Tag: Moses

Holy Week Meditations: Jesus Under Question. The Resurrection and Marriage (3/3)

Luke 20:27-40

The opponents

When our daughter was at secondary school, she acted in a school production of Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Rhoda McGaw Theatre in Woking. Debbie and I managed to see the production twice, having snagged tickets both for the preview night as well as the final show on the Saturday night. 

Seeing it twice alerted me to something I hadn’t noticed before. The theology in it is dreadful! Firstly, all reference to God is excised from the story. The key line in the Genesis account that what Joseph’s brothers meant for evil purposes, God meant for good, is not even hinted at. And secondly, the very title of the song One More Angel In Heaven gives away their failure to understand a book, Genesis, that has no direct reference to the afterlife.

Welcome to the world of the Sadducees, the latest group to interrogate Jesus in the temple and try to catch him out. They only accepted the Torah, or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, as Holy Scripture, and since none of these books contained any direct reference to resurrection, they didn’t believe in it. Resurrection only gets a name-check in the Old Testament in the book of Daniel, and possibly Job. But to the Sadducees, these books weren’t scripture, whereas to the Pharisees and other groups they were – hence why the teachers of the law in this passage actually side with Jesus!

The other thing to appreciate about the Sadducees is that they were the aristocracy. They were wealthy and well-to-do, and exercised influence in Jerusalem. While they were not strictly part of the temple authorities, you can be sure that their money talked in the holy city. 

And like the religious leaders, they cosied up closely to the Romans. Doing so protected their wealth. For a rough parallel, think of Russian oligarchs keeping quiet to avoid the wrath of Vladimir Putin. Therefore, if Jesus’ good news of the kingdom of God was a threat to the Jewish powers that be in Jerusalem because it undermined the Roman Empire, it was also a threat to the Sadducees with their closeness to and dependence upon Rome. We are dealing with another unholy alliance of power. It is to their advantage to neutralise Jesus.

The issue

For Israel, Moses was the central and most important figure in their history. He led them from slavery in Egypt to the cusp of the Promised Land. He received the law from God on Mount Sinai. And the Sadducees, as I said, limited themselves in terms of biblical authority to those first five books of the Bible that were sometimes popularly known as ‘The Five Books of Moses’ (even though he didn’t appear in the first one, Genesis). So if Moses said something, it was very important. 

With their laser focus on Moses, they thought they could ridicule Jesus. And I say ‘ridicule’, because here is one of those times when it is important to see this story in its Holy Week context and the context of the two previous episodes we have considered in this chapter. If this story had existed somewhere else, the question the Sadducees pose could have been construed as an innocent enquiry. But the context in Luke’s Gospel demands that we see this too as an attempt to trap Jesus. 

What they try to do with their elaborate story is to say to Jesus, you believe in resurrection, but the teaching of Moses contradicts you. Their story about the woman who marries seven different brothers one by one is based on an Old Testament law of what came to be known as ‘levirate marriage.’ It was important to have offspring. Therefore, if a man died without having fathered children, it was his brother’s duty to marry the widow and have children that would be his heritage. It is like the popular modern belief that after death we live on through our descendants. The secular celebrant who conducted Miriam King’s funeral on Monday said something like that as she tried vainly to offer hope to her family and all at the funeral who were mourning. This view is called ‘immortality through posterity’, and what the Sadducees claim here is that the law of levirate marriage depends on it, and therefore the belief of Jesus (and others) in the resurrection is wrong and unscriptural. 

As far as the Sadducees are concerned, it’s game, set, and match to them. They reckon they have silenced Jesus in the way he has silenced others. How wrong they are. 

The response

Jesus’ response comes in two halves. The first is about how you understand Scripture. The second is specifically about the Sadducees’ hero, Moses. 

