobiography and biography giving their separate accounts of the same person, is like listening in stereo to separate speakers, the two voices trying to tell the same story, one from within, and one as external observer. And both are required to hear the full range of the music.

Writers and speakers (and preachers), note the advice given to the young cub reporter Elie Wiesel: "If you want to hold the reader's attention, your sentence must be clear enough to be understood and enigmatic enough to pique curiosity." (Page 57)

O God Beyond me, you dwell in unapproachable light. Teach me that even my highest thoughts of you are but a dim and distant shadow of your transcendent glory.

Teach me that if you are in nature you are still greater than nature.

Teach me that if you are in my heart, you are still greater than my heart.

Let my soul rejoice in your mysterious greatness.

Let me take refuge in the fact that you are utterly beyond me, beyond the sweep of my imagination, beyond the comprehension of my mind.

Your judgments are unsearchable and your ways past finding out.

O Lord, hallowed be your name.

(Diary of Private Prayer, John Baillie, Day 17 Morning Prayer)

In a world fixated on explanation, obsessed with transparency and 'the right to know', curious beyond reasonable limits to know the private details and revealing gossip of what makes up others' lives, this prayer is a request for humility of mind, proper reticence and reserve about what we need to know, and a contentment that comes from glad resignation to the mystery of the One who is beyond our knowing, and who refuses to 'put it all out there'. Except for one explicit and specific statement, God's final and definitive revealing of God's own truth, "He has spoken in his Son." 

Or as T F Torrance never tired of reminding people, "There is no God behind the back of Jesus Christ." The full quotation reads like this:

"What God is in eternity, Jesus Christ is in space and time, and what Jesus Christ is in space and time, God is in his eternity. There is an unbroken relation of Being and Action between the Son and the Father, and in Jesus Christ that relation has been embodied in our human existence once and for all. There is thus no God behind the back of Jesus Christ, but only this God whose face we see in the face of the Lord Jesus." (Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God, pp. 243-244)

Baillie and Torrance were not contradicting each other. Baillie's prayer bows the heart before the mystery of Love Eternal that is beyond knowledge; Torrance's doxological theology lifts the heart to gaze on the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 

My friend Ian from College days, is amongst other forms of art, a very good cartoonist. He used to entertain us in class by drawing on the blackboard between classes. Sadly, these quickly drawn illustrations of the lectures were always rubbed off, and in the days long, long before we had digital cameras to capture such transitory genius. I remember one lecture on the Gospel of John, and the discussion around which John wrote the Gospel. Probably John the Elder of Ephesus seemed to be the leading candidate (in the early 1970's). In a minute or two we had an entire scene drawn, with the pillars of a Temple, and standing on the steps, the dominant figure stood with a zoom lens camera poised, dressed in first century Greco-Roman clothes, bald and bearded. The caption read, "John collecting material at Ephesus." Fifty and more years on, that is still a smile trigger of an image.

When I left College I asked Ian if he world draw me a particular image, my favourite passage from the Gospel of John. That moment, when Jesus takes Peter aside and asks him, "Peter, do you love me?" Three times, the same question, but each time more searching. Three times Jesus didn't take Peter's "Yes" at face value. It's a story that the author of John's Gospel had to get in, and it sits there as the climax of a Gospel that began with the Eternal Word of the Creator God, and now ends with the confession, "Lord, you know all things, you know that I love you." The three times denier has just confessed and owned Jesus three times, and life can begin again. 

The image above is now a bookmark on many of my books. I had several hundred of them printed and used them for years. It still moves me when I look at it. The strong tenderness of Jesus, the insistence that Peter be honest with himself as well as with Jesus, the breakfast meal of fish sizzling away as the background accompaniment of words that restored a friendship and a faith. 

I've written here before about my long immersion in the Gospel of John, ever since working through the Greek text in 1975, using C K Barrett's now venerable commentary. I still have Barrett's commentary, for me irreplaceable as the first expert guide through the narrative landscapes and theological mountains of the Fourth Gospel. More than once I have preached through the Prologue as an Advent series; Holy Week is impossible for me without time spent in the Passion story of John; the Farewell Discourse, and our Lord's Prayer for his followers and the Church from my first serious exegesis of it, has shaped both my spirituality and formed and sustained in me an ecumenical spirit, a lifelong desire for fellowship with all those who stand as I try to do, with John and Peter and all the rest of them, beneath the Cross and beside the now empty tomb in a garden in the early morning. And to share the wonder, gratitude and fellowship of those who have come to know the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. 

