Archived Daily Manna | Rejoice Fellowship | A mission to release people to rejoice in the world.

Message: Matthew is the only Gospel that contains the extensive collection of Christ's teachings known as The Sermon on the Mount. It comprises three full chapters, Matthew 5-7, almost entirely filled with Jesus' words. (Making it easy to find in red-letter Bibles!) Luke contains some of the same (or nearly the same) quotations, but they are scattered around. This difference demonstrates the specific aims of Matthew and Luke. Matthew's primary interest is to present the verbatim teaching of Christ. He wants us to have a primary source document to show us what Christianity is: what we should believe, how we should behave. Luke, on the other hand, was more interested in giving us a history of the life of Christ. To some degree, his Gospel tends more towards setting Christ's words in the context of his activities. As it is written, Matthew seems to imply that Jesus spoke the entire content of these three chapters at one sitting. We do not have to take the time frame literally, for it is tangential to the message. It would have been a very long day, especially considering the novelty and difficulty of the material. So we might suspect that Matthew 5-7 is more a compendium of Christ's important teachings than a verbatim sermon; or that it was delivered over many days; or that it contains some teachings, heard later, that fit so well with the thematic material of the Sermon that integrating them here created a superior lesson. Or, we might choose to take Matthew absolutely literally. There is much to recommend that approach, also. In Matthew, only four of the apostles have been called when the Sermon on the Mount is presented. Luke also contains the Beatitudes — the eight or nine statements about “blessings”, so-called because beatitude is a Latin word meaning “blessed” But in Luke, they occur after all 12 apostles are called. Certainly all of the apostles heard all of Christ's teachings presented in Matthew 5-7, for he is teaching the future teachers. This raises another possibility, which also makes good sense: Jesus may have repeated various parts of the Sermon on the Mount later in his ministry, possibly many times. The odd language detailing that Christ sat down and opened his mouth, which seem superfluous, were both conventional to the time. Rabbis would teach while standing and walking, but to make a critical pronouncements, they would sit. The phrase “opened his mouth” was idiomatic, used to relate official or important pronouncements, especially for oracles or for kings making an edict. Christ would have been walking around; when he sat and opened his mouth, it would have silenced the crowd. The Sermon on the Mount can fairly be called the most important Christian teaching in existence. It is nothing less than the concentrated memory of many hours of heart-to-heart communion between Jesus and his disciples. To the Jews of the day, it was a radical change in everything they had been taught about the proper relationship of man and God; and to any person not acquainted with Christian dogma, it is mind-bending, counter-intuitive, and utterly contrary to human experience.