[.smalltext]This is the introduction to Salt and Light, this week’s featured book.[.smalltext]

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]For fifty years,[.small-caps] I have been entranced by the Sermon on the Mount, a text that rebukes, restores, and revives my faith. It calls me back to read it again and again. It centers my theology and my attempts to live it out. It flips the American script and beckons me to a way of life no one, apart from Jesus, has yet fully lived. The Sermon on the Mount is a deep well filled with the best of Jesus’ teachings. But it does not comfort. It does not say to us, “It is well with my soul.” It says, “Follow me, follow the Jesus of the cross.” It stirs. It provokes. It excites the imagination to a new way of life. It calls us to the kingdom of God, and as Eberhard Arnold writes in this wonderful collection of pieces about the Sermon on the Mount, “The kingdom of God is absolute. Its love is unconditional. Its social justice is perfect.”[.article__paragraph--cap]

This sermon was born when Jesus took a stand on a hill in Galilee and spoke up so all could hear. In so doing, he spoke against the ways of those who found his crowds potentially dangerous, dangerous enough to foment a riot or a rebellion or a revolution. It turns out there was no danger of them rioting, but time has told us it was indeed a revolution that Jesus was setting in motion that day – a revolution of the moral imagination.

As a college sophomore at a bookstore in downtown Grand Rapids, I bought a copy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship. I don’t now recall why. I suspect one of my teachers or pastors had mentioned him. I read the book and was captivated. It was a firehose blowing me away, but it was more than that: it was an encounter with a new worldview – the worldview of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. It broke my fundamentalist past apart. It left me in pieces that would take decades to put back together. Bonhoeffer taught me to read the Sermon on the Mount, so I began reading it. Between my first and second years in seminary I spent the entire summer examining nothing but the Beatitudes.

Blessed

I was intrigued by the meaning of the word “blessed” in the Bible. I examined the term in the Old Testament and in the Jewish sources I had access to. The background clarifies its meaning for Jesus’ Beatitudes, but no English translation, least of all “happy,” captures its meaning. The term evokes the God who blesses, and it touches on a relationship of grace with God that begins now but will not be complete until the kingdom fully comes. Yet to be blessed by God remains in important senses conditional. Those who are blessed are marked by behaviors that belong to the kingdom, such as peacemaking and being merciful to others. The virtues at work in those who are blessed are relational virtues springing from a redeemed character: the pure in heart, those who mourn, the poor in spirit, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. As Arnold writes, in these Beatitudes Jesus “discerned the nature of those who had God’s righteousness.” Finally, the term “blessed” evokes a powerful contrast and even more: a total reversal. Those blessed were not on the top of the social ladder in Galilee or Judea. They were instead mostly from the lower classes, even the margins. But they were promised that all things would be made right. This did not mean flipping power from the rich to the poor, so the poor could be just as imperialistic as those before them. No, the reversal here is a reversal of justice: injustice defeated, justice established.

This can only happen in community. The Beatitudes of Jesus toss the gracious waters of God’s ultimate approval on people. Kingdom people. People committed to one another in the kingdom coalition Jesus formed and still is forming. Throughout his biography of Arnold, Against the Wind, Markus Baum shows how following Jesus with others in community was a central concern in Arnold’s life.

Righteousness

Later I became entranced by the meaning of the word “righteousness” in the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are those who long for righteousness and those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. Jesus tells his disciples they are to possess a righteousness that far outstrips that of the Pharisees and scribes. Not because theirs was legalistic or picayune. No, what made the difference was following Jesus and his way of interpreting the Law of Moses.[.footnote-link]1[.footnote-link]

Righteousness describes how followers of Jesus are generous with their resources, and it especially describes the central vision of their way of life. Jesus says, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” and in so doing, the blessings of God will come your way – not as a life of luxury but as a life blessed by God. As such, in true Jewish fashion, the term “righteousness” describes behavior, practices, and a way of life – a way of observing the Torah of Moses with Jesus as the rabbi, Jesus as Lord, Jesus as Messiah, Jesus as Savior. It is a mistake to think that what Jesus is referring to in the Sermon on the Mount is some kind of imputed righteousness. Followers of Jesus would have to wait until Paul to hear that teaching. In Jesus’ day and in Jesus’ way, righteousness was doing the right thing at the right time. It was going the way of Jesus when other ways were on offer.

