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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.   

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."