Then there's the woman at the well, the man at Bethesda, the wedding in danger of running out of wine and street credit, the man born blind and Nicodemus who had a different kind of visual impairment. And Peter, loud, confident in his own force of personality, impulsive to a fault, a repeat offender at promising more than he could deliver, but never more than he intended. And Jesus, the friend of sinners, the conversationalist with a woman at a well, the tough teacher rebuking the obtuse or timid Nicodemus, the weeping friend at Lazarus's grave, the silent interrogator of Pilate, the risen Lord mistaken by Mary as the gardener. This is a Gospel that is infinite in range and scope as readers behold (a favourite Johannine semantic domain) its treasures of story and sign, characters and conversations, and enduring capacity to transform the way we see the world, God, ourselves, and what Jesus promised when he said, "I have come that you might have life, and have it more abundantly." (John 10.10)

So, yes, John sits at the top of my canon within the canon, a document that Has taken more of my time and thought than any other part of the Bible – even the Prison Epistles,¹ which incidentally, operate on the same cosmic scale of reconciling love that reaches out to and embraces "all things…making peace by the blood of the cross."   

Later this month our reading group will meet. This happens every second month, we choose a book, and along with the good conversation of long-time friends, discuss said book. This time round it's a book by one of our own circle, pictured above. Conversations By the Sea. Reflections on Discipleship, Ministry and Mission, Andrew R Rollinson. (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 2023). I'll do a separate post reviewing this after our Reading Group has met. For now, this is yet another profound and searching opening up of the last chapter of John's Gospel, where 'both the miracle and the meeting provide assurance of a new future and a new fruitfulness." (p. 8) 

^{1 Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians and Philemon.} 

I suppose it depends on your view of the Bible, what it is, who it is for, where it is from, how it came to us, and what we are supposed to do with it. I'm not sure how many times I've read all of the Bible. I suppose there are stones left unturned in some of the darker corners of the Old Testament, but not many. But I've been reading the Bible every day for 56 years, and for most of those years preached every week once, twice, even three times a week for some of those years.

Not every day, but several hours a week I've taken spade and pickaxe, fork and rake, and I've worked the exegetical soil until most of the textual garden has a reasonable tilth. In other words, exegesis of a text is an exercise in cultivation, preparing and maintaining fertile soil, fertilised (with manure), supplemented with humus. Seeds of thought are sown, the harvest of the work is the fruit of the Spirit and the growth in whatever wisdom the grace of God can smuggle past our assumed cleverness, which is another phrase for pride!

Like everyone else I have favourite corners and patches of this large variegated garden. The more technical term for this dubious practice of having preferences for certain parts of a Bible we are supposed to think comprehensively authoritative, is having a canon within the canon – favourite verses, chapters, books we go back to, often to the neglect of other chunks we can't get on with. Come on, every reader of the Bible however conscientious, risks losing their footing in Leviticus, or even losing their way in Numbers, like those first pilgrims stumbling towards the promised land.

So, confession time. My favourite chunks of text; my canon within the canon; the parts of the Bible that for me reach the parts other parts of the Bible more often than not don't reach. Oh, there are surprises, beams of light, food for the soul, a slap in the face, a hefty shove in the right direction, and these can come from the most unexpected texts. But more often there are corners and plots of text that unfailingly do it for us, connect with those deep and not always understood longings and prayers and anxieties and hopes that are part  of the life we bring to the text, wanting to hear God's voice speaking the right words from the Word. 

The Gospel of John is an obviously treasured text, of which more another time. Psalms, all of them, but several of them known by heart because in them deep speaks to deep. Ruth and Jonah, two very old stories that reverberate down the centuries and hammer at the doors of our prejudices and contented exclusions. 

Then there's the Sermon on the Mount, the radical realism of Jesus the King proclaiming the reign of a different kind of Kingdom. From all of Paul, my favourites have long been the Prison Epistles, the Colossian Christ 'making peace by the blood of the cross'; the Ephesian Christ, Lord of the Church and "breaking down dividing walls of hostility"; the Christ of Philippians, the divine love of the Son spiralling downwards from equality with God to the form of a human slave, now exalted in the power of resurrection and promised life.

Oh, and Isaiah 40-55, that chunk of text the critics call Deutero-Isaiah, with some of the most fabulous poetry used to vision-cast even more fabulous promises of streams in our cultural deserts, peace between weapons manufacturers who agree to reconfigure their production lines and produce ploughs instead, deserts blooming with new possibilities for beauty, truth and goodness.

And, of course, the three Gospels, Synoptics we call them, three perspectives on Jesus because one viewpoint could never capture the glory and the grace of the Word of Creation become flesh and living amongst us. The parables and the healings, the arguments and the parties, dumb disciples and amazed crowds. And at the centre of each telling of this story of divine love let loose, a carpenter teacher, showing us what compassion looks like, and anger at cruelty and unjust systems, and ways of thinking about God that dismantles our fears and reconstructs the foundations of what a human life can be.

