Sermon on the Mount

The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) is the first of five great teaching blocks in Matthew's Gospel and the fullest statement of the ethics of the kingdom of God that Jesus came to inaugurate. Luke records a parallel and partly shorter discourse delivered on a level place (Luke 6:17–49), and most evangelical scholars treat the two accounts as records of the same teaching, given on a hillside whose lower slopes form a natural plateau above the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee. Seeing the crowds, Jesus went up on the mountain, sat down (the customary posture of a rabbi teaching with authority), and his disciples came to him. The discourse opens with the Beatitudes (5:3–12), nine sayings that pronounce blessing on the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted. Jesus then declares his disciples salt and light, affirