He suggested that I
might use Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5 – 7), as the basis of a similar
comparison. So far, I have failed to distil the Sermon on the Mount to a few
essential points (12 or less is my rule), but I am open to suggestions. However,
I was inspired to reread these three chapters and as usual was struck by a
couple of points that I had not previously noticed.
In the initial part of
the sermon, Jesus states that all those who are normally pitied, despised or
sneered at in the world, are the possessors of the Kingdom of God. We are mostly familiar with that. He lists
nine types of people, whom we might feel sorry for, keep our distance from, or
if we admired them, would never really wish to emulate them. Plenty of room for
all kinds of discussion here.
After a four verse
filler, He then moves on to tell his listeners that He had not come to abolish
the law and the prophets.
I was curious about
this in two respects. In the first instance, I am not sure why he was telling
his listeners this. They were not concerned about the law and the prophets.
They wanted to be freed from the Romans. Their interest was very worldly. In
their eyes, the job of the Messiah was to deliver them from the Romans. He was
to become King of the earthly Kingdom, Israel. Who better to do this than
someone who could perform all kinds of miracles?
So if the crowds
turned up for reasons, such as seeing or even participating in miracles and
hopefully seeing someone who would lead them against the Romans, they would
have been firstly disappointed and then surprised at what they heard. It was
like nothing that they had heard before. Matthew 7.28, 29 tells us that the
crowds were astonished at His teaching. I am not surprised.
As for not coming to
abolish the law and the prophets, in one sense that is exactly what He had come
to do. The Old Covenant with all its rituals and regulations was never
effective, in any spiritual sense, in being able to draw people nearer to God.
However, as one reads
on through the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus barely touches on ceremonial law.
Where He does, He describes how the current practice was unspiritual (e.g.
fasting), and in some cases (e.g. making an oath), He said that it would be
better if it were not done at all. Jesus did not so much abolish the ceremonial
law, as just ignore it. It was irrelevant.
In a sense, Jesus made
a distinction between the moral law and the ceremonial law, without directly
stating this. Like so many of His statements, He regarded it as self-evident
and it did not require an explicit statement.
For the most part, He
expanded considerably on some moral laws, how we should behave towards each
other. (“e.g. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”), where
the standard is raised very high.
The crowds may have
been amazed, but everyone deserted Him at the end and may even have been part
of the crowd that shouted “Crucify Him”. He wasn’t going to free them from the
Romans. They were comfortable with their ritual and certainly did not want to
love their enemies. He simply wasn’t what they wanted.
So if He wasn’t talking
to the crowds, as their interest was very transitory, who was He talking to? Is
it obvious? I am not sure. Perhaps He was talking to us and the spiritual laws
that He explained were for our benefit. These can be pretty hard to take,
difficult to understand, and on many occasions, contrary to our experience.
The Church of England
can debate world peace and whether women may become bishops. I don’t think that
this is what Jesus meant when He said that we should be the light of the world.
Perhaps the ceremonial and theoretical are always easier to debate and practice
than the spiritual.
