To What Extent Was the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) Intended to Be a Distinctive Ethical Teaching for All People?
To what extent was The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) intended to be a distinctive ethical teaching for all people?
Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount is one of the 5 main blocks of teaching in the gospel- emulating Torah. ‘Without our noticing, faith can degenerate into religiosity...That is when the teaching of Jesus brings us up with a jerk.'[1] The sermon presents the reader with a radical teaching from Jesus, completely divergent to any preceding teaching in Judaism; it offers a stark contrast to the Old Testament. The radical change is the shift between legalism and obstinate Jewish law to an emphasis on person and relationship with God and neighbour.
It is important, firstly, to understand Matthew’s purpose in including the Sermon on the Mount; ‘For Mt, Jesus, not the law, stands as the decisive centre of his religious universe...the criterion of judgement, the norm to be taught.’
The Sermon on the Mount opens with the beatitudes, which describe all types of people as ‘happy’: ‘happy are the poor in spirit...gentle ...merciful...persecuted...’ (Mt 5: 13) These beatitudes include all people, they start the sermon as it means to go on; its intention is to provide ethical teaching to all people.
In this essay I will explore and aim to decipher the extent of which the sermon presents a distinct ethical teaching with the aid of diverse and important viewpoints.
The first view, of the sermon’s ethical teaching, is the ‘Absolutist View.’ This view rejects compromise; ‘all the precepts in the Sermon must be taken literally and applied universally...If obeying the scripture costs the welfare of the believer, then that is a reasonable sacrifice for salvation.’ [2] The last part of the quote almost replicates Mt 5:30
‘...if your right hand should cause you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; for it will do you less harm to lose one part of you than to have your whole body go to hell.’
There are traces of absolutism within the sermon; a deontological
Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount is one of the 5 main blocks of teaching in the gospel- emulating Torah. ‘Without our noticing, faith can degenerate into religiosity...That is when the teaching of Jesus brings us up with a jerk.'[1] The sermon presents the reader with a radical teaching from Jesus, completely divergent to any preceding teaching in Judaism; it offers a stark contrast to the Old Testament. The radical change is the shift between legalism and obstinate Jewish law to an emphasis on person and relationship with God and neighbour.
It is important, firstly, to understand Matthew’s purpose in including the Sermon on the Mount; ‘For Mt, Jesus, not the law, stands as the decisive centre of his religious universe...the criterion of judgement, the norm to be taught.’
The Sermon on the Mount opens with the beatitudes, which describe all types of people as ‘happy’: ‘happy are the poor in spirit...gentle ...merciful...persecuted...’ (Mt 5: 13) These beatitudes include all people, they start the sermon as it means to go on; its intention is to provide ethical teaching to all people.
In this essay I will explore and aim to decipher the extent of which the sermon presents a distinct ethical teaching with the aid of diverse and important viewpoints.
The first view, of the sermon’s ethical teaching, is the ‘Absolutist View.’ This view rejects compromise; ‘all the precepts in the Sermon must be taken literally and applied universally...If obeying the scripture costs the welfare of the believer, then that is a reasonable sacrifice for salvation.’ [2] The last part of the quote almost replicates Mt 5:30
‘...if your right hand should cause you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; for it will do you less harm to lose one part of you than to have your whole body go to hell.’
There are traces of absolutism within the sermon; a deontological