Sermon on the Mount

by Scot McKnight

  He is to teach them both to love all the Children of Light—each commensurate with his rightful place in the council of God—and to hate all the Children of Darkness, each commensurate with his guilt and the vengeance due him from God (1QS 1:9–11).

  But one doesn’t have to go to the Qumran dwellers to find the prejudicial love or ethnic bias that one finds in Jesus’ opening “thesis.” Loving those we like and hating those we don’t like is as common as skin.

  In other words, the term “neighbor” had taken on skin itself. As the scribe asked, “Who is my neighbor?” and as the Jewish culture embodied such distinctions in the temple courts in Jerusalem, so “neighbor” was seen by some to be “Jews of my ilk.” While some would see “neighbor” to be any Jew, others would have restricted “neighbor” to “Jews of my particular sort,” and one thinks here of Pharisees and Zealots and Essenes. Jews weren’t and aren’t alone in this endeavor.

  The Understood Love-of-Enemy Command

  Here’s where Jesus was, then: “neighbor” was the Jewish neighbor, the “enemy” was Rome, and the “enemy” was dishing out persecution. Jesus counters with “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (5:44). Hence the parallelism of Jesus’ lines is addressing more or less the same command:

  Love your enemy

  Pray for those who persecute you.6

  The enemy is the persecutor; loving means at least praying for that person.

  This passage hinges on the meaning of “love.” Briefly we remind ourselves what was said above on 5:31–32. Love must be defined by how God loves. From God’s behaviors we learn that love is a “rugged commitment to be with someone as someone who is for that person’s good and to love them unto God’s formative purpose.” The eternal relations within the Trinity, commonly called the perichoresis, or mutual indwelling and interpenetration, form the eternal foundations for love, and God’s covenant relationship and commitment to Israel reveals that God is one who enters into relationship (presence) as the God who is for Israel’s good.

  With that as our understanding of love, what Jesus says takes on a far more radical meaning. Jesus commands his followers to commit themselves to be with their enemies, which involves proximity and attentiveness, and to be the sort of person who longs for and works for the good of the enemy. Because love cannot be reduced to “toleration,” working for the good of another, including one’s enemies, means striving for them to become the sort of person God wants them to be. If love and praying are parallel expressions, and if love means what we have described, then praying for those who persecute is not a cute formula designed to get us over the hump of bad feelings or resentment but the concrete behavior of going to God in the hope of reconciliation, love, justice, peace, and a kingdom society.

  The radicality of Jesus’ words is matched by their frequency of both quotation and allusion in the early church. Jesus himself forgives enemy-persecutors at the cross (Luke 23:34); Stephen does the same (Acts 7:60); Paul counsels the same response (Rom 12:14; 1 Cor 4:12–13; 1 Thess 5:15); and Peter, in the midst of the fire of suffering, urges his readers to follow Jesus (1 Pet 3:9). One has to think here of the Martyrdom of Polycarp and also Polycarp’s letter To the Philippians 12:3, which has more than a notable connection to our antithesis:

  Pray for all the saints. Pray also for kings and powers and rulers, and for those who persecute and hate you, and for the enemies of the cross, in order that your fruit may be evident among all people, that you may be perfect in him. (italics added)

  Jesus’ words were not considered clever by his followers; they were seen as a challenging demand, an Ethic from Beyond that mapped a new future for kingdom people.

  Love of Enemy’s Ultimate Ground

  As the seventh beatitude promised his listeners that they would be the “children of God” for their peacemaking (5:9), so Jesus promises his followers they will be “children of your Father” if they act lovingly toward their enemies (5:45). The connection reveals Jesus’ kingdom is marked by shalom: to love and pray for the enemy is the first step toward shalom.

  Notice the reward Jesus has in mind: “that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” If we take Luke 6:35 or Matthew 5:9 into consideration, “that” seems to indicate the consequence or the reward for love and prayer. Verses 46–47 clinch the case because Jesus himself shows he’s thinking in terms of reward, and this idea leads us to see here an Ethic from Above. By using reward language, Jesus is telling us what God ultimately thinks.