As to his understanding of Scripture, he talks about why marriage is not needed in the life to come. But before we get to that, I would just like you to see in passing a little detail that will take us off piste for a tangent, but which is a piece of incidental evidence for Jesus’ more positive view of women. It’s the way he refers to people who ‘marry and are given in marriage’, in English translations. We might read in there with the language of being ‘given in marriage’ the old custom of a bride being ‘given away’ by her father, as if her ownership is being transferred from him to the bridegroom. It’s something that is modified in the current Methodist marriage service so that the language speaks not of ‘Who gives this woman to be married to this man?’ but ‘Who presents this woman to be married to this man?’ (And it gives an opportunity for the man to be presented to the woman, not that I have ever had a couple avail themselves of that opportunity.)

However, the English translations let us down at this point. You might think that something translated ‘given in marriage’ was in the passive voice, but in the Greek it’s in a grammatical construction called the middle voice, and it should be rendered ‘those who allow themselves to be married.’ In other words, Jesus is allowing for women to have agency in the question of marriage, an utterly revolutionary thought in his day, and until relatively recently in our culture, too. 

That said, now let’s return to why Jesus says that marriage is not needed in the life of the age to come. He says that once death is abolished, there is no more need for people to have children. No more will dead people have to be replaced by the births of babies. Therefore, their extreme account of levirate marriage doesn’t stand up.

And why doesn’t it stand up? Because of what Christians call ‘eschatology’, that is the doctrine of the last things. The ‘eschaton’ is the age to come. In Christian terms, that is subjects like heaven, hell, the last judgment, the new creation, the kingdom of God, and so on. 

The point is that for Jesus you don’t just interpret Scripture in some flat way where you just read the meaning off the page (or the scroll!). You need to interpret it from a particular standpoint. And he says that the way to do so is from the perspective of God’s eternal, final, ultimate purposes. 

I wonder how we read our Bibles. Do we just lift verses off the page and out of context? Do we play what some people call ‘Bible bingo’? And it’s not just reading them in their immediate context which is important (and which we’ve been doing in this series), it’s about seeing the wider context of God’s great story and where it is heading. 

Now the Sadducees would object to this. ‘How can you do that,’ they would say, ‘when there is no evidence from the Torah that there is an age to come?’ So that is where the second part of Jesus’ response comes in. 

Here is where he says to these opponents, you say you go by what Moses teaches, but you don’t even understand him properly. The very thing you deny is there in the life, teaching, and experience of Moses himself! You want to talk about Moses, he says: well, here’s a question for you. How can Moses refer to ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’ when all of those three men are dead? It makes no sense! If death is the end and that’s that, what on earth is the point of referring to God like this? 

The readers of Luke’s Gospel will not be surprised when Jesus says here that God ‘is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive’, because they have already heard Jesus give the Parable of Dives and Lazarus, where poverty-stricken Lazarus is carried off by the angels to Abraham, who is still alive. Jesus is consistent in his teaching, and Luke reflects that. 

The Sadducees thought they had game, set, and match, but not a bit of it. Jesus saved match point and turned the game on its head. It is their turn to join the company of those silenced by Jesus in Luke 20. 

The audience

Who is listening to this debate? We might expect it to be ‘the people’ again, but Luke has a surprise for us. Some teachers of the law are on the scene. It’s possible (but not certain) that these would have been aligned with the Pharisees, who originally were a more what we might call working class movement, and therefore not the most natural bedfellows of the Sadducees. 

Evidently, these teachers of the law take great delight in Jesus confounding the Sadducees. ‘Well said, teacher!’ they exclaim. And you would also expect them to have some sympathy with what Jesus teaches here. Remember they did not limit themselves to the first five books of the Bible. Although there is some debate as to when the canon of what we call the Old Testament was definitively agreed in Judaism, I think we can assume they accepted the books that mention or hint at resurrection. Hence, on this at least, Jesus is an ally. 

So is this good? Yes and no. On the one hand, this may be a sign of what was to come later in the early history of the church when some Pharisees sided with the first believers. In Acts 23, when Paul is on trial before the Sanhedrin, he cleverly says that he is on trial for believing in the resurrection of the dead, leading to a fierce example between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, where some of the Pharisees support Paul as an innocent man. 

