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Sermon on the Mount

MATTHEW, 11: LOVE, NOT RELIGION, IS THE POINT (7:15-29)

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Where does this language about “false prophets” come from? I thought prophets belonged in the Old Testament.
The word “prophet” means someone who claims to be speaking on God’s behalf—in other words, almost any religious leader. Mostly, Jesus’ contemporaries used the word to refer to people who lived hundreds of years before their time, but Jesus is using it here in its more basic sense.
And there was a revival of prophetic claims at the time—especially among Jesus’ own followers, after his death. Sometimes, scoundrels found it pretty easy to impose on innocent Christian congregations by claiming to be prophets. The second-century Greek writer Lucian of Samosata (not himself a Christian) tells an intriguing story about just such a “prophet” in his satire “The Death of Peregrinus.” One might almost feel that Jesus was warning, in advance, against exactly such people.
Prophets made their impression through speech, often with the suggestion that they were in a trance or had been taken over by a spirit that was merely speaking through them. Accordingly, they claimed a degree of authority that was more than human. Jesus says, in effect: “Don’t get swept up in the words; wait to see how your ‘prophet’ lives.”
That means making judgements about people.
Yes, even after we just heard “Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged” (7:1). But the judgement is to be based on works of love. Just as we can tell good fruit from bad, we’ll know the true prophet when we see that this person is motivated by God’s love and does works expressive of that love.
Jesus threatens the impostors with hell-fire! Not so very loving, is it?
He gets very angry about abuses done in the name of religion by religious leaders. And it’s clear that he fully expects that such abuses will crop up among his own followers, just as in other religious groups. (Of course, he’s been proven right again and again.) He was also talking about this in chapter 6, where we saw warnings about religious behavior being misused for personal aggrandizement. He sees that no arena of human existence is immune to abuse. That includes religion.
Is he against religion?
No. His teaching is itself religious. It’s about our relationship with the God who is the power behind the creation, the lover of the world, and the Pole Star of our human lives. But he has no illusion that religion is always good in itself. And he’s trying to give us a way to distinguish good from bad in it.
Later Christians have sometimes treated Jesus’ attacks on religion as attacks on one particular religion—Judaism. It’s a nice trick for shifting people’s attention away from our own misdeeds. But it’s nonsense. Jesus never separated himself from Judaism. That separation between Christians and Jews happened only in the generations after Jesus. His strictures apply equally to all religions. In fact, he applies them quite explicitly in this passage to his own followers as well.
The people who say, “Lord, Lord”?
Exactly. And this applies not just to ordinary believers but quite specifically to the elite who have prophesied in Jesus’ name and exorcised and worked miracles. If they haven’t done the will of the Father—haven’t led lives founded on love—he rejects them absolutely: “I never knew you.” We’ll hear a strong echo of this same attack on loveless piety near the end of Matthew’s Gospel in the Parable of the Sheep and Goats (25:31-46).
He’s getting quite peremptory here at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. Everything seems to be either/or, doesn’t it? He didn’t seem so angry at the beginning of the sermon.
Yes. He says, in effect, that either we hang on to what is really central or our lives will fall apart like the house built on sand. The point, though, isn’t that we have to reach perfection immediately. Jesus’ inner circle of disciples certainly didn’t, as Matthew will point out again and again. In practice, human beings are seldom if ever completely good or evil. We are a mix of wisdom and folly—a constantly shifting mix. But the question remains: Where do our central commitments lie? Where is the foundation?
Remember, too, that God sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous (5:43-48). God continues to love us, even when we misstep. But Jesus wants us to understand that the foundation for a wise, centered, enduring human existence is here in these teachings, waiting for us to explore and learn and practice more and more deeply with our lives.
I can see why “the crowds were astounded.”
Yes. These three chapters that make up the Sermon on the Mount still astound. And the attentive reader never gets to the end of finding new insight into them. Each return to the text is apt to open up something we hadn’t noticed or understood before.
Was this really so different from what other religious authorities were teaching?
There is much in the teaching of Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries that agrees with the Sermon on the Mount. The difference isn’t primarily one of content, but one of focus and certainty. Matthew’s phrasing here is key; “he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.” The scribes, like the clergy of other religions, taught on the basis of an existing religious consensus, which existed in written form in the scriptures of Israel and also orally in the form of opinions offered by a long series of esteemed leaders. The scribes would have been less likely to say “I tell you” than to say “The Torah tells you.” That can tip over all too easily into the creation of an inflexible system that demands obedience and is willing to skimp on less sharply defined values such as love.
Jesus speaks like a prophet himself, claiming direct access to God. He was even wiling, back at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, to contrast what he said with what “was said to the men of old.” No wonder he was willing to make distinctions between authentic and inauthentic prophets! Unlike the false prophets, he is transparent to the gospel of love. The fruits of this tree are good. And they are on display for all to see. In fact, we’ll be seeing more of them in the next two chapters of Matthew.
So that’s the Sermon on the Mount? It’s very dense, and it doesn’t exactly leave you with three clear points or an agenda for concrete action.
You could say it even resists being reduced to a few clear points. Oh, the Golden Rule is clear enough. But putting it into action requires a lifelong process of learning how to love one another, of understanding the peculiar circumstances in which each of us lives, and choosing the loving course in those circumstances. We don’t find a simple set of rules either here or elsewhere in the Gospel of Matthew.
Still, we will come back again and again to the themes that these chapters have raised for us, and it is worth the time we’ve taken to look at them closely as part of trying to understand this gospel. Next, Matthew will turn to showing us how Jesus behaved toward the larger public. Here are the “fruits” that authenticate his prophesy.

