Sermon on the Mount

And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.

— Matthew 7:28-29 (ESV)

The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’s teaching recorded in Matthew 5-7, delivered on a Galilean hillside to his disciples and a gathered crowd (Matt. 5:1) early in his public ministry. Luke records a shorter, parallel discourse delivered on level ground, traditionally called the Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:20-49). The sermon has been called “a manifesto for life in the kingdom of heaven,”¹ setting out the righteousness, both inward and outward, that Jesus requires of his disciples, “greater” than that of the scribes and Pharisees (Matt. 5:20).

Featured Media

Matt Carter reads the Sermon on the Mount standing before the Sea of Galilee (Vimeo video; starts at 2m7s)

Confessional Witness

Neither the Second London Baptist Confession nor the Westminster Confession devotes a chapter to the Sermon on the Mount itself, but both confessions, in nearly identical language, answer the question the sermon’s antitheses raise: does Jesus’s teaching set the Mosaic law aside? “The moral law doth forever bind all, as well justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof… Neither doth Christ in the gospel any way dissolve, but much strengthen, this obligation.”² This is the Reformed confessions’ shared answer, not a Baptist distinctive, to the very claim Jesus makes at the sermon’s center: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matt. 5:17).

The Westminster Larger Catechism’s own exposition of the Ten Commandments follows the same pattern Jesus uses in the antitheses, reading each commandment as reaching beyond the bare outward act. Asked what the sixth commandment forbids, the catechism answers, among other things, “sinful anger, hatred, envy, desire of revenge,”³ the same inward reading Jesus gives when he says that anger against a brother, not only murder, is “liable to judgment” (Matt. 5:21-22). Likewise, the catechism’s answer on the seventh commandment forbids “all unclean imaginations, thoughts, purposes, and affections… wanton looks,”⁴ matching Jesus’s statement that “everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:27-28). The catechism does not cite the sermon by chapter and verse at these questions, but its own heart-level reading of the commandments is substantively the same move Jesus makes.

Biblical Basis

The sermon opens with the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:3-12), a series of blessings that “opens and closes with the announcement that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the most unlikely candidates: the poor in Spirit… and those who are persecuted for righteousness.”⁵ The kingdom belongs to those who mourn, who hunger for righteousness, and who are merciful and pure in heart, not to the honored, powerful, and wealthy, an inversion of ordinary social value that “shows vividly that God’s kingdom is countercultural.”⁵ Jesus then tells his disciples that they already are salt and light: called, by virtue of who they are, to a preserving and visible influence on the watching world (Matt. 5:13-16).

The sermon’s long central section, from 5:17 to 7:12, opens and closes with the Law and the Prophets. Jesus first insists he has not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it, and that not the smallest stroke of it will pass away (Matt. 5:17-18); he then declares that his followers’ righteousness must “surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees,” the very people known for scrupulous law-keeping (Matt. 5:20). What follows is a series of six sayings, often called the “antitheses,” each opening “you have heard that it was said… but I tell you” (Matt. 5:21-48). Each saying reveals what Moses’s commands always required beneath the outward act: the hatred that precedes murder (5:21-26), the lust that precedes adultery (5:27-30), and further teaching on divorce, oaths, retaliation, and love for enemies (5:31-47). The section closes with the demand, “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48).

Matthew 6:1-18 turns from the law to the practice of righteousness itself: giving, prayer (including what Jesus’s disciples ask when they say the Lord’s Prayer, Matt. 6:9-13), and fasting are all to be done for God’s notice, not to impress others: “or you have no reward from your Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 6:1). The sermon’s final section (6:19-7:27) turns to kingdom priorities: not storing up treasure on earth, not being anxious, and treating others as one would want to be treated, “for this is the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 7:12). It closes with a warning about false prophets and about those who call Jesus “Lord” without doing his Father’s will, and with the parable of the two builders, one on rock and one on sand (Matt. 7:15-27).

Doctrinal Significance

The sermon’s demands do not stand alone in Matthew’s Gospel; they follow four chapters establishing who Jesus is and “what grace he brings,” so that the sermon itself is “his first major teaching, wherein he begins to tell us of life in that sphere of grace, and the part we are called to play.”⁶ Strong describes the sermon, read against the Mosaic law it expounds, as “a great advance on the law of Moses,”⁷ the same law’s own deepest intent, stated plainly by the one with authority to state it.

The tension between the sermon’s demand and human ability to meet it is resolved two ways, not one. First, the kingdom the sermon describes is already present in Jesus’s ministry but not yet consummated, so its full realization awaits the kingdom’s completion even while obedience is required now.⁸ Second, and more fundamentally, Jesus himself is the one who fulfills the law he describes (Matt. 5:17), and only those joined to him are given what the sermon requires: as Jesus himself later says, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me” (Matt. 11:28-29). The sermon does not describe a way of earning entrance to the kingdom; it describes the righteousness of those who already belong to it.

Historical Development

The Sermon on the Mount’s own place in the church’s memory long predates sustained debate about how to apply it. “No other short section of the Bible has been more prominent in theological discussion and in the general life of the church,”⁹ and the majority of early Christian commentators read the sermon in a straightforward way: as a description of the life that those who are faithful to God will seek to follow, not a special standard for the few.¹⁰

That straightforward reading did not go unchallenged. By the later medieval period, some interpreters, among them the Franciscan Bonaventure (d. 1274) and the Jesuit Juan Maldonado (d. 1583), read the sermon’s harder sayings as “counsels of perfection”: voluntary standards for those pursuing a distinct vocation of holiness, beyond what bound ordinary believers.¹¹ On this reading, ordinary Christian life required only the moral law’s plain terms; renouncing retaliation, loving one’s enemies without qualification, and the rest belonged to a monastic or clerical calling, not to the whole church.