But on the other hand, in the next few verses of Luke, Jesus will condemn the very same for not understanding the Scriptures as regards the Messiah, for not living their lives in the light of the age to come, and as hypocrites who love status, exploit the poor, and make a show of their spiritual practices (Luke 20:41-47). 

Overall, then, it seems that these are people who affirm some of the right doctrines, but it makes little difference in their lives. Being doctrinally accurate does not make them followers of the Messiah. It’s all very well cheering on Jesus for getting one over your rivals, but the bottom line is whether we are going to follow him as Saviour and Lord. 

And that following him will soon become quite tricky, as the story of Holy Week progresses. 

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Covenant Service: Good News For Failures (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

Jeremiah 31:31-34

It’s that time of year when sign-ups to health clubs and gyms breed like rabbits. Yet in a few months’ time, many of the direct debits will still be going out from bank accounts, but a lot of the new fitness enthusiasts of January will have given up. The thought of ‘New year, new me’ will lie in tatters. Another set of New Year’s Resolutions will have failed.

Maybe that’s why I haven’t bothered with such resolutions for many years. I feel sure I’ll fail.

So much of life is made up of failures – cheerful thought, I know! – be they failures of good intentions or that much larger feeling that our lives themselves are a total failure. Not one of us is without our failures.

But on this first Sunday of the New Year, when we renew our covenant with God, and we traditionally become sombre and serious, wondering whether we can keep the solemn and intimidating promises we make, I want to preach Good News.

In my draft order of service, I simply called this sermon ‘The New Covenant.’ But now I want to give it a different title: ‘Good News For Failures.’ I want you to have a sense of hope from our reading in Jeremiah.

Yes, I know many people have Jeremiah down as a depressing and depressive prophet of doom. But if you read him closely, he preaches short-term doom but long-term hope. And that’s why we can have a theme of ‘Good News For Failures.’

I have two pieces of Good News from Jeremiah for Failures:

Firstly, God’s New Covenant means Failures Are Not Forgotten:

31 ‘The days are coming,’ declares the Lord,
    ‘when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
    and with the people of Judah.
32 It will not be like the covenant
    I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
    to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
    though I was a husband to them,’
declares the Lord.

Jeremiah has preached doom to Israel. He warned them that if they did not turn from their sins the king of Babylon would come and conquer them and take them into exile. They didn’t listen. They thought they could find political solutions to their troubles without changing their ways while continuing to sin.

It didn’t work. The Babylonian army turned up. At this point, a first tranche of Israel has been marched off into Babylon. They are away from the land, which was so central to their religion, because it had been promised to them by God. If they are away from their own land, then surely they are forgotten and rejected by God for ever.

Yet Jeremiah comes with this word and others that looks forward to the future. God has not finished with his people. They may have broken the old covenant, but he will make a new covenant.

And of course, that is what the coming of Jesus at Christmas is about. If you re-read the nativity stories you will see how many of the promises don’t simply look forward to Christianity and the Church (which is the way we often read them) but are promises to Israel. God has not forgotten and rejected his people. His own Son is bringing the promised new covenant.

Now we Gentile believers are grafted onto the vine which is the People of God, and so we too are inheritors of this same promise. When we fail, God has not forgotten us.

If we come to this Covenant Service this morning conscious of how much we have not lived up to our promise a year ago, we come to a God of grace who in Jesus Christ offers us yet another new beginning. Just as we confess our sins every Sunday morning together and receive assurance of forgiveness, so too year on year at this service we shall confess our sins before we renew the covenant and again receive God’s promise of a fresh start.

Every now and again, I come across people in church who believe that God cannot continue forgiving them. A few will even say they think they have committed ‘The unforgivable sin.’ However, Jesus said the unforgivable sin was blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, and if someone is sensitive to their sin then believe me that usually indicates they are also sensitive to the Holy Spirit.

