TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAP.
[I.] THE SERMON
[II.] THE BEATITUDES IN GENERAL
[III.] THE BEATITUDES IN DETAIL
[IV.] THE REVISION OF THE OLD LAW
[V.] THE REVISION OF THE OLD LAW (cont.)
[VI.] THE MOTIVE OF THE CITIZENS OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
[VII.] THE LORD’S PRAYER
[VIII.] UNWORLDLINESS
[IX.] CHRISTIAN CHARACTERISTICS
[X.] FINAL WARNINGS
APPENDIX
[I.] THE TEXT OF THE SERMON WITH PARALLEL PASSAGES IN ST. LUKE’S GOSPEL
[II.] THE TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR CHRISTIANS
[III.] THE DUTY OF THE CHURCH WITH REGARD TO DIVORCE
ANALYSIS
OF
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
ST. MATTHEW V–VII.
| The character of the citizens of the kingdom of God | v. 3–12 |
| The place of this character in the world | 13–16 |
| The relation of this character to the righteousness of the old Covenant | 17–48 |
| A relation of continuity | 17–19 |
| A relation of supersession | 20–48 |
| both of the existing standard of its professors | 20 |
| and of the original standard of the law | 21–48 |
| the law of murder (Comm. vi) | 21–26 |
| the law of adultery (Comm. vii) | 27–30 |
| the law of divorce | 31–32 |
| the law of perjury (Comm. iii) | 33–37 |
| the law of retaliation | 38–42 |
| the hatred of enemies | 43–48 |
| The motive of the citizens of the kingdom | vi. 1–34 |
| The approval of God, not of man | 1 |
| this applied to almsgiving | 2–4 |
| this applied to prayer | 5–6 |
| [further directions about prayer | 7–8 |
| the gift of the pattern prayer | 9–15] |
| the gift of fasting | 16–18 |
| their consequent unworldliness | 19–24 |
| and freedom from anxiety | 25–34 |
| Further characteristics of the citizens of the kingdom | vii. 1–12 |
| The uncritical temper | 1–5 |
| Reserve in communicating religious privileges | 6 |
| Impartial considerateness, based on experience of the character of God | 7–12 |
| Final warnings | vii. 13–27 |
| The two ways | 13–14 |
| Character the one thing needful | 15–23 |
| Endurance the test | 24–27 |
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
CHAPTER I
THE SERMON
I
WHAT is the Sermon on the Mount? It is the moral law of the kingdom of Christ, or in other words it occupies in the New Testament the place which in the Old Testament is occupied by the Ten Commandments. It is thus an excellent example of the relation of the two divine “testaments,” or rather covenants, to one another. There is a sentence of St. Augustine’s on this subject which it would be useful for every one to have constantly in mind. “We do wrong,” he says, “to the Old Testament if we deny that it comes from the same just and good Godas the New.On the other hand, we do wrong to the New Testament if we put the Old on a level with it.”[2] This is a general statement of the relation between the two covenants, and it applies especially to the moral law. The moral law of the Old Testament, as it is expressed in the Ten Commandments, was the utterance of the same God who now speaks to us in the person of Jesus Christ. It reappears here in the Sermon on the Mount, but deepened and developed. We may say with truth that the Sermon on the Mount supersedes the Ten Commandments; but it supersedes them by including them in a greater, deeper, and more positive whole.
This Sermon on the Mount, then, is the moral law of the new kingdom, the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of the Messiah. We have been used to think of the Messiah, the Christ, as an isolated figure; but the Messiah whose advent is expected in the Old Testament is only the centre of the Messianic kingdom. Round about the king is the kingdom. The king implies the kingdom as the kingdom implies the king. Thus the wayin which Christ announced His Messiahship was by the phrase “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” And now—now that He has gathered round Him his first disciples—He takes them apart, and there on the mountain He announces to them the moral law of the new kingdom to which they are to belong. Thus it is a law not only for individual consciences, but for a society—a law which, recognized and accepted by the individual conscience, is to be applied in order to establish a new social order. It is the law of a kingdom, and a kingdom is a graduated society of human beings in common subordination to their king.
But observe, what we have here is law—law, not grace. In St. Paul’s phrase, it is letter, not spirit. When St. Paul says that“the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life,”[3] he means this—that an external written commandment (that is, the letter) is capable of informing our consciences, of telling us what God’s will is, of bowing us down to the dust with a sense of our inability to fulfil it; but it is not capable of going further. Thus it “killeth”; it makes us consciousof our sin, of our powerlessness, but it leaves it for something else to put life into us to do the thing we ought. That life-giving power is the Spirit. Thus the law, by informing, kills us: the Spirit, by empowering, gives us life. Observe, it is a good, a necessary thing to be thus killed.The perilous state is “to be alive without the law,”[4] that is, to have an unenlightened conscience and be living in a false peace. “If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness.” The first thing is to know what we ought to do; and the very fact that we feel our powerlessness to do it, makes us ready to offer the cry, the appeal for divine help.
Again I would ask you to notice a sentence of Augustine’s, which is full of meaning:“The law was given that men might seek grace; grace was given that the law might be fulfilled.”[5]
Thus what we have here, in the Sermon on the Mount, is the climax of law, the completeness of the letter, the letter which killeth; and because it is so much more searching and thorough than the Ten Commandments, therefore does itkill all the more effectually. It makes us all the more conscious of sin; all the more full of the clamorous demand that God, who asks such things of us, shall give us also the power to fulfil them. But just as in many departments of human life “man’s necessity is God’s opportunity,” just as in some well-constructed drama the very culminating moment of difficulty suggests the immediate arrival of release, so it is here. The divine requirement is pressed home with unequalled force upon the conscience, but it is pressed home not in the form of mere laws of conduct, but (as we shall see) as a type of character,—not out of the thick darkness by an inaccessible God, but by the Divine Love manifested in manhood and pledging His own faithfulness that he who hungers shall be satisfied and he who asks shall be heard. The hard demand of the letter is here in the closest possible connexion with the promise of the Spirit.