Next up: TROUBLESOME MIRACLES

READING MATTHEW, 9: THE PITFALL OF DIVIDED LOYALTIES (6:19-34)

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Doesn’t the Sermon on the Mount seem rather miscellaneous—the way it jumps from topic to topic?
Yes, it can. That may be partly because it’s made up of separate sayings or groups of sayings that could have been handed on quite independently of each other among early Christians before Matthew brought them together in this form. But there’s another reason why the Sermon on the Mount doesn’t have a direct line of development. Jesus’ goal is to reshape our whole perspective on God, the world, and our own lives. His purpose isn’t so much to give us information as to point us toward new perspectives we must somehow come to and decisions we must make for ourselves.
Here in the latter half of chapter 6, we’re right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus started with beatitudes and told his audience that they, undistinguished as they were, were the light of the world. Then we had a series of sayings where Jesus both affirmed the Torah and began to reinterpret and refocus it on the generous God who makes rain fall on everybody, righteous and unrighteous alike.
Then, in the first part of Chapter 6 we found sayings that push us to take our relationship with God as absolutely central to our lives. Even being religious is a potential danger because then our public reputation may become more important to us than our relationship with God. Think, for example, of the way some contemporary Evangelical leaders shrink from criticizing the appalling morals of their congregations’ favorite political leaders. They do not seem to be willing to lose their supporters’ confidence.
But why this next shift? He was telling us to avoid religious hypocrisy. Now he’s telling us not to be concerned about basic survival!
It does sound that way. But the shift isn’t quite as abrupt as it first seems. What are the earthly treasures that Jesus dismisses in 6:19-21? Are they limited to material possessions? Or do they also include the treasures of ostentatious piety and the social credit one accrues thereby? Our earthly treasures include anything that obscures our focus on the centrality of God. When we are truly turned toward God we become full of light; we perceive things truly. The person focused on public standing is in the dark. (vss. 22-23)
And there are no half-measures?
Ultimately, that’s true. In reality, few if any of us—even the great saints—fully measure up to this ideal. We’ll have plenty of opportunity to watch Jesus’ original disciples stumbling over it again and again in Matthew’s Gospel. Our growth in faith is a long and sometimes faltering process. But, ultimately, we have to focus more and more on what we truly care about. The service of “Mammon” isn’t simply the possession of wealth. In fact, I think the NRSV translators were mistaken in translating it as “wealth.” If Matthew had wanted to say “wealth,” he had a perfectly good Greek word for it. Why does he use an Aramaic word instead? It suggests a broader significance. In fact, it sounds almost like the name of an idol. It’s what we are worshipping when the desire for wealth and reputation and power takes possession of us.
But what about responsibility for our own lives? Is Jesus really telling us to give up responsibility for ourselves? This “lilies of the field” thing sounds dangerously improvident—and lazy!
Actually, Jesus doesn’t say, “Don’t work.” He says, “Don’t be anxious.” Anxiety, he is saying, is the opposite of trust. And trust (Greek pistis, usually but perhaps misleadingly translated “faith”) is the core of our relationship with God. Anxiety, in turn, is what lies behind the effort to serve two masters. “Yes, I trust God—but, just in case, I will also worship the market, my social media, the gang I run with, my political party, my luck. . . .” And in the process, our side bets, as it were, wind up obscuring, compromising, or even replacing the trust, hope, and love that join us to God.
But Jesus does ask his inner circle of disciples to abandon their houses and families and jobs and live a wandering life with him—on the alms of others!
Yes, good point! But he doesn’t ask this particular kind of discipleship of everyone. Later on, he even turns down some people who volunteer but whom he perceives are not prepared for it (8:19-22). Remember that the Sermon on the Mount is addressed to the whole crowd of curious listeners, not just the inner circle of disciples who have left all.
For that matter, Jesus and his inner circle could live as wandering mendicants only because he had other followers who made it possible. Matthew will later mention a group of women followers, standing at the cross, who had come from Galilee for this very purpose (27:55-56).
Most of Jesus’ followers must have remained in their hometowns, working at their jobs, going out to hear him when he was near enough for them to do so, cultivating in their own context the trusting and loving relationship with God that he called them to. And to all his followers he addresses the same words: Don’t be anxious. Anxiety is a form of doubt, of mistrust—a temptation to betrayal.
The inner circle will fall into that pit repeatedly throughout the story. They will shy away from Jesus’ prediction of the cross. They will try to outmaneuver each other to be Jesus’ second-in-command. They will repeatedly fail to understand what he is telling them. One of them will betray him to death. Most of the rest will betray him by fleeing and hiding out. Even at the end of Matthew’s gospel, some will still be found doubting (28:17).
Worry is an invitation to start looking for or creating idols—little gods that we hope we can control better, that we hope will prove more predictable than our Father in Heaven. Polytheism always seems easier than relying on a single God. But it threatens to result in a fragmented life, one with no stable center. Happily, the God who sends rain upon just and unjust alike does not abandon us even when we fall into this pit.

Next up: THE NARROW GATE

READING MATTHEW, 8: A YES AND A NO TO RELIGION (6:1-18)