No: to everyone who fails, I believe God invites us to look at Jesus on the Cross and see his arms stretched out wide – so wide they embrace the world, including us.

Those who are excluded from his embrace are those who exclude themselves not simply by sinning but by refusing to accept they have sinned, perhaps painting their sin as righteousness (often self-righteousness), and thinking they have no need to repent.

But to those of us who are acutely aware of our need to repent, God says, I have not forgotten you. I have not rejected you. Come back. You will find I am already waiting for you.

Secondly, God’s New Covenant Means Failures Have New Hope:

33 ‘This is the covenant that I will make with the people of Israel
    after that time,’ declares the Lord.
‘I will put my law in their minds
    and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
    and they will be my people.
34 No longer will they teach their neighbour,
    or say to one another, “Know the Lord,”
because they will all know me,
    from the least of them to the greatest,’
declares the Lord.
‘For I will forgive their wickedness
    and will remember their sins no more.’

Neatly for me, this gives me a chance to link back to my sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, when I looked at the relationship between Jesus and Moses. To recap part of it:

In the Old Testament, people were not saved by the Law but by grace. Keeping the Law did not save people, rather it was a response to having been saved. We can see this by the fact that God only gave Moses the Law for Israel after he had delivered them from Egypt.

Nevertheless, it was external to the people. It showed God’s righteousness, but it did not convey the power to obey it. On the other hand, the Christmas promise is that Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, and when Jesus returns to the Father that changes to the Holy Spirit, God within us.

Now link that with what Jeremiah records God as saying here. The external Law will be replaced in the New Covenant with everyone knowing the Lord. In other words, the New Covenant promises God’s indwelling of every disciple.

Not only that, we do not have to depend on priests to mediate between us and God – again, because everyone will know the Lord.

We don’t have to struggle to know God, we don’t have to struggle to know his law, and we are also enabled with divine power to do his will.

Yes, we shall still fail from time to time, and God in his mercy will forgive us and lift us up. But we shall also find God’s own strength when we truly want to obey his will.

The Old Covenant was good – it was very good – but the New Covenant is like that moment when you are driving in your car, gently accelerating, but then the turbo cuts in, and whoosh!

The New Covenant contains not only the Old Covenant promises of forgiveness, but the additional promises of God’s presence and power with us. This is God’s side of the bargain. This is his generous, grace-filled offer to every disciple of the Messiah.

So when we come to renew our promises today, I want us to realise that we are not coming to a severe God who is ready to stoke the flames of Hell the moment we let him down. He is the God of mercy and love who has provided everything we need through the Cross of Christ. Forgiveness comes there. The restoration of our relationship with God comes there. The gift of the Spirit follows.

If we remember that this is the nature of our God who calls us to reaffirm our covenant with him, then perhaps we shall be more ready to make those challenging promises.

After all, we’re not making a New Year’s Resolution, we’re responding to God’s grace.

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Advent, The Prologue and Relationships: 4 Jesus and Moses (John 1:1-18)

John 1:1-18

Moses isn’t the first Old Testament character that comes to our mind at Christmas, I’ll give you that. Maybe we think of Isaiah prophesying the virgin birth or the One who is called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace. We might remember Micah and his prophecy that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, which Herod’s advisers quote when the Magi show up.

But Moses?

Well, John seems to think it’s worth contrasting Jesus with Moses at the end of our great passage. Hear verses 14 to 18 again:

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

15 (John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, ‘This is the one I spoke about when I said, “He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.”’) 16 Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. 17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in the closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.

Why didn’t I just read verse 17, which is the only verse here that explicitly mentions Moses? Because even when he’s not named, John is alluding to him. And by doing so, John tells us more about what the Good News of Jesus is.

I’m going back to three episodes in Moses’ life that John has in mind and we’ll see how the comparison and contrast with Jesus tells us about the wonder of the Incarnation.