  Reward theology, which is found throughout Matthew’s gospel,7 can make Protestants nervous because it can suggest works righteousness, but the Jewish context, where “reward” and “merit” are the way Jesus’ contemporaries customarily spoke—in rhetorical terms—of both the motive and benefit of salvation because they also spoke of sin as “debt,” is far less squeamish about using the idea of reward.8 Thus, I am inclined to think “that” is the reward, expressed as a promise. Put slightly differently, this is the rhetoric of motivation instead of a theology of merit. This idea, that we are to live in a way that reflects who God is, fills the pages of the New Testament (see 1 John 4:7–12).

  God’s love—seen in sun and rain—is showered on all humans, both “the evil and the good” or “the righteous and the unrighteous,” which stands for the “observant” and “nonobservant.”

  Interrogation

  Prejudicial love is no barometer of one’s moral life. Prejudicial love is only a way of loving ourselves. To love enemies breaks through the self barrier into divine space. Each of the antitheses reflects what Jesus meant by surpassing righteousness in 5:20, but this one perhaps even more than the others.

  Jesus trades in conventional stereotypes, the sort of stereotype that has become both politically incorrect in our world but also potentially damaging to the social status of others. The Gospels indicate that Jesus was a friend of tax collectors (Matt 11:19) and concerned with Gentiles (21:43; 28:19); thus, his behavior indicates that his rhetoric here is not prejudicial but an acceptable trope. His conventions connect prejudicial love with “tax collectors,” the famous “tax farmer” known for abuse, and “pagans,” who are used by Jesus as a way of showing one more time how ungodly people can be. These stereotypes function to highlight the unacceptable form of behavior one finds among those who consider themselves to be loving and godly. We are drawn back to the rhetorical plot of 5:43: those who claim to believe in the Bible’s words to love their neighbor are all too often those who hate humans, and now Jesus shows that too many see love in ethnically exclusive terms. To love humans is to love all humans.

  Summary Command

  “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” which completes 5:43–47 and is not simply a summary of 5:21–47, has suffered at the hands of its readers and interpreters and preachers, and it has flourished at the hands of the same. The ending of the chapter all hinges on one word—perfect.

  Here are some of the options in the history of the church.9 I begin with Luther, who sees in the word “perfection” not the rigors of the priests, monks, bishop, and pope, but in right doctrine shaping right behaviors, which means an “entire, whole, and undivided love.”10 Calvin sees “sheer and free generosity” and “exceptional goodness.” He further observes that it “comes out better in Luke’s words, Be ye merciful….”11 Guelich focuses on a sense of “wholeness” as one’s “qualitative standing before God and others,” but this is neither moral nor legal perfection. In the end, for Guelich this is mostly about a restored and reconciled relationship with God.12 Ulrich Luz observes two dimensions to “perfection”: unity of the heart and total obedience, one subjective and the other objective.13 Hagner writes: “they are to be like their Father in loving their enemies.”14 Keener observes “full allegiance to God’s will in the Mosaic law as Jesus has interpreted it.”15 Strecker understands it as “the human realization of the totality of Jesus’ instructions and hence identical with the demanded righteousness (5:20)” and
“agape and righteousness” together.16 N. T. Wright writes of “a character formed by overflowing generous love.”17 We could stop here and say a consensus is emerging that “perfect” is essentially love of others, but this needs to be established by evidence, not just a listing of major interpreters.

  We begin with the word perfect. The Greek word teleios, in general, means “completion, perfect, mature, adult, full development.” Jesus probably didn’t speak Greek on this occasion, if he ever did, so we are tempted to reconstruct which Hebrew or Aramaic word Jesus would have used, and most land on šālēm or tāmîm, in which case the term would have meant “unblemished” or “whole.”18 Neither the term in general nor the reconstructed background end the questions about the meaning of the term.

