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From Augustine to Aquinas, Luther to Zwingli to Calvin, Kierkegaard to Tolstoy, and Bultmann to Bonhoeffer to Windisch to W D Davies to Guelich to Betz, Christians have wrestled with the stringent demands and far-fetched promises of the Sermon on the Mount.

I still have a 35,000 word typewritten exegesis paper I wrote over 40 years ago as my probationary studies in my first years of Baptist ministry here in Scotland. For three years off and on I read and made notes, typed (with a typewriter), edited and retyped (no delete or cut and paste) until it was ready to present as evidence I was continuing to engage with biblical scholarship and theological study and reflection. I also still have the assessment, feedback and comments. The examiner suggested it should be the basis of a publication on the Sermon on the Mount. That never happened.

What did happen was a lifelong wrestling with a text that grabs you by the ankles every time you read it and give it the slightest chance to tackle. I've kept reasonably up to date with scholarship, but that's the easier part. I go back to several of the classic texts, not least Bonhoeffer's discipleship. The big commentaries on Matthew and Luke keep coming, and the occasional dedicated monograph like Pennington's recent Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing – these add information, perspective, context and theological reflection. 

But what long term exposure to the scholarship on the text does not do, is adequately explain why so many who do the exegesis of Matthew 5-7 end up domesticating the text, toning down the demand, blunting the edge of words meant to cut through our moral complacency and comfort zones. Culpepper acknowledges this unseemly rush to compromise right at the start of his own exegetical account of these troublesome and disruptive sayings of Jesus. He wryly observes that "The history of interpretation can be viewed as a succession of ingenious evasions and responses to these evasions." (81)

Culpepper himself quotes Tertullian who claimed the Sermon is Jesus' "official proclamation of the Christ",  an allusion to the practice of Roman officials who upon taking office, announced the rules of their administration." He recalls Bonhoeffer's more astringent approach which he describes like this: "The Sermon does not call us to interpret it, to study it, or to debate it: it calls us to obey it. Obedience is possible however, only in the context of fellowship with the crucified." (83) 

Now over the years I've preached on the Sermon on the Mount. Twice I've taken a congregation through it section by section. The Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer have been recurring texts in my sermons. But I'm still left wondering if I have given the words of Jesus the same exposure and weight as some of the celebrated Pauline texts.

I was forced to think about this by one of Culpepper's sharp comments. He notes Jesus "went up on the mountain…the disciples came… he opened his mouth and began to teach them." 5.1 But then Culpepper jumps to Matthew 28.20 the end of Matthew's gospel where Jesus again goes up on the mountain, probably the same mountain, and commands his disciples to "teach all nations to keep all I have commanded you."

Why had I never linked those two mountains like this? Culpepper is suggesting that the Great Commission has at its heart the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, communicating and demonstrating the ethos, principles, rules and values of the Kingdom of God. Jesus' own way of being, is to be spoken, remembered and written, and from then on to be taught as the distilled essence and essential demonstration of human lives transformed in the Kingdom of God.

Oh I know the Great Commission and the good news is more than this; but it is not less than this; and often enough the church's witness has been demonstrably less than this. 

My next reflection on Culpepper's commentary will be about what he makes of the Beatitudes.    

  

This tapestry was created to explore the beautiful Jewish idea of "tikkun olam" – to repair the world.

The overall idea of the design comes from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem God's Grandeur, and especially the last two lines:

I have never doubted that the presence of God the Creator is discernible in the world around us. Obvious examples are when a lovely sunset can move me to wonder, or a hazy horizon can evoke the kind of longing that feels like an ache in the heart. When I go for a walk in the country, through a wood, across a field, up a hill, the movement and purpose begin to feel like a pilgrimage, that is, a walk that starts as a keep fit discipline, gives way to a more contemplative mood.