Firstly, we go to the wilderness:

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

When we read, ‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us,’ the English ‘made his dwelling’ if translated more literally would be ‘tabernacled’ Jesus tabernacled among us. Why is that significant?

Do you remember the tabernacle that Moses was instructed to get Israel to construct? It was the dwelling-place of God’s presence that the Israelites carried with them in the wilderness. And indeed it remained so until the Temple was built, centuries later, in Jerusalem.

The tabernacle was the portable presence of God. When John says that Jesus tabernacled among us, he is telling us that in coming to earth Jesus is the very presence of God with us. He wasn’t just some prophet. He was the very presence of God in the midst of human life.

We do not believe in a God who has stayed remote from us. Contrary to the Julie Gold/Nanci Griffith song that Cliff Richard covered, God is not simply watching us from a distance. God has traversed the distance and in Jesus he is Emmanuel, God with us. He knows what it is to live the human life with all its joys and struggles. He is not an ivory tower God.

When we struggle with suffering or injustice, Jesus has lived it. This is what he came to do. As I often say at funerals, when I go through a bad experience in life, the people who come up with the clever answers that explain my predicament are no help. They are as smug as Job’s comforters. But those who have walked the road I am on, and who come alongside me – they make a difference. So it is with Jesus.

One simple example from my life: a few years before I met Debbie, I had a broken engagement. (Or a narrow escape, as my sister called it. I married the right woman in the end!) One day, when I was particularly down, two friends of mine, Sue and Kate, rang the doorbell and said, “We’re taking you out to lunch.” What I discovered over lunch was their own histories of broken relationships.

Jesus tabernacled among us. He understands. He is still present with us by the Holy Spirit. Hear the Good News of Christmas that the Son of God tabernacled among us. He is Emmanuel, God with us.

And it’s the model for the way we spread that Good News. For after the Resurrection, Jesus told his disciples,

As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you. (John 20:21)

So the way we begin sharing the Gospel is by openly living for Christ in the midst of those who do not yet believe. We do not go on helicopter raids to bring people in, we start by going among other people, living our Christian lives before them. This is what Jesus himself, the Word made flesh, did, when he tabernacled among us. So too us.

In one town where I ministered, some Christians left the local United Reformed Church and said they were going to start a new church on a deprived estate. They hired a hall there for meetings. But did any of them move to the estate and live out their faith among the people they were supposedly going to evangelise? No.

The Word was made flesh and tabernacled among us. It is Good News for us in all that life throws at us, and it is the model for us sharing that Good News even today.

Secondly, let’s look generally at the exodus and for this we go to verse sixteen of John chapter one:

16 Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given.

Many people say that the Old Testament is about God’s Law and the New Testament is about God’s grace. Wrong! There is grace in the Old Testament. The New Testament tells us so, in verses like this. So when Jesus comes, his mission of grace builds on what has gone before and takes it to new levels.

In Moses’ case, grace is seen in the Exodus. God sees the suffering of his people in Egypt as they are enslaved, as Pharaoh worsens their already bad working conditions, as he attempts to have male Israelite babies killed.

The Israelites themselves are not perfect, but God in his mercy and grace will save them. Moses whom he calls to lead them is also far from perfect – in fact that’s an understatement, he’s a murderer. But in grace God calls him and mercifully redirects his passions.

Grace comes before anything we ever do for God. He acted in grace to deliver the Israelites from Egypt. And when Jesus comes, he does so to bring grace on a far greater scale, a cosmic scale, even. Yes, God is still interested in setting free people who are suffering due to the sins of others, but in Jesus he comes to do even more. He comes to set people free from their own sins. He comes to bring reconciliation not only with God but with one another. And he comes to heal broken creation. For when Jesus is raised from the dead, it will be the first fruits of God’s project to make all things new, even heaven and earth, as we learn in the Book of Revelation.

If from Moses and the wilderness we learn that Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, then from Moses and the Exodus, we learn that Jesus is – er – Jesus, the One who will save his people from their sins.