  Other passages help, so we turn to the rich young ruler episode (Matt 19:16–30). Jesus challenges the man by listing God’s expectations, and the list Jesus uses conforms substantively with the antitheses of 5:21–48. Jesus refers to murder, adultery, divorce, swearing, turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, and then perfection. Matthew 19:16–22 refers to murder, adultery, stealing, bearing false witness (cf. swearing in Matt 5), honoring parents, loving your neighbor, and the call to perfection. This leads to the suggestion that “perfection” at least means something like “completely obedient to God (as especially revealed in the Torah).” The notion, then, is not the rigor of sinlessness but the rigor of utter devotion.

  But commitment to the fullness of God’s Torah does not quite satisfy most readers of 5:48 since there seems to be more involved. Perhaps the most neglected feature in probing the meaning of “perfect” is the word “as” (in “as your heavenly Father is perfect”). The word “as” connects “perfect” to God, revealing that ethics are derived from the character of God. There is yet another consideration: Luke 6:36 has “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” While it might be tempting to think Luke softened the word “perfect” to “merciful,” I suggest that it is precisely here that we get the decisive clue as to what Matthew’s text actually means, and it importantly connects to the flow of the paragraph in Matthew. A careful reading of 5:48 as the summary for 5:43–47, which focused on love or mercy for one’s enemies because of God’s love for all, cracks the rock open to find the diamond. The “perfect” of God in this text is his love for all. Thus, Jesus is urging his followers to be “perfect in love” or to “love completely” in the sense that they are to love not only fellow Jewish neighbors but also enemy neighbors. Jesus urged his disciples to love all because God loves all (5:45). Put together, then, an expanded paraphrase looks like this:

  Be perfect, that is, love both your fellow Jewish neighbors and the Roman enemies in your midst … as your Father makes the sun to rise and the rain to fall on all humans—Jews and Romans—so you are to be perfect in love as your Father is perfect in love.

  The word “perfect,” we conclude with the emerging consensus above, means “to love all humans, Jews and Romans, as neighbors.”19 This view of perfection lines up with Jesus’ own hermeneutical approach to the Torah. He says in Matthew 22:34–40 that the Torah (and the Prophets) hang on two commands—to love God and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Perfection is to be the person who treats everyone as the neighbor, and this fulfills the entirety of God’s will. This too is surpassing righteousness (5:17–20).

  LIVE the Story

  Enemy love is not a command with a purpose—Jesus nowhere tells why we are to love the enemy. This not Jesus’ strategy for conquering; it is not pragmatic. Nor is enemy love natural. This command, instead, confronts us with the one who is Lord and confronts from a world that is not yet ours: the kingdom. So asking about practicalities and practicability both miss the point. The Ethic from Beyond almost never bows to practicality.

  There is only one approach to living the words of this text. It begins when we confess who is our enemy and it ends when we learn to love them as our neighbor. Until we name our enemies, we can’t live these words of Jesus. Until we invite them into our home, or treat them as our neighbor, or love them as we love ourselves, we do not live these words. Until we regard them, dwell with them, and embrace them as God regards, dwells with, and embraces them, we cannot live these words of Jesus.

  So we have to begin with this question: Who is your enemy?

  I want now to dig under the surface of our claim to love our enemies, and in doing this digging I want to replicate for us what Jesus did for his contemporaries. You may remember that I suggested “love your neighbor” was used to justify “hating your enemies.” In Jesus’ world “enemies” were the Romans and “neighbors” were sympathetic Jews. They loved their neighbors in such a way that it expressed nonlove for the Romans.

  We do the same thing today: many of us love our neighbors in such a way that it is at the same time a powerful damnation of others, and we do this damnation in the socially acceptable form of exclusion, denunciation, and libel. So here we go, and I would urge you to spend some time pondering alone right now, asking yourself the honest question who your enemy is.

