Sermon on the Mountainside
Jesus’s best-known lesson is called the Sermon on the Mount—the mount
being the location where he begins to teach his disciples about a new way of
life. He is in the midst of bringing God’s kingdom to earth’s landfill, and such
things make people uncomfortable. Like the ideas of Chavez, this stuff runs
counter to the ways people think. It says up is down and trash is treasure. He
begins to introduce us to the great kingdom paradox: at the end of me, I find
real life in him.
Matthew 5:1 tells us that Jesus sees the crowds, climbs a mountain, and
sits down to teach. If you’re like me, you tend to skip over that scene-setting
stuff to get to the red-letter words in your Bible—the actual sayings of Jesus.
But let’s look a little deeper.
We find that if Jesus climbed a mountain, this is probably happening just
above the Sea of Galilee. There were revolutionaries in those times, and a lot
of them laid low in those mountains, avoiding arrest.
So this makes sense. Jesus is another revolutionary who has come up the
mountainside. He is saying, “Down with the kingdom of this world and up
with the kingdom of God.” And the new kingdom has new rules, many of
which are just the reverse of the old ways. Some New Testament scholars call
this Jesus manifesto the “Great Reversal” for obvious reasons. Even today it
all seems counterintuitive.
But Jesus doesn’t want to talk about tangible rules or laws. He isn’t into
current events either. Nothing about the Romans here. All that is on the
surface of life, and Jesus wants to go a little deeper to what’s inside us—what
makes the surface the way it is. The kingdom of God begins as an inside job.
Jesus launches his sermon with a list of very striking paradoxes. For our
purposes we will look at four of these statements that sound ridiculous at first
blush but start to make sense once you think a little deeper and compare your
personal experience.