This tells us why the Word was made flesh and tabernacled among us. He came to bring this comprehensive salvation. To save us from what others do to us. To save us from what we do. To save creation from its brokenness.

Never let us reduce salvation to a personal and private forgiveness of my own sins which earns me my ticket to heaven. Yes, we do need our own sins forgiving, we do need to repent of them and put our faith in Jesus, but that is just the beginning. God saves us to involve is in the whole project of grace that Jesus heralded. We have a job to do, and Jesus is enlisting us in the ways of grace.

I love to tell the story of a keen young Christian who found himself on a train sharing a compartment with a man of the cloth dressed in a purple shirt, in other words a bishop. The young Christian had heard about these religious establishment figures and was sure the bishop would not have any vital experience of Christ, and so he said to him, ‘Bishop, are you saved?’

The bishop looked up and calmly replied, ‘Young man, do you mean have I been saved? Or do you mean am I being saved? Or do you mean will I be saved?’

Before the bemused young man could respond the bishop continued: ‘Because I have been saved – Jesus in his grace has forgiven my sins. I am being saved – Jesus by his grace is slowly making me more like him. And I will be saved – because one day there will be no more sin in this creation. I have been saved from the penalty of sin, I am being saved from the practice of sin, and I will be saved from the presence of sin.’

The bishop understood what it meant for Jesus to have given us ‘grace in place of grace already given.’

Thirdly and finally, let’s go to Mount Sinai with Moses.

17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

Ah, the law: that’s what we associate Moses with, isn’t it? Coming down from Mount Sinai with God’s prescription of two tablets, and then all those other laws, some of which perplex us today.

So it was law in the Old Testament and grace in the New Testament after all? Except you have to remember when it was that God gave the law to Israel. It was after he had delivered them from Egypt in the Exodus and they were on their way to the Promised Land. So it’s not true that keeping God’s law was the way to salvation, it was rather how they responded to salvation.

Even so, there was a problem. Israel failed to keep the law. Prophet after prophet called them to repentance, but either they rejected the message or it didn’t stick.

Hence, the coming of Jesus with grace and truth. For grace is not just about forgiveness. It is about that on-going salvation from sin that the bishop told the earnest young Christian about.

And he does not only bring the truth, he is the truth. Jesus the truth lives among us and eventually within us by his Spirit. The truth of God is no longer laws external to us on tablets of stone. Now that truth lives within us and enables us to be different. This is the promise of Christmas. Not only God with us, not only God saving us from our sins, but God within us.

An old lady once collared me after a service and told me that what this country needed to do was simply to get back to the Ten Commandments, and then all would be well. But she missed the grace that Jesus offers here. Because on our own we fail to keep the Ten Commandments, or indeed any of God’s law. We need the grace of forgiveness, and the grace of God’s presence in our lives to transform us. If faith was just a rule-keeping exercise, Jesus would never have needed to come.

But he did come. He came to be present with us, even when we wander in a wilderness, and he calls us to do the same in the midst of others. He came to bring the greatest exodus of all, in the many ways he liberates us and this world from sin. He came to bring the inner strength we need if we are to respond to God’s love for us by being with us and within us.

If anyone has reason for joy and celebration this Christmas, it’s the disciple of Jesus. Don’t be miserable in the face of inappropriate celebrations in the world at Christmastime. Instead, show that we have greater reasons to throw a party than anybody else.

I know there are lots of things that affect our mood and our ability to celebrate at Christmas. We may have had a good or a bad year. There may be an empty seat at the table this year, or there may be new life in our family.

But in terms of our faith, the coming of Jesus gives us true strength. Christmas really is ‘good tidings of great joy.’

