Authors will not shy away from problems in the texts. Whether one is examining the meaning of “perfect” in Matthew 5:48, the problems with Christology in the hymn of Philippians 2:6–11, the challenge of understanding Paul in light of the swirling debates about the old, new, and post-new perspectives, the endless debates about eschatology, or the vagaries of atonement theories, the authors will dive in, discuss evidence, and do their best to sort out a reasonable and living reading of those issues for the church today.
Live the Story. Reading the Bible is not just about discovering what it meant back then; the intent of The Story of God Bible Commentary series is to probe how this text might be lived out today as that story continues to march on in the life of the church. At times our authors will tell stories about what this looks like; at other times they may offer some suggestions for living it out; but always you will discover the struggle involved as we seek to live out the Bible’s grand Story in our world.
We are not offering suggestions for “application” so much as digging deeper; we are concerned in this section with seeking out how this text, in light of the Story of God in the Bible, compels us to live in our world so that our own story lines up with the Bible’s Story.
SCOT MCKNIGHT, general editor New Testament
LYNN COHICK, JOEL WILLITTS, and MICHAEL BIRD, editors
Abbreviations
AB Anchor Bible
ABD Anchor Bible Dictionary
ABRL Anchor Bible Reference Library
ACCS: Matthew Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Matthew
ASV American Standard Version
b. Babylonian Talmud
BDAG Bauer, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (3rd ed.)
BECNT Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament
BJS Brown Judaic Studies
CEB Common English Bible
DJG Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels
EDEJ The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism
EJ The Encyclopedia of Judaism
ICC International Critical Commentary
IVPWBC The IVP Women’s Bible Commentary
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JSNTMS Journal for the Study of the New Testament Monograph Series
KNT N.T. Wright’s Kingdom New Testament
KJV King James Version
m. Mishnah
NAC New American Commentary
NICNT New International Commentary on the New Testament
NIV New International Version
NPNF Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers
NRSV New Revised Standard Version
NTS New Testament Studies
SNTSMS Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series
TLNT Theological Lexicon of the New Testament
TNIV Today’s New International Version
WBC Word Biblical Commentary
The Sermon on the Mount is not a statement to be treated
in a cavalier fashion—by saying that this or that isn’t right
or that here we find an inconsistency.
Its validity depends on its being obeyed.
This is not a statement that we can freely choose to take or leave.
It is a compelling, lordly statement.
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
What Jesus teaches in the sayings collected in the Sermon on the Mount
is not a complete regulation of the life of the disciples,
and it is not intended to be;
rather, what is taught here is symptoms, signs, examples,
of what it means when the kingdom of God breaks into
the world which is still under sin, death, and the devil.
You yourselves should be signs of the coming kingdom of God,
signs that something has already happened.
JOACHIM JEREMIAS
A man comes forth in Israel to make today’s prophetic vision
tomorrow’s agenda;
one for whom the teachings of Mount Sinai do not suffice
because he wishes to penetrate beyond to the original divine intent;
one who, despite war and tyranny, dares to pursue
the biblical love of neighbor to its ultimate consequence
in order to brand all our souls with an ideal of human possibility
that no longer allows us to be content with the threadbare,
run-of-the-mill persons we are
but need not be.
PINCHAS LAPIDE
[Jesus’] life is but a commentary on the sermon,
and the sermon is the exemplification of his life.
STANLEY HAUERWAS
The Sermon on the Mount has a strange way of making us
better people or better liars.
DEAN SMITH
Introduction
The Sermon on the Mount is the moral portrait of Jesus’ own people. Because this portrait doesn’t square with the church, this Sermon turns from instruction to indictment. To those ends—both instruction and indictment—this commentary has been written with the simple goal that God will use this book to lead us to become in real life the portrait Jesus sketched in the Sermon.
The contrast between Jesus’ vision and our life bothers many of us. Throughout church history many have softened, reduced, recontextualized, and in some cases abandoned what Jesus taught—ironically, in order to be more Christian! Pinchas Lapide, an Orthodox Jew who wrote a short commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, described this history in these terms:
In fact, the history of the impact of the Sermon on the Mount can largely be described in terms of an attempt to domesticate everything in it that is shocking, demanding, and uncompromising, and render it harmless.1
Harsh words, to be sure. But the history is there, and all you have to do is spend a day or a week reading how the Sermon has been (re)interpreted. Note Lapide’s quote of Karl Barth’s famous words: “It would be sheer folly to interpret the imperatives of the Sermon on the Mount as if we should bestir ourselves to actualize these pictures.”2
So, what do these (re)interpretations look like?3 First, some have said the Sermon is really Moses or the law ramped up to the highest level and that Jesus’ intent is not to summon his followers to do these things but to show just how wretchedly sinful they are and how much they are in need of Christ’s righteousness. The Sermon, then, is nothing but a mirror designed to reveal our sinfulness. Second, others assign the sayings of Jesus in the Sermon to the private level, sometimes as little more than disposition or intention or striving and other times to how Christians live personally and privately as a Christian but not how they live publicly. The Sermon, then, is a code for private morality. Third, others think these sayings belong only to the most committed of disciples, whether monk, nun, priest, pastor, or radical. If they are designed only for the hypercommitted, the ordinary person can pass them by. The Sermon is for the elite Christian. Fourth, the tendency today is to see the Sermon as preceded by something, and that something is the gospel and that gospel is personal salvation and grace. That means that the Sermon is a sketch of the Christian life but only for those who have been so transformed by grace that they see the demands not as law but as grace-shaped ethics that can only be done by the person who lives by the Spirit. The Sermon, then, is Christian ethics, but it can only be understood once someone understands a theology of grace.