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This segment of the Sermon on the Mount starts off bluntly: “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.” Jesus then names three specific acts of piety as examples: almsgiving, prayer, fasting.
Why these three?
They were particularly esteemed in the Judaism of Jesus’ day as expressions of piety.
Was Jesus against almsgiving, prayer, and fasting?
Jesus fasted, himself, as we’ve already read, though he kept it a secret. He participated in synagogue prayers. He gave alms by curing people without charge. So, no, he wasn’t against these expressions of piety. His concern is that people are apt to do things that are good in themselves for the sake of cultivating our own reputation for piety rather than as an aspect of our relationship with God.
The question, basically, is “Who is the audience for your piety?” If our audience is other people, then this isn’t really a part of our life with God and is not rewarded by a deepening relationship with God. This is why Jesus commends almsgiving in secret, praying in private, and a kind of fasting that disguises itself and puts on a good face for the rest of the world.
All of this applies as much to the modern Christian context, of course, as to Jesus’ contemporaries. I might add that Christians, both on the Right and on the Left, are also fond of demonstrating their piety by publicly announcing the details of what they believe and condemning those who disagree. Probably Jesus would say that this, too, is open to the same kind of corruption.
So it’s just a matter of keeping a low profile?
Yes, in a way. But, of course, it’s more complex than that. If no one is ever seen giving alms, praying, and exercising self-control of the appetites, how will anyone know that such things are of value? Each generation learns about these things in part from prior generations. It’s not that they can’t be thought up anew, but if we start from scratch in every generation how long would it take to figure it all out again? If Jesus is counseling complete secrecy, he would be crippling human community and the educational process that shares past experience with new generations. This is more a warning against the temptation to misuse piety for unholy ends.
What Jesus calls for is integrity of purpose. The purpose of our religion, our faith, our piety is to form a relationship with God that can then shape and strengthen us and pervade and transform our relationships with one another. This whole process is undermined and even invalidated if we turn our attention instead toward impressing other people. We’re then using our piety as a kind of social credit and it no longer has anything to do with God at all.
Why does the Lord’s Prayer come at this point? It seems to interrupt the series of instructions about not doing pious acts in public.
Yes, that’s always seemed a bit strange to me, too. It’s introduced with “don’t be like the Gentiles”—which parallels the thrice repeated “don’t be like the hypocrites.” I don’t actually know whether Gentiles were any worse about long-winded prayer than Jews. But what Jesus is attacking here is a magical understanding of prayer—an expectation that if you can just pray long enough, often enough, and with the right formulas, you can more or less make the divine powers do what you want.
Jesus will affirm, later on in this chapter, that God does care about what people need, even making “his sun rise on the evil and on the good” (6:45). But—as I read long ago in an essay by a monk of the Order of the Holy Cross (I regret that I have lost the reference)—true prayer is not about getting God to do what we want; it’s about becoming more of what God wants us to be. The Lord’s Prayer is a model of that kind of prayer.
I’m not sure I even hear it any more, it’s become so familiar.
Yes, encountering it here in Matthew’s Gospel gives us a chance to think about what sort of prayer it models for us and to rediscover how subversive it is. To start with, it says very little about what we want. Instead it starts out entirely focused on God and then goes on to how we can participate in what God is doing.