A very different challenge arose in the early twentieth century from historical-critical scholarship. Albert Schweitzer, in The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), argued that Jesus expected the imminent, supernatural arrival of God’s kingdom within his own generation, and that his ethical teaching, the Sermon on the Mount included, was therefore “interim ethics”: a way of life for the brief period of waiting before that arrival, not a permanent ethic for the church.¹² On Schweitzer’s reading, once the kingdom failed to arrive as expected, the sermon’s demands lost the urgency, and much of the authority, Jesus’s own hearers would have understood them to carry.

Both readings were answered, from within confessional Protestantism, by insisting that Jesus intends the sermon’s hearers, then and now, simply to obey it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship (1937) argued that the sermon leaves no room for picking and choosing: “Jesus knows only one possibility: simple surrender and obedience, not interpreting it or applying it, but doing and obeying it.”¹³ More recently, Glen Stassen and David Gushee’s Kingdom Ethics (2003) renewed the same claim: the sermon, as “the largest block of Jesus’s teaching,” belongs at the center of Christian ethics.⁸

Opposing Views

Christian pacifist traditions, including the historic peace churches within the Anabaptist tradition, appeal to the sermon’s teaching on retaliation as their central biblical case. Reading Jesus’s command “do not resist the one who is evil” (Matt. 5:39), Preston Sprinkle argues that “when Jesus says, ‘Do not resist the one who is evil,’ He specifically prohibits using violence to resist evil,”¹⁴ a prohibition its advocates read as covering every sphere of life, personal and civil alike, so that a faithful disciple may take up neither self-defense nor the state’s use of force.

Bavinck, representing the Reformed tradition’s own reading of the same passage, agrees that Jesus forbids returning evil for evil according to the old rule of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” but denies that this extends to every defense of one’s own rights: “Christ is absolutely not condemning every instance of defending one’s own rights, as he did before the high priest” when he protested being struck instead of accepting the blow in silence (John 18:22-23; cf. Acts 22:25; 23:3; 25:10).¹⁵ On this reading, the sermon addresses the private desire for vengeance; it does not abolish every lawful defense of oneself or others.

Objections and Responses

The sermon’s demands, perfect love, no anger, no lust, are impossible to fulfill, so they cannot be a real command for ordinary believers now. Jesus allows for the devices of ordinary speech, including hyperbole, and the sermon’s own conclusion presses hearers to actually do what he says rather than merely admire it: “everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock” (Matt. 7:24).⁸ The difficulty is real. Scripture resolves it by recognizing that only those united to the one who alone fulfills the law are given what it requires, not by lowering the demand itself (see Doctrinal Significance, above).

In the antitheses, Jesus repeatedly overturns what “was said to those of old”; doesn’t this mean he sets the Mosaic law aside? Jesus explicitly denies this intention at the section’s outset: he has not come “to abolish the Law or the Prophets” but “to fulfill them,” and not the smallest stroke of the law will pass away (Matt. 5:17-18). Each antithesis targets a merely external reading of Moses’s command, not the command itself, and exposes its full, heart-level demand. That is the same claim the confession makes about Christ’s own relation to the law: he does not dissolve it but strengthens its obligation.²

Related Doctrines

References

Ken Magnuson, “5. Aspects of Biblical Ethics: New Testament,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2020), quoting G. N. Stanton, “Sermon on the Mount/Plain,” in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, eds. Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight, and I. Howard Marshall (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 735. ↩
Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 19, “Of the Law of God,” para. 5; cf. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 19, para. 5. ↩ ↩²
The Larger Catechism (London, 1648), Q. 136. ↩
The Larger Catechism (London, 1648), Q. 139. ↩
Magnuson, “Aspects of Biblical Ethics: New Testament.” ↩ ↩²
Magnuson, “Aspects of Biblical Ethics: New Testament,” quoting Christopher Bryan, “Sermon on the Mount,” in Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible, eds. Kevin J. Vanhoozer et al. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 737. ↩
Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907), 231. ↩
Magnuson, “Aspects of Biblical Ethics: New Testament.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Magnuson, “Aspects of Biblical Ethics: New Testament,” quoting Stanton, “Sermon on the Mount/Plain,” 735. ↩
Magnuson, “Aspects of Biblical Ethics: New Testament,” citing Charles Quarles, The Sermon on the Mount: Restoring Christ’s Message to the Modern Church (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2011), 4-11; D. H. Field, “Sermon on the Mount,” in New Dictionary of Christian Ethics and Pastoral Theology, eds. David J. Atkinson et al. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 777-78; and Douglas J. Moo, “Sermon on the Mount,” in Encyclopedia of Biblical and Christian Ethics, ed. R. K. Harrison (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1987), 373-76. ↩
Magnuson, “Aspects of Biblical Ethics: New Testament,” citing Bryan, “Sermon on the Mount,” 737, naming Bonaventure and Juan Maldonado as examples of this reading. ↩
Stephen Witmer, “Keeping Eschatology and Ethics Together: The Teaching of Jesus, the Work of Albert Schweitzer, and the Task of Evangelical Pastor-Theologians,” Themelios 39, no. 3 (2014): 487-89. ↩
Magnuson, “Aspects of Biblical Ethics: New Testament,” quoting Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (London: SCM, 1959), 175. ↩
Ken Magnuson, “15. Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics, quoting Preston Sprinkle, Fight: A Christian Case for Nonviolence (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2013), 26. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 13, “Sin and Its Consequences.” ↩