What Is the Sermon on the Mount? The Core of Jesus's Teaching in One Speech

Matthew's gospel presents Jesus as a new Moses, and the sermon is his law from a new mountain: he goes up, sits, as a teacher did, and speaks, and the crowd at the end is astonished because he teaches with authority and not as the scribes. Luke's gospel has a shorter version, delivered on a plain, with four beatitudes and four woes, and the overlap suggests that both drew on a common collection of sayings that scholars call Q, which Matthew arranged into a discourse. The audience is the disciples, with the crowd listening, and the subject is the life of the kingdom of heaven, the reign of God that Jesus announced as arriving, and what its citizens are like.

The sermon moves through a sequence:

• •The Beatitudes: nine blessings on the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, those who hunger for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and the persecuted, a reversal of every ordinary ranking
• •Salt and light: the disciples are to be visible and useful to the world
• •The law fulfilled: Jesus has come not to abolish the law but to complete it, and six antitheses deepen its commands, from murder to anger, from adultery to lust, from an eye for an eye to turning the other cheek, from loving the neighbour to loving the enemy
• •Piety in secret: alms, prayer and fasting done without display, and the Lord's Prayer as the model
• •Treasure and anxiety: store up treasure in heaven, serve God rather than money, and consider the lilies, which do not toil
• •Judgement and the golden rule: judge not, take the beam from your own eye, and do to others what you would have them do to you
• •The two ways: the narrow gate, the tree known by its fruit, and the house on rock against the house on sand

The sermon's demands are absolute, and Christians have spent two millennia deciding what to do with that. The early church took it literally, and the pacifism and poverty of the first centuries came from it. Augustine and the medieval church read it as a perfect law that the church's sacraments and the monastic orders fulfilled on behalf of the ordinary Christian, who kept the commandments; Luther read it as showing the impossibility of righteousness by works, so that its purpose was to drive the hearer to grace; the Anabaptists, and later the Quakers and Tolstoy, took it as a rule of life and refused oaths, courts and war; Albert Schweitzer called it an interim ethic for a world about to end; and the social gospel and liberation theology read it as a programme for the poor. Gandhi, who was not a Christian, said it went straight to his heart and built his non-violence partly on it, and Martin Luther King preached it as the charter of the civil rights movement. The one reading nobody has found tenable is that it is easy.

The commands that have troubled readers most are the ones about violence and money. Turn the other cheek, resist not evil and love your enemies have been read as a personal ethic that does not bind the state, as a counsel of perfection for the few, as hyperbole, and as exactly what they say, and the argument between Christian pacifists and the just war tradition is an argument about these verses. The teaching on wealth, that no one can serve both God and money and that the heart is where the treasure is, sits uneasily with every prosperous Christian society, and the eye of the needle elsewhere in the gospel makes the point again. The sermon's own answer, in its closing image, is that hearing the words and not doing them is building on sand.

The sermon is the most quoted passage in the New Testament and probably in world literature; its phrases, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, an eye for an eye, turn the other cheek, wolves in sheep's clothing, pearls before swine, the narrow gate, have entered every European language. It is the text that non-Christians most often cite as the part of Christianity they admire and that Christians most often cite as the part they find hardest, and it has been the standing reproach of every Christian civilisation to itself. Whatever else Jesus taught, this is the part that was written down as a speech, and it has been read as one ever since.

The Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 5 to 7, is the discourse in which Jesus sets out the ethics of the kingdom of heaven: the Beatitudes that bless the poor and the meek, the deepening of the law from acts to intentions, love of enemies, piety in secret, the Lord's Prayer, trust rather than anxiety, the golden rule and the house built on rock. It has been read as literal rule, as a mirror that reveals the need for grace, and as a social programme, and it remains the standard against which Christianity has judged itself.