  We’ve all got enemies. I want to suggest America’s enemy is the Muslim countries, and Christians have joined in. Evangelicalism’s enemy is mainline Protestant liberals and Roman Catholics, and to a lesser degree, Eastern Orthodox. The enemy of the white person is the black person, and the enemy of the black person is the brown person. The enemy of the Christian Republican is the Democrat, and the enemy of the Christian Democrat is the Republican. The enemy of the morally conservative Christian is the homosexual. And I’m not even beginning to touch on particular enemies—the people you see daily, bump into on street corners in your community, see as you drive through your neighborhood—but those are enemies too. Those folks may be your real enemies, those who get your blood boiling and who get your emotions akilter, and those … yes, those whom Jesus calls you to respond to in a radical new society called “kingdom”. The Ethic from Beyond calls you beyond your comfort zone.

  The question we must ask now is this: How are you turning your enemies into your neighbors? The implication of this enemy love passage is the elimination of enemies and the creation of a society marked by shalom because the kingdom is shalom. Jesus’ fundamental strategy for enemies was to make them our neighbors, and the concrete form of Jesus’ enemy love was to invite them to his table—so that at the table of Jesus we find typical “enemies” like tax collectors and sinners. One of the women who accompanied Jesus in his missional work was Joanna, wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod’s household (Luke 8:1–4)—about as close to Rome as one could get in the Jewish world of Jesus. She not only shared the table, but she also shared the ministry with Jesus. And Jesus healed the Roman centurion’s servant (Matt 8:5–13). In other words, Jesus reached out to those perceived to be Jewish “enemies.” What are you doing to make your enemies your neighbors?

  She Sat in the Back Right Corner

  She sat in the back right corner of my class. Her name was “Mussaret.” I was unsure what to think, if I tell the truth. She wore the hijab every day to class. She rarely spoke in class, and then only if asked, and what she had to say was intelligent and informed. About midway through the Jesus of Nazareth class I gave a long test on the facts of the Gospels, and her score was the highest in the class. On another assignment, on the theme of conversion in the Gospels, she wrote an exceptional paper. She then wrote one of the finest papers I ever got at North Park on Jesus’ own self-perception. We had barely spoken beyond the customary “good mornings” and “hellos.” So I asked her one time at the doorway as she left class if she could come by office to chat, but only if she wanted to. I told her I wanted to get to know her. I was concerned she might see this as marking her out as someone different, but she smiled back at me and said, “I’d love to. I have so many questions.”

  Mussaret came into my office before class one day and, after I stumbled out a few words, she said, “I’m a believer. My family doesn’t know it. When I’m at home, I love to hide in
my bedroom and read the Bible. When my parents ask me what I’m reading, I tell them ‘Assignments for class.’ But I want you to know that I love Jesus, I pray at the mosque to the God of Jesus, and while I look like a Muslim, I’m a follower of Jesus.”

  The conversation did not go in the direction I anticipated. I was a bit stunned, so we talked for thirty minutes about the Bible, about questions she had about the Christian faith—how to explain the Trinity—and then she and I walked to class together. I would not have known this about her had I not asked her to come to my office.

  After class one day, when she was the last to leave, I asked her why she hid out to read her Bible. She said, “If my mother or father find out I’m a follower of Jesus, they’ll send me to the Middle East to marry a true Muslim man and I’ll never see America again. My mom told me that last week.”

  Can We Be Friends?

  For three and a half years, two to three times a month, sometimes in the summer at a coffee shop near my home, I met with a young college student to talk life. He came into my office one day and said this: “I read your blog about homosexuality.” Then he said nothing, so I tried to ease into the conversation by saying, “What did you think?” His response was this: “I’m a homosexual. It’s a struggle for me.” I expressed empathy with the best of my (not all that natural) powers, and then he said this, “Can we be friends?”

  I said, “Of course.”