Addressing God as “Father” is not a literal ascription of masculinity or parenthood to God. It is a way of saying that we confess ourselves as directly and intimately related to God. We come from God; we owe who we are—our very identity— to God. And note that we say “our Father,” not “my Father,” because this relationship with God is something we share with the whole of humanity.
We say “in heaven” to affirm that this relationship overarches, includes, and subordinates all earthly ones. “Heaven” also serves as an image for what human life can become in its best, freest, most generous and loving state. The phrase expresses not only God’s power, but the joy of our communion with God and one another.
Isn’t that a lot to pick up out of so few words?
Yes, they’re dense with implications. And only after we’ve established the context of our prayer in this way do we begin to make requests—and they’re not focused on us. First is that God’s name be hallowed—that we may approach God with due awe and reverence. Then we ask that God’s kingdom come and God’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” We admit that our earthly existence is a long way short of the love, beauty, and joy that heaven images for us and we express our desire to be drawn closer to that goal—a prayer that we may become more of what God longs for us to be.
Only then do we ask for some tangible thing that we need—something variously translated as “daily bread,” or “bread for today,” or “bread for tomorrow.” (The Greek epiousion is a rare word and its exact meaning isn’t perfectly certain.) This prayer is one for sustenance, not riches or distinction or success or long life or any of the other things we might want to ask for. And Jesus assures us that God is sufficiently caring and attentive to us to know what we need (vs. 8).
Then comes what may be the most difficult part of the prayer, the bit about forgiveness.
Yes, that can be painful. And Jesus doesn’t give us any wiggle room.
Right! He actually says that God’s forgiveness of us depends on our forgiving those who have done us wrong. It seems unfair—or at least ungenerous of God. But the fundamental truth is that, if I want to have God’s free forgiveness for myself, I can’t refuse it to someone else. God’s forgiveness isn’t for one person at a time. It’s for the whole human race. We can fully open up to receiving it only in the company of all the other sinners in the world who need it as much as we—maybe, in some cases, even more.
God’s forgiveness isn’t just a gift to me; it’s something I’m invited to take part in. God wants us to become agents as well as recipients of forgiveness. What God gives freely to us, we are to share with one another.
The next line of the prayer seems almost as difficult. Would God actually bring us “into temptation” or “to the test” or to “the time of trial,” or however it gets translated?
The confusion is partly in the English language. “Temptation” has now come to mean essentially the same thing as “enticement.” But the more basic meaning of the Greek word is “testing.” Perhaps we should compare the prayer here with Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane to be delivered from the cross. In the mystery of God’s love and grace, perhaps God may ask for our cooperation even in very difficult ways. We are given the freedom here to ask that we be delivered from such a role.
In any case, we pray to be delivered from evil (or “the evil one”—either translation is possible). That is to say, we pray not to fall away from our hope in God because then we would find ourselves flailing away in the world as if we had only ourselves to rely on. Evil feeds on the loss of all trust, hope, purpose, love.
So the Lord’s Prayer really does belong in the context of Jesus’ sayings about public piety. All true religion is fundamentally a trusting relationship with God that is shared with others. It is not a bid for public notice or respect. If my reputation becomes more important to me than my relationship with God, I have effectively cast in my lot with evil.