Love

I am struck how often Arnold sees love in the Sermon on the Mount. The term “love” appears but five times, one of which is quoting the Old Testament, but the love of Jesus infuses every passage. If Jesus’ followers had heard in synagogues that they were to love their neighbors but detest the Romans, which is probably what “enemies” means, they were now ordered by the Lord of Love to love their enemies and pray even for those who persecuted them. Loving only those who love us is ungodlike, because God loves all. For Jesus, perfection is acting like God in loving all persons. The importance of love in the Sermon on the Mount becomes clear later in the Gospel when Jesus, who is presented here as the new Moses, is asked which of Moses’ commandments is the fairest of them all. His answer is twofold: love God, and love others as we love ourselves. If that’s the Jesus way to read the Law of Moses, then all of the Sermon on the Mount is an exposition of love. As Arnold encapsulates it, “This is the secret of the attitude that knows and recognizes but one law: perfect, pure, true love, manifested in all areas of life.”

But what is love? We need to develop the discipline of refraining from using modern dictionaries to define Jesus’ words. Rather, we should look to God’s revelation in Jesus himself to define love. Love for Jesus is a rugged, affective commitment to another person that involves presence (being with someone), advocacy (being for someone), and mutual formation into the way of Jesus. Jesus called disciples to be with him; he shielded them; he spoke for them; he mentored them; and he showed them how to live a life of love in the kingdom coalition he was forming. Eberhard Arnold understood the challenge of Jesus this way:

It is an either-or decision. Either we are dependent on God and love him and become people of love, with a heart turned toward others – one that has overcome the disposition to kill or to injure or to rob anyone of their livelihood, and one that is free of impurity and the filth that drags love into the dirt. Or we are people of mammon who, in every relationship, calculate how much we may earn, what advantages we might gain, how we can become successful, how to enlarge our property, how to make our living more secure, how we can overcome financial need by accumulating more money. This hardens our hearts and destroys any yearning for God and his love, and corrupts the deepest urges of love in our own hearts.

Mammon

From his first sermon in Nazareth to the care he showed his mother with his dying breath, Jesus cared for the poor. His gospel was for them; he blessed them, and he called his followers to give to the poor. The flipside of this song was his warning to the rich. He knew that the lure of money and wealth stifled the gospel he preached. We should not be surprised, then, that in the Sermon on the Mount he tells his disciples that they can only serve one master – either God or mammon. And he instructs them not to let mammon and resources and provisions dominate their hearts. Rather, they are to seek the kingdom of God and God’s justice and righteousness. In so doing, they will discover a new kind of flourishing. Such a life, one of farming, building, creativity, generosity, and hospitality, has always marked the Anabaptist vision that Arnold came to embrace. In this vision, all creation witnesses to the provisions of God. Mammon chokes; Jesus’ way of life sets us free. A life that is anti-mammon can only be lived through mutual commitment with others. The anti-mammon life is shared because sharing breaks the hold of mammon.

Evangelism

Few people realize how evangelistic the Sermon on the Mount is. Not evangelism in the classic evangelical or revivalist or megachurch sense, but in the Jesus sense. The Sermon is set up by Matthew 4:23–25, which informs the reader that Jesus ministered throughout Galilee, doing three things: teaching in the synagogues, declaring the gospel of the kingdom, and healing anyone with any problem. That opener is repeated in nearly identical language at the end of Matthew’s ninth chapter: teaching, preaching, and healing.

In between those bookends, Matthew locates the Sermon on the Mount and ten stories of healing that summon people to follow Jesus. This long section in Matthew’s Gospel, unfortunately broken up by chapter and verse divisions when reading to oneself, presents Jesus to audiences who, throughout the centuries, have mostly heard the Gospel read aloud. Through it, they are being summoned to see Jesus and to hear Jesus and to render a decision about Jesus.

The Sermon on the Mount, it must be maintained, is Jesus’ own form of evangelism. Hear me out, he says. What do you think of my vision? he asks. Do you want to follow me? That’s evangelism. This way of evangelism is a summons to see who he is and to render a decision about whether or not one wants to follow him.

Jesus, Arnold claims, “lives in the prophetic truth which knows that law and society can be transformed only through the religious and moral renewal of the spiritual life.” Like Jesus’ unparalleled sermon, the talks and essays collected in Salt and Light point the way to this renewal and transformation. I hope you will be as unsettled and encouraged as I have been.

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