The Bible is full of this stuff. Jesus clearly understood the rhythms of the seasons and harvest, the survival tricks of the birds, and noticed enough of the fauna of Galilee to know how fully clothed flowers have a beauty all their own that leaves royal robes looking second rate – "not even Solomon in all his splendour is arrayed like one of these…" Quite so

Today I went to a favourite place. It's been a long week, full of intense exchanges with various people – a funeral service speaking about my teacher of 50 years ago, and my friend for just about as long; a visitor who stayed with us bringing the riches of conversations about art, theology, dealing with grief and fundamental changes in life, news of people's sudden illness, and yet more news of folk I know contracting Covid. So yes, a favourite walk and a camera would be just fine, thank you.

Jesus wasn't the only one who paid attention to birds and learned wisdom from their ways. Along the path we walk there's a small loch where two swans are expecting cygnets any day soon. We watched them build the nest, and the cob throwing together his watching place, a roughly made raft guarding the only waterway to the nest. There are waterhen, coots, mallard, heron and even the occasional cormorant on vacation. The industry and determination to build, brood and bring their young into life is part of that instinctive drive we call life. 

Whatever else we make of the creation stories in Genesis, it's impossible to miss the impetus towards life, fruitfulness and more life. Be fruitful and multiply was said to the first humans, but that urge to produce and reproduce is part of the great symphony of our world, a symphony as yet unfinished, and of a new world every year. There is a profound mystery in the surge of the seed, the protective stubbornness of a brooding swan, the  blizzard of blossom petals and later seeds cascading from the trees.

So yes, I look at the world around me and discern the movement of God in the waves across wheat fields still green, and hear the music of the wind through the trees, playing variations on a theme of Creation. And yes I look at a pearl bordered fritillary and simply wonder that it is there at all, and then wonder at this delicate miracle, resting in sunlight to absorb energy before continuing its exhibition of winged ballet.

In preparation for a recently published essay, I did some work on natural theology, the belief that God reveals Godself through the created order, that is, God's fingerprints and footprints can be seen all over the place. Amongst other arguments for a theology of nature and a natural theology is the way the prophets speak of God's actions and purposes revealed in the world around.

When Isaiah wanted to give pictures of hope, and clues to what God was about, he often turned to the natural world for illustrations. Trees in the field clap their hands, mountains are made low and valleys lifted up, the desert blossoms, there are springs erupting in the desert. Sir George Adam Smith wrote one of the great commentaries on Isaiah. Here are his words about what was going on when the psalmists and prophets knew God was moving and new things were afoot. 

“When psalmist or prophet calls Israel to lift their eyes to the hills, or behold how the heavens declare the glory of God, or to listen to that unspoken tradition which day passes to day and night to night, of the knowledge of the Creator, it is not proofs to doubting minds which he offers; it is spiritual nourishment to hungry souls. These are not arguments—they are sacraments.”

Those words were new to me. But they describe with passion and precision exactly what can happen when you go for a walk, pay attention to the world around you, imagine the Creator's presence in his own creation – spiritual nourishment for our hungry souls, sacraments by which grace takes us by surprise.

Women Remembered. Jesus’ Female Disciples. Helen Bond and Joan Taylor. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2022.

The two authors are in the first rank of scholarship exploring Christian origins and the socio-religious context of Jesus and the Early Church. They are also experienced TV broadcasters, well used to reconstructing historical detail and social settings in their treatment of the New Testament world and the texts that give us windows into the Early Church and its environment.

Both authors are well known for their work in redressing the gender representation and interpretation balance in the contextual and textual world of the New Testament. They are committed to a rehabilitation of the role, significance and pervasive presence of women in Early Christianity. The result in this book is a fascinating study of how women have been “silenced, tamed, or slurred by innuendo” in subsequent representations of women in biblical interpretation, art, inscriptions and archaeological evidence.

The book sparkles with serious wit, sharpened and informed by immersion in the NT world, and the result is a book that compels the reader to look more closely and recognise the prejudice and even misogyny evident in the portrayals of the women around Jesus and in the emerging communities of the early church. Now before we react either in denial or offence to the word ‘misogyny’ being used to describe the depictions and representations of women in Greco-Roman and Jewish culture, it’s a salutary exercise to view and read the evidence – of which there is more than enough to "suffer us to learn in silence”, before pre-judging! And the lessons are well taught and stimulating.  