Next up: THE PITFALL OF DIVIDED LOYALTIES

READING MATTHEW, 7: HOW CAN THE LAW CHANGE AND STILL BE THE SAME?

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Matthew 5:17-48 gives us a series of sayings about the Law of Moses or Torah (the first five books of the Bible). Then as now, this was a cornerstone of Jewish life and thought. For Matthew, this is a central topic. We’ve seen that he was prepared to point out the irregularities in his story—in Jesus’ genealogy and in the visit of the Magi. Still, he continued to be fully committed to his religion as a Jew.
Why is Jesus even concerned about it? Wasn’t he founding a new religion?
Christianity certainly turned into a separate religion in its own right as Christian and Jewish communities split apart in the second, third, and fourth centuries. But such division is a familiar result of internal efforts at reform within a religion. Think of Luther and the Lutherans. There is nothing to suggest that Luther thought of himself as anything other than a good Catholic (more Catholic, in fact, than the Pope). But the pressures of politics and history have produced parallel groups that we call “Roman Catholic” and “Lutheran.” For Matthew and his intended audience, in the first century, the notion that “Christian” and “Jew” were mutually exclusive definitions was unintelligible. There were many varieties of Judaism, each regarding itself as the truest expression of Jewish faith. The Jewish followers of Jesus could easily have wound up simply as another of these.
However the division of Christianity from Judaism came about, exactly, Christians of all sorts, Jewish and Gentile, held onto many aspects of Judaism, especially the scriptures of Israel. And Matthew clearly expected his readers to be well acquainted with them—able, for example, to recognize his many citations of scripture and understand his emphasis on fulfillment of prophecies. He also included some reference to the controversies between Jesus and other contemporary Jewish teachers—controversies about the meaning of the Torah.
The Torah was not only a sacred book but also the written constitution and law of the Jewish nation. Since it was now centuries old, it needed skilled interpreters—a role that scribes, priests, and the leaders of Jewish sects were expected to fulfill. Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel, steps into this role, too. He demonstrates a particular way of understanding it and interpreting it for his place and time.
Hence the emphatic insistence that nothing is going to replace the Law?
Exactly. “I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. . . . until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished” (vs. 17-18) But what does Jesus mean by this? It could mean that he will provide a detailed interpretation of the Torah, comparable to that of the priests or the leaders of the Pharisaic and Essene parties—a way of making the ancient provisions of the Torah applicable in a changed world. Jesus even says to his hearers that their righteousness will have to exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees if they are ever to get into the kingdom of heaven (vs. 20). A daunting prescription: you’ll have to be more righteous than these people who have given their whole lives to understanding and living out the Torah.
But then he seems to switch direction entirely in vs. 21 and start replacing the actual provisions of Torah with new and more stringent requirements.