And at the end of all four Gospels, the cross, and our struggle to find words that describe it – horror, tragedy, judicial murder, deterrent of all dissent from empire. In historical terms, perhaps that lethal word, 'deterrent', whether the Roman military machine crushing any refusal of its authority, or the religious obsession with controlling the sacred to the point where even when confronted and contradicted by divine goodness personified, they (and sometimes we) don't see it.

And each Gospel ends, not with the end, but with a new beginning, which we call resurrection, the triumph of life over death, love over hate, hope over despair, and light over darkness – "the light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not."

Such is my canon within the canon, my favourite plots in the garden of the biblical text, the corners I've worked to a fine tilth where seeds grow, flowers bloom, fruit is there year round. That doesn't mean neglecting the rest – the Apocalypse which power washes lazy imaginations encrusted with far too much accumulated normality; Acts of the Apostles as a permanent reminder of the Church as Spirit filled and impelled communities of grace and forgiveness, a Church animated by the restless energy of young life let loose in a world too preoccupied with power, profit and status.

Genesis that sweeping saga of creation and fall, promises made and broken, and the journeys of those who would learn to call God the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the God of Joseph and his brothers and his amazing technicolour dreamcoat. Exodus the most filmed book in the Old Testament from eminently solemn The Ten Commandments, to the Dreamworks version Prince of Egypt, to  Exodus. Gods and Kings; the book itself is the identity conferring text for the people of Israel, and woven boldly throughout the Hebrew Bible's narratives, prophecies and Psalms.

My point in this long biblical catalogue of good bits, is that, one way or another, these texts that make up the Bible can be quite risky to take seriously. But it's worth the risk. In a world as broken as ours now seems to be, we need some of Isaiah's vision of streams in the desert. We could do with Ruth telling us how migrants ought to be treated. And the divine compassion and resistance to all that dehumanises and diminishes people that we encounter in Jesus in the Gospels, aye, we need a complete re-education in compassion and neighbour love, the cruelties of sin and the healing of forgiveness. And much more. Go read your Bible, find the good bits, and stay with them till they stay with you. 

It is this close affinity between Holy Communion and Christ’s real presence, between created things and the uncreated but incarnate Lord, that is the clue to George MacLeod’s implacable resistance to nuclear weapons. The reality at the heart of all things, the power and energy that holds all things together, is Christ the light and life, the energy and vitality of the universe.

When the constituent element of matter, locked into the atom, is split to release the creative energy of the cosmos, and then that same energy is harnessed for purposes of mass killing, then something happens which transcends science, technology, politics and military hubris. Matter is defiled, the substance of the physical world, sanctified by the creator, incorporated by the Word become flesh, is now turned against flesh. Creation is thrust into reverse, human life faces obliteration, and humanity created in the image of God pursues power over others with suicidal intent.

One of his addresses on peace indicates the theological and moral outrage of one who always saw atomic war as inexcusable blasphemy, the abomination of desolation, the holiness of created matter commodified into the searing sacrilege of a mushroom cloud.

"Spirit and Matter. [Christ] is both these because he is the Light and Life of the world. He is ‘in and through’ the material, [all things]. We have so spiritualised our message, that when atomic warfare was first used we did not grasp its appalling nature. The day that Atomic warfare was first employed (at Hiroshima), happened to be the Day of the Feast of the Transfiguration, when Jesus revealed himself to His chosen disciples as both physical and spiritual. What we did at Hiroshima was to take the Body of Christ and use it for bloody Hell.

The aeroplane shot up to 33,000 ft and in seconds the mushrooming cloud from the explosion encircled them even at that height. Captain Lewis, the co-pilot, amazed at the cloud going so instantly above them looked up and said, ‘My God what have we done?’

Well what had they done that Aug 6? You remember another cloud that circled the Mount of Transfiguration … Jesus the atonement between heaven and earth; His body translucent; a sort of preview of His Resurrection Body. Was He spirit or was He matter? He was the atonement between spirit and matter. He is the Life of the World and the energy of the world."¹

^1. Address on Peace, Acc.9084/582, 2, 13 (Macleod's papers are held iat The National Library of Scotland)

The article from which this extract comes, was originally a paper at a colloquium on George Macleod, held at the Scottish Baptist College in 2008, subsequently published in Theology in Scotland in 2009. It is available as a PDF free access at the link below. Please note that it remains copyright to the author and the Journal.

https://ojs.st-andrews.ac.uk/index.php/TIS/article/view/53/73