During his 1842 tour of the US, Charles Dickens met a southerner who tried to convince him that harsh treatment of slaves was against the self-interest of Southern slaveholders. Dickens’s response was devastating: “I told him quietly that it was not a man’s interest to get drunk, or to steal, or to game, or to indulge in any other vice; but he did indulge in it for all that. That cruelty and abuse of irresponsible power were two of the... Read more
INTRODUCTION Jesus opens His sermon pronouncing blessings. The Beatitudes imply certain attitudes and kinds of behavior, which are spelled out in the rest of the sermon. Above all, the Beatitudes are promises. As the one anointed by the Spirit, Jesus announces that God is working to turn the world right side up, and bring blessing to His people (cf. Isaiah 61:1-3). THE TEXT “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who... Read more
Matthew 5:20: I say to you, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven. I’ve suggested in the sermon that Jesus is giving His disciples and the crowds instructions in redemptive righteousness. He is telling them and us how we are to behave in order to break through the cycles of evil that characterize fallen humanity. He is not simply telling us to avoid sin, whether in action or... Read more
“I say to you,” Jesus said, “unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.” It’s easy to soften the force of this. Don’t. Jesus is not talking about His own personal righteousness imputed to us. He’s not talking about a righteous status granted to us. He’s talking about how you live and act in the day to day demands and relationships of life. (more…) Read more
In a 2003 article in JBL, Glen Stassen of Fuller Seminary examines what he describes as fourteen triads in the sermon on the mount. Along the way, he challenges the almost universal assumption that 5:17-48 is a collection of “antitheses,” arguing that Jesus’ instructions are not dyadic (as “antithesis” suggests) but triadic. Many take the antitheses this way: Jesus states an ancient principle of behavior. Then Jesus gives his own commandment. Finally, he illustrates the commandment He’s given in various... Read more
In a 1987 article and a 2005 revision (published in his Studies in Matthew ), Dale Allison offers a careful treatment of the structure of the sermon on the mount. To begin with, there are multiple verbal parallels between 4:25-5:2 and 7:28-8:1: “great crowds followed him” (4:25; 8:1); “the crowds” (5:1; 7:28); “the mountain” (5:1; 8:1); “he taught/his teaching” (5:2; 7:28). At the very least, the sermon is framed by these inclusions. Allison also finds similarities between 5:3-12 and 7:13-27,... Read more
Jesus teaches the disciples on the mountain, we’re told in 5:1. Jesus sees multitudes, sits down, and the disciples come to Him. On the mountain, there is a circle within the circle. This is a new Sinai. Around Sinai, and around the tabernacle, there was a circle of priests and Levites, and then a larger circle of the multitudes of Israel. Israel was organized in concentric circles around the Torah kept in the Most Holy Place. Israel was organized in... Read more
Following the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, young English noblemen began traveling the continent in what became known as the Grand Tour. Along the way, the came across Italian landscape painters, and went home dreaming of turning England into little Italy. Maggie Lane writes, “The desire was awakened to create landscapes equally beautiful of their own grounds in England. There was also a political aspect of the question, the idea that as England had escaped the tyranny of the French... Read more
Most of England’s enclosure acts were passed between 1760 and 1815, and the acts transformed the British landscape. Before enclosure, yeoman farmers lived in villages, and trudged each day to their scattered strips of land to work. Before enclosure, according to Maggie Lane, “one-third of the land enclosed in England had previously been either common, on which villagers had traditionally enjoyed grazing rights, or waste – rabbit-warrens, ant-hills, weeds, rocks or scrub.” Enclosure brought a “fundamental reworking and recolouring of... Read more
Chesterton admits that Dickens’s characters neither affect nor are affected by time or circumstances. This is, he says, because Dickens was constructing myths rather than novels: “Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist; he was the last of the mythologists, and perhaps the greatest. He did not always manage to make his characters men, but he always managed to make them gods. They are creatures like Punch or Father Christmas. They live statically, in a perpetual summer of being... Read more
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