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The Purpose of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:1-12 (Ordinary 4 Epiphany 4 Year A 2023)

Matthew 5:1-12

If ever I want to wind up a congregation about how long the sermon is going to be, I tell a story I’ve often used about the famous Puritan preacher Richard Baxter of Kidderminster. On one Sunday, he was heard saying in his sermon, “And sixty-fifthly …”

Now, I’ve never preached a sixty-five point sermon. Honest! A typical sermon of mine has three points. I know that’s a cliché to many, but psychologists have suggested we remember things in threes.

But today’s reading could tempt me to preach an eight-point sermon: one point for every beatitude. I did attempt that once as a young minister, preaching on Remembrance Sunday, where this reading is also set. Let’s just say it wasn’t one of my most successful sermons.

Actually, I think the Beatitudes are best served by a sermon series or by a weekly series in a Bible study group – one week for each Beatitude. That way we can get to grips with them.

Instead, this week what I want us to do is something we often miss by rushing into the Beatitudes at the very beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. I shall say a little about the Beatitudes, but mainly I want us to think more widely about the purpose of the Sermon on the Mount. That should set us up well for the next couple of weeks, when we also have passages from the Sermon to reflect on, and I hope it will help us in the longer term on those occasions when we return to the Sermon on the Mount.

So my question for today is this: what is Jesus doing in the Sermon on the Mount?

Firstly, Jesus is showing his authority.

It is not an incidental detail when Matthew tells us that Jesus ‘went up on a mountainside’ (verse 1). Whenever Jesus goes up a mountain in Matthew’s Gospel, something important happens. Other examples include the Mount of Transfiguration in chapter 17 and the mountain where he gave the Great Commission after his Resurrection in chapter 28.

This repeated mountain pattern alerts his Jewish readers to something important. They remember that God gave the Law to Moses on a mountain – Mount Sinai. Here is a new Moses.

And then they remember that they were promised one greater than Moses would appear. For the Sermon on the Mount is the first of five big blocks into which Matthew divides Jesus’ teaching – just like the so-called ‘Five Books of Moses’: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

A new Moses, indeed one greater than Moses is here. He has special, if not unique authority. Therefore we cannot dismiss the teaching here as just ‘good advice.’ Nor can we dismiss it as unrealistic and other-worldly. We can’t say it’s idealistic nonsense that doesn’t apply in the real world. You could say it is the ideal ethics of the kingdom, but

It is the ideal ethics of the kingdom that its citizens must exemplify in advance.[1]

Jesus is bringing God’s new Law, the Law of his kingdom. This is meant to make us stand up on our feet and give it our full attention. Why? Because Jesus has the very authority of God.

Secondly, Jesus focusses his teaching on his disciples.

His disciples came to him, 2 and he began to teach them.

In the previous chapter he has called people to repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near (4:17). Now, he says, this is what the life of a repentant disciple looks like.

One experience preachers occasionally have at the door after the service is the person who comes up to us and says, “Thank you for your sermon this morning, that was meant for so-and-so. I hope she was paying attention!”

However, before we rush into saying that the teaching we find in the Sermon on the Mount is applicable to other people, maybe politicians for example, we need to remember that it is first and foremost addressed to those of us who claim to be disciples of Jesus, however imperfect we are.

In the Sermon on the Mount you and I get to take a good, hard look at ourselves and how we are getting on as followers of Jesus:

Jesus himself apparently expected full compliance with his teaching, not in the legalistic or ascetic ways he himself condemns, “but as signs of God’s kingdom.”[2]

In the Gospel narratives Jesus embraces those who humble themselves, acknowledging God’s right to rule, even if in practice they fall short of the goal of moral perfection.[3]

If we want to know how we are getting on as Christians, the Sermon on the Mount is a good barometer. If we are wondering what to do for Lent this year, maybe one good discipline would be to read through the Sermon in Matthew 5-7 in small chunks, reflecting on Jesus’ teaching, and bringing our findings to God in prayer.

Thirdly, Jesus teaches in full sight of the world.

Jesus teaches here outdoors as many rabbis of his day did, not confining his teaching to the synagogue. This is a way of life that is meant to be lived out in the world. It is not private piety.