A clearing the ground chapter on women in the world of Jesus explains the experience of women in the cultural and social realities of the first Christian century. The conclusion is that in language, assumed values, attitudes and social expectations women were largely erased from the action, silenced in the big discussions, and in politics, religion and family matters, women lived under a burden of diminished opportunity and constrained expectations. Bond and Taylor convey this in lucid and at times wry commentary with illustrative texts such as Celsus who dismissed the resurrection accounts as the bletherings of delirious women and sorcery. (p.18)

There follows a series of chapters exploring the experience of Salome, Joanna, Mary Magdalene, Martha and Mary, the Anointing Woman, and some mentioned in the apostolic history including Prisca and Junia. Each chapter examines the textual fabric of the stories. A particularly telling example is of the anointing woman. Several stories and allusions in the Gospels are traced into a history of the three main narratives in Luke 7, Matthew 26 and John 11. Far from being a side-show in the male driven narratives of the Twelve, each of the women is seen to have a relationship with Jesus in which they are affirmed and at times become exemplars of what real discipleship actually looks like. This chapter ends, “The moral seems to be: take your cue from what the women do.” (120) The same combination of contextualising the narrative, exploiting evidence of cultural and social practices and attitudes, and careful comparisons of the Synoptic texts and these with John, opens up other key figures, such as a sane yet imaginative account of Mary Magdalene, determinedly earthed in the text, but with illuminating side glances at subsequent portrayals in art and the apocryphal Gospels.  

I’m quite sure that any sermon will be the more interesting, and accurate and fair, if traditional commentaries and unexamined assumptions by the preacher are exposed to Bond and Taylor’s careful, well evidenced and soundly argued treatments of the figures, stories and texts of each of the women examined in the chapters of this book. Further, there are times when it should be as clear as day, that certain passages require the insight and empathy that can only come from a female perspective on women’s experience. An obvious example being the sympathetic realism with which they explore the story of the woman with the flow of blood as it is told, with differences, in all three Synoptic Gospels.

Bond and Taylor’s expertise in the social context of the Gospels, and their interest in restoring the portrayals of women in the NT, could be compared to the work of art restorers. In these chapters they set about removing the varnish and accretions of time’s dust, and recovering at least some of the vivid colours to present a fresh perspective on figures too easily ignored, erased or distorted by uninformed or unexamined assumptions, and at times even male prejudice or scholarly laziness.

The book finishes on this optimistic note: “We hope we have set these women disciples of Jesus in their rightful place, close to Jesus in his mission in Galilee, and active in establishing, serving and leading Christian communities as the faith spread around the Mediterranean and the wider ancient world.“ (184)

I think a careful reading of this book will go a long way to achieving that hope. The cumulative case is rather strong.    

I've just updated the sidebar on what I'm currently reading. Just to mention the most recent series by Conn Iggulden. If you haven't read his historical novels you might want to have a look. Well over a year ago I read The Gates of Athens, the first in his new series on Ancient Greece, begins with King Darius on a punitive expedition to the Greek city states. Failing to subdue them he vows to raze the Greek cities and so the scene is set for the battle of Thermopylae. The sequel, Protector, is set some years later when Xerxes has succeeded Darius and goes to fulfil his father's vow to punish and finally subdue the Greeks. The largest army and naval fleet ever assembled marches and sails in overwhelming numbers. The rest is history.

Which is why Iggulden is such a gripping novelist. He makes it his business to know the history, to imagine within the context of the times the politics, the cultures, and the characters. The detail of social behaviour, ancient values, military strategy, social structures from slaves to senators, the early days of democracy – its benefits and dangers; all of this woven into a narrative in which the main circumstances are already given, but which becomes a story of flesh and blood people, struggling to find and hold on to their foothold on life. It's a story of Empire and power, the collision of cultures and ideologies, and the outcome would shape the destinies of West and East.