This tendency today is respectable Christian theology and only the one who turns back an apple pie from Mom would disagree. But the danger is obvious: those who take this approach more often than not end up denying the potency of the Sermon and sometimes simply turn elsewhere—to Galatians and Romans and Ephesians—for their Christian ethical instruction. What many such readings of the Sermon really want is Paul, and since they can’t find Paul in the Sermon, they reinterpret the Sermon and give us Paul instead.4 It is far wiser to ask how Paul relates to the Sermon than to make Jesus sound like Paul, and many today ar
e showing that Paul’s ethics and Jesus’ ethics—their theologies—are not as far apart as some have made them out to be.5 Even more important, when we seek to “improve” the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount by setting them in a larger theological context, we too often ruin the words of Jesus. There is something vital—and this is a central theme in this commentary—in letting the demand of Jesus, expressed over and over in the Sermon as imperatives or commands, stand in its rhetorical ruggedness. Only as demand do we hear this Sermon as he meant it to be heard: as the claim of Jesus upon our whole being.
What these proposals for the Sermon do is force us to ask a set of questions:
How did Jesus “do” ethics?
What framework did Jesus use when it came to discipleship?
Were his moral teachings truly requirements for salvation? For entrance into the kingdom? Necessary for salvation?
The Sermon and Moral Theory
The Sermon on the Mount remains the greatest moral document of all time.6 To justify this claim I want to probe Jesus’ moral vision by comparing Jesus’ Sermon to other moral theorists.7 From Moses to Plato and Aristotle to Augustine and Aquinas to Luther and Calvin, and then into the modern world of thinkers like Kant and Mill all the way to contemporary moral theorists like Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr, John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas, and also Oliver O’Donovan and Alasdair MacIntyre, some of the finest thinkers have applied their energies to ethics. How does Jesus fit into that history?8
In the history of discussion about ethics there have been some major proposals, and I want to sketch three of the most important, show how each can be used to explain Jesus, offer critical pushback against each, and then offer what I think is a more helpful approach to understanding the ethics of Jesus.
Virtue Ethics
The person with whom virtue ethics begins is ultimately Aristotle, whose theory has been influential both in wider culture and in the church. It was especially influential in Aquinas and the monastic tradition of the Catholic Church, including devotional and spiritual greats like Benedict and Bonaventure. Others come to mind: Alasdair MacIntyre and N. T. Wright and Stanley Hauerwas are each, in one way or another, deeply influenced by Aristotle’s virtue ethics. So we need to drill down a bit deeper to see just what Aristotle had to say in order to grasp the core of virtue ethics.
Three ideas will give us handles on Aristotle’s ethics. First, the goal of life was human flourishing (Greek word eudaimonia). Second, a moral, reasonable person could only become a virtuous person in the context of friendship. Put in broader categories, virtue ethics are defined by and take shape within a community.9 Third, Aristotle’s approach was to practice the habits that made virtue the core of one’s character. The word “virtue,” then, is tied to the word “character,” and character forms as the result of good habits. The good person (character) does what is good (virtues), and doing good (virtues, habits) over time produces good character. The question, then, is not so much “What should I do?” but “Who should I be?” or “What does it look like to be a virtuous person?”
Again, Christian ethicists have their own version of virtue ethics, and I would call to our attention at this point the emphasis in Dallas Willard’s spiritual formation studies: his acronym is “VIM.”10 That is, a person with vision and intention needs to practice the habitual means of the spiritual disciplines to become a person with character sufficient for a flourishing (or blessed) life. In important ways Willard’s theory of spiritual formation is a radically revised version of virtue ethics reshaped by the Christian theology of revelation and grace.11
The question I will ask below and in this commentary is this: Was Jesus a virtue ethicist? Or, is virtue ethics the best or a sufficient way of thinking of how Jesus “did” ethics? I will argue that virtue ethics push us to the rim of the inner circle but do not completely come to terms with Jesus in his Jewish world. The fundamental problem with virtue ethics is that Jesus does not overtly talk like this; he does not teach the importance of habits as the way to form character.
The Categorical Imperative
The famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose work reshaped all philosophical thought in the Western world, sought to establish ethics on the basis of reason alone, and his normative theory, often called deontological ethics (deon means “ought, duty, or obligation”), landed on the “categorical imperative.” Kant framed the categorical imperative in a number of ways:12
Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law. [The focus here is on the universality of true ethics.]