And moreover, he knows the world is watching:

Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside … (verse 1a, my italics)

There are a couple of things we can draw from this. One is what I’ve just said, namely that the world is watching the disciples of Jesus as they are taught. And you can be sure that if your friends or family know that you are a Christian, they are watching you, too.

Therefore, it’s all the more important that we engage with the teaching of Jesus. I know that the old cliché is kind of true when we say, ‘Christians aren’t perfect, they’re just forgiven’, but I want to take issue with that word ‘just.’ Yes, we are imperfect and we are forgiven, but we are more than that. We are people on a journey, growing in grace and faith. As Paul tells us in Philippians 1, God has begun a good work in us, and he is going to finish it. It’s like the catchphrase from Mastermind: ‘I’ve started, so I’ll finish.’ And our neighbours are watching our progress.

The other thing about Jesus teaching in full sight of the world is that

He wanted both [the disciples and the crowd] to hear, calling both to decision.[4]

When Jesus teaches his message here, he is saying, “This is what the kingdom of God looks like. Are you up for it? Make a decision!” And when we live it out before the watching world, there is a sense in which we are doing the same. “This is what the kingdom of God looks like. This is God’s future. What are you going to do about Jesus?” Such faithful living is the beginning of our evangelism.

Fourthly and finally, Jesus begins the Sermon with encouragement.

That’s what the Beatitudes are – encouragement. They are encouragement for disciples of Jesus. The preamble to an ancient speech or letter, or the ‘proem’ as it was called, was often filled with encouragement for the hearers or recipients. You see the same in the way Paul begins most of his letters. Even when he’s cross with a church, he often starts by recounting blessings associated with them.

And so that’s why Jesus says ‘Blessèd’ eight times at the beginning. You are blessed – times eight! You are blessed as you live the life of a disciple. You may not always think you are blessed as you follow me, he says, but really and truly you are.

You are blessed in the work of the kingdom – when you long for righteousness and you make peace.

You are blessed in the attitudes of the kingdom – when you grow in meekness, mercy, and purity of heart.

You are even blessed in the suffering that comes from walking in the ways of the kingdom – when you are poor, grieving, or persecuted.

These conditions do not always look like what the world would call ‘blessèd’, but God is with his disciples there, he is growing their work and character, and he is promising them justice when the kingdom has fully come. In all these ways he encourages his people that they are on the right path. We simply need to take care that we are walking in these directions, and God will take care of the blessing.

So as we submit to the authority of Jesus by seeking to follow his challenging teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, we are helped by the Holy Spirit. And as we live out values such as the Beatitudes before the world, we shall be challenging that world about the need to respond to the call of Jesus.

[1] Craig Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A socio-rhetorical commentary, p161.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Op. cit., p161f.

[4] Op. cit., p165.

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Video Sermon: How Do We Understand The Presence Of God?

Continuing with the story of Moses and the Israelites, this week we arrive at Exodus 33:12-23.

However, rather than explore this story, I’m taking up one important theme in it – the presence of God – and giving a sketch of that subject as it appears through Scripture.

I hope you find these thoughts helpful in your own life.

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Video Sermon: How To Stop Quarrelling With God

Continuing this week with those pesky Israelites. In Exodus 17:1-7 they’re still moaning about God. Except they’ve upped the ante. Now it’s a full-blown quarrel.

It’s one thing bringing our pain to God, it’s quite another to quarrel with him. How do we avoid the spiritual danger of hardening our hearts against God? Here are my thoughts.

I mention a song during the talk – ‘Land of the Living’ by Bryn Haworth. You can listen to it below and you can buy it here.

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Video Sermon: How God Cures Grumbling

This week, I reflect on the story of God providing manna in the wilderness for the Israelites in Exodus 16:1-15. Given that human nature hasn’t changed over three thousand years, I look at how the ways God cured their moaning can be effective when we become religious whingers today.

If you liked this, please share it on other social media channels. Thanks!

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