Amongst the tests of Iggulden's skill is how far he captures the varying contexts and scenes. I've recently re-read the biblical stories of Esther and Daniel. Iggulden makes you feel the fear and awe of coming anywhere near King Darius and his son King Xerxes. One of primary levers in these novels is the contrast between absolute power which cannot be questioned, and communal decision making with all the messiness of rhetoric, persuasion, political positioning, voting alliances and all the other curbs on power of a fledgling democracy.

All of this makes for novels driven by urgency, two forms of political ideology on a collision course. Having read Iggulden, I'm aware that the biblical accounts take on a deeper texture as the minds and motives of these ancient emperor kings are imagined and portrayed with considerable weight of research behind them. It's an interesting thought, the historical novelist as background reading for getting a better sense of the biblical text. Especially as in this case, when both Esther and the first half of Daniel are themselves told with the literary skill and imaginative freedom that is creative with the facts and the circumstances in ways intended to strengthen the faith of the faithful.  

    

Regular readers here will know that one of my interests is designing and working tapestry. The theme, choice of colours, mixing of coloured strands, decisions about which stitches to use; the scope for messing it up is quite wide!

So there are times when doing freehand tapestry you realise, "No. That doesn’t work!" The colour isn’t right, or the stitch is wrong, and you've done a lot of them. You’ve been stitched up! That’s when you need a wee tool called a stitch remover. A needle pointed hook that cuts out the mistakes and gives you a chance to try again.

Not so easy though, when in the daily worked tapestry of our lives, we've stitched ourselves up by saying the wrong words, or made embarrassing mistakes, or misjudged someone, or behaved in a way we now regret.

Some things can't be unstitched; but where they can, we should do it. Words like forgiveness, reconciliation, acceptance, kindness, goodwill – they’re all good stitch removers where we made false stitches that don't fit the overall pattern of the life we're trying to lead. “Blessed are the peacemakers…the merciful…the reconcilers.” Words that unstitch our mistakes.

One of the most important contents of any significant book is The Preface. A Preface is the story of the book, an author's apologia for ever thinking someone might read the book, and even the Preface. Why was this book written like this, at this time? Why should a reader take the time and effort to read it? Does it say anything new or different?

Yesterday Geetanjali Shree was the first Indian author to win the Booker Prize for her novel Tomb of Sand. In her acceptance speech (let's call it a spoken Preface) she explained her excitement that now a whole Hindi tradition of storytelling and literary art would now be showcased to the world. When writing the book she never dreamt for a moment that she might win any prize, let alone the International Booker. 

"Behind me and this book lies a rich and flourishing literary tradition in Hindi, and in other South Asian languages. World literature will be the richer for knowing some of the finest writers in these languages," she said.

That will be reason enough to go looking for her novel.

But back to the written Preface. One of my particular interests is biblical exegesis, and biblical commentaries are one of the joys of my life. Over the past 50 years publishing of biblical commentaries in series has become a religious publishing phenomenon. One result of this is the to be expected paragraph in almost every Preface, explaining why yet another commentary on a document – say the Gospel of John – a text that has been exhaustively, minutely, and laboriously examined over two millennia and on which at any time there are a hundred volumes of commentary available – and that isn't including the multiplying kingdom of online resources.

What can be left to be said? Why rehash what's already out there. Qoheleth asks if there is anything new under the sun – he is also the impatient interrogator of authors and publishers about much study being a weariness to the flesh. Still, for those who are interested in such textual immersion, a well written Preface is a window into the mind of the writer and the justification for this further attempt to explain, explore and expound.

Now and again a writer leaves aside the scholarly seriousness and says "yah-boo" to convention. There are acknowledgements and thanks – sometimes a separate page from the Preface – but most often as the last context setting paragraphs. And so I come to what set me off on this post in the first place, a delightful debunking of this courteous practice of Acknowledgements. It comes in volume two of Donald Hagner's commentary on Matthew – I smirked admiringly when I read it.