… so act that you use humanity, whether in your person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means. [Here the emphasis is treating humans as humans deserving of profound respect.]
… the idea of the will of every rational being as a will giving universal law. [And here we are to see that each person, as an individual, can be an expression of the universal ethic.]
These three statements—universality, humanity, individuality—are each variations and developments of the categorical imperative: what is true for one must be true for all, and if we treat others as an end and therefore value humanity inherently, we will act in such a way to live rationally and ethically. Two more ideas: At work here (1) are both intention and practice, with intention having even more weight than practice. Also at work, because Kant thinks of ethics in terms of universality, is (2) that what “I” ought to do becomes a right for everyone else as well as my duty to other people.
Was Jesus Kantian? It could be argued that Kant’s categorical imperative is a variant on the Golden Rule (Matt 7:12) or the Jesus Creed (Mark 12:18–32), but this is inaccurate. In fact, Kant’s categorical imperative is far more useful in telling us what not to do—do not lie—than what to do—make promises and live by them. The ethicist Hauerwas levels Kant: “Kant’s statement of the categorical imperative is an attempt to free us of the need to rely on forgiveness and, more critically, a savior. Kant’s hope was to makes us what our pride desires, that is, that we be autonomous.”13
Utilitarian Ethics
Two English thinkers, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), offered what is usually called utilitarian ethics. Classic utilitarianism can be said to have three leading points: it is consequentialist, universalist, and (in some cases) hedonist. It is consequentialist in that what makes an action right is the consequences of that action. It is universalist in that a utilitarian judges the consequences for everyone affected by the action. It is hedonist in that the classic utilitarian (and here we are thinking of Bentham, not Mill) identifies “good” with “pleasure” and “bad” with “pain.” So an action is right if, and only if, it produces (thus, consequentialist) the greatest good (hedonism), and for the greatest number (universalist). We are asking if Jesus fits into such a scheme of ethical thinking.
Christian thinking can in some ways adapt or even colonize consequentialism and reframe ethics into that which brings the greatest pleasure of all, namely, glorifying God. I would not restrict John Piper’s famous Desiring God project, which permeates all of his work, to an ethic of consequentialism, but there is a strain of this approach to ethics in his emphasis on God’s glory.14 In addition, one has to begin to think of Christian eschatology, including the final judgment as well as the new heavens and the new earth, as the final consequence toward which all ethics need to be shaped.15 A kind of consequentialism plays an important element in the ethical theory of Jesus, but it needs to be said that the utilitarian model secularizes, flattens, and rationalizes eschatology. Furthermore, consequentialist ethics entail a major issue that postmodernity has brought to the fore: Who decides which ethic is most consequential? What groups do we include when we say the “greatest number”? It must be said once again: far too often we discover an ethic shaped and controlled by the privileged and powerful.
Jesus and the Ethical Theories
I am convinced Jesus doesn’t fit neatly into any of these theories, and the Sermon on the Mount requires a better “theory.”16 However, each of these theories—virtue, deontological, and utilitarian ethics—does say something true about how Jesus “did” ethics. But using these categories runs the serious risk of colonizing Jesus into the history of philosophical thinking. It might be wiser for us to begin by wondering what Jesus sounded like—morally, that is—in a first-century Galilean Jewish world.
This warning about imposing philosophical categories to Jesus leads to a warning against theologians doing the same. There is something about the Sermon on the Mount that makes Christians nervous, and in particular it makes Protestants nervous, especially those whose theology’s first foot is a special understanding of grace. Now I don’t want to say grace is not an important foot in the dance, but for some grace has to be said first or nothing works right. This realization leads many theologians to say something like this: “Nothing in the Sermon can be understood until you know that you are saved by grace and that, as a result of God’s regenerative work in your inner person, you can listen to Jesus and follow Jesus.” Or they may pose law (Sermon without grace) against gospel (grace leading to Sermon). No one said this more poignantly than John Wesley: “If they [the words of the Sermon] are considered as commandments, they are parts of the law; if as promises, of the gospel.” And Kenneth Cain Kinghorn, who edited Wesley’s sermons on the Sermon, put it this way: “Wesley taught that the moral law is the gospel presented in the form of a requirement, and the gospel is the law presented in the form of a promise.”17
However this posture of introducing the Sermon is expressed, the Sermon still makes many Christians nervous. Why? Because Jesus doesn’t “do” ethics the way many want him to do them. You can squeeze some texts all you want, but Jesus doesn’t say, “First grace, then obedience.” He dives right in. There may be—indeed is—a reason Jesus simply dove in. Stanley Hauerwas recognizes that Jesus’ new wine doesn’t fit into the ethical-theory wineskins: “Virtue may be its own reward, but for Christians the virtues, the kind of virtues suggested by the Beatitudes, are names for the shared life made possible through Christ.”18 Or later, “Yet Christians are not called to be virtuous. We are called to be disciples.”19
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