Yes, this is a particularly daunting part of the Sermon on the Mount. It’s not enough to refrain from murder; you mustn’t even insult another person. (“Brother” and “sister” here probably mean “fellow human beings,” not literal close kin.) It’s not enough to refrain from adultery; a man mustn’t even desire a married woman. Does this sound impossible? Yes, it is. Desire isn’t always amenable to voluntary control. And Jesus drives the point home with the appalling language of tearing out the eye or cutting off the right hand. If this is his new list of rules, it’s not working. It certainly can’t serve as a literal list of demands, and Christian tradition has uniformly rejected the idea that Jesus meant vss. 29-30 literally. But they do make a powerful metaphor. Jesus is teaching that it’s not enough to obey the letter of the Law. We are to become new people with a very different way of relating to the world around us and even to the Law itself.
Jesus even treats divorce, something allowed by Torah, as a sin (vss. 31-32). Notice that he treats this as a purely male sin, since the Torah gave the power of divorce only to men. In Jesus’s time women might also gain this right through the marriage contract; still, he was seeing it as primarily a male sin. (We’ll return to this topic later in Matthew’s Gospel.) Again, oaths have official standing in the Torah, but Jesus forbids them. Revenge is permitted within certain limits, but Jesus forbids it—almost going to the opposite extreme of insisting that we assist everyone without question. And Jesus expands the commandment to love your neighbor into a commandment to love your enemy.
It’s all bewildering. It leaves the head spinning. What happens to ordinary, orderly social convention here? Isn’t God interested in righting wrongs any more? What about the justice of God?
Isn’t that implied in the threat of judgement, such as vss. 25-26 or 29-30?
We certainly find it there. God, apparently, is not resigning altogether from the job of judge. But Jesus pushes a very different aspect of the divine to the fore at the end of the chapter, where he tells us that we must be “perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (vs. 48). Think of how he has just described God’s perfection: “he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (vs. 45). God’s perfection consists not in judging and condemning but in loving all people alike. God’s love for us is not a response to our worthiness, but an expression of God’s boundless grace.
So Jesus is really invalidating—or at least replacing—the whole idea of law?
Actually, he doesn’t resolve the matter for us. As so often in Jesus’ teaching, we find that what has disappeared is the absolute either/or. We think that God must either be just or be merciful. Jesus refuses to reject the justice in order to gain the mercy—or to reject the mercy in order to shore up justice. It’s not that he rejects Torah. He insists rather on translating it into an internal reality; it is to become not a series of rules but a disposition, a way of being in the world.
One reason why the Sermon on the Mount has exercised such influence on readers for almost two thousand years is that it resolutely resists our hankering after a rigid oversimplification. Just reading it makes us begin to face up to the fact that true human goodness is something more inscrutable, more beautiful, and more costly than we are accustomed to think—and not simply a matter of obeying the current set of rules. In fact, as we’ll see, goodness can became a cause of evil.

Next up: A YES AND A NO TO RELIGION (6:1-18)

READING MATTHEW, 6: IMPLAUSIBLE BLESSINGS

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On Matthew 5:1-16:
With chapter 5, we enter on what, for many people, is the heart and soul of the Gospel of Mathew: the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5-7). It makes the immediate impression of conveying deep truths for human life. It challenges and encourages. And it also confuses us and sometimes leaves us feeling lost. We’ll take our time working through it in this series of comments. (And let me say, as an aside, that readers are welcome to respond to posts on this website with questions or comments.)
What’s this business about the mountain?
There was a practical reason. In an age without amplifiers, there was an advantage if the speaker was a bit elevated so that more people could see and hear. But there’s probably more than that going on here. Readers have long noticed that Luke has a similar sermon, but specifically states that Jesus delivered it “in a flat place.” Each choice has its own significance. The “flat place” puts Jesus and his words squarely in the middle of daily life. The mountain, on the other hand, literally looms larger, recalling the giving of the Law on Mt. Sinai. And, in fact, the sermon makes specific references to the Law. Matthew is suggesting that this event has an importance comparable to Mt. Sinai—even that it is Jesus’ new iteration of the Law. And some of the sayings speak to this very issue.
Why start with beatitudes?
A good question that we seldom think to ask. We tend to take the Sermon on the Mount for granted: it just is. But the Beatitudes start the address off in a quite particular way. On the one hand, they’re highly traditional. The Psalms, too, begin with a beatitude: “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.” (KJV) More modern translations replace “blessed” with “happy,” which captures an important part of the meaning. “Blessed” here doesn’t mean “morally superior” as we sometimes assume today; it means something closer to “happy” or “fortunate.” The good behavior for which this person is praised is expected to yield the fruits of a happy and contented life: “he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season.” .
But, on the other hand, Jesus’ beatitudes are addressed to people who don’t seem to be faring any too well: the poor in spirit, the mourners, those hungering and thirsting after righteousness, the persecuted. Is he saying, “The worse off you are, the better off you are”? He certainly seems to be talking in terms of a great reversal: the people with no pretensions will inherit the earth; the kingdom of heaven belongs to those who have pretty much run out of hope (or whatever, exactly, the unusual phrase “poor in spirit” may mean); it’s not the powerful who are God’s true children, but the peacemakers.
Isn’t that all in the age to come, not here?
There’s certainly an element of that: “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.” But the classic beatitude isn’t just a future promise. It’s a present declaration: Even now, you are the really fortunate and happy people. Jesus is saying that all these folk are blessed and happy now, even if he is allowing for a future dimension to it as well. After all, he compares the blessed to the prophets who were persecuted in the past (vss. 11-12). Some of them (Jeremiah in particular) had lives of real suffering. But they also had the presence of God. Jesus isn’t suggesting here that the sufferings will go away; but he is saying that even the most distressed and least powerful of human beings can have the same kind of intimacy with God the prophets had—and have it here and now. Just look at what comes next!
But verse 13 seems almost like a fresh start.
Many have thought so. Some readers of Matthew suggest that the Sermon on the Mount (and the other discourses of Jesus in this gospel) were mostly assembled by Matthew himself out of separate bits and pieces handed on in the oral tradition of Jesus’ teachings. Luke, by comparison, has a set of Beatitudes (6:20-32) and also the saying about salt; but he puts the saying about salt in a completely different context (14:34-35). It’s quite conceivable that the sayings were handed down independently of each other, but that doesn’t mean that Matthew was just pasting things together. The sequence is carefully thought through.
It is the people who have been blessed in the Beatitudes to whom Jesus now says, “You are the salt of the earth”—the element that gives life and flavor to the world. He makes the point a second time: “You are the light of the world.” High praise in both cases. But, in both cases, Jesus also makes the praise a warning. The salt in us, the light in us, comes from our poverty of spirit, our meekness, our hunger for God—things that throw us back on God. We are salt and light because we mourn, knowing the failures of human life and the limits of our capacity to make everything right, because we are meek, with no artificially grand notions of ourselves, because we hunger and thirst for righteousness rather than claiming to possess it and impose it on others, because knowing our own imperfections has made us merciful toward the struggles of others, because we are becoming pure in heart—a purity that can withstand the temptations of religious power and armed might, because we are not conquerors but peacemakers. And therefore the blessing is ours even when we are persecuted because those who long to own the world and control it cannot bear the sight of us.
Many Christians, from age to age, haven’t even come close to claiming these blessings. None of us fulfills them completely. But the true saints have been living by them and in them for just as long. Jesus doesn’t compel either group. He invites us to enjoy the blessings, and by grace we can and do make progress in the undertaking.
And this makes us the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Or, rather, it means that we, less and less, waste our savor and dim our light. For Jesus is not calling us to something new and unheard of. He is calling us to what the prophets already knew, to what is deep in our created humanity if we can only rediscover it and bring it back into play—light, savor, generously shared with the whole house.
Remember, too, that Jesus is not addressing his new disciples alone here, but also the wider audience of enquiring, perplexed, or curious people. For that matter, his disciples haven’t had any special, distinct instruction from him yet at this point in Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus tells the crowd that, simply as the ordinary human beings they are, they are already the salt of the earth and the light of the world—and also that it is possible to lose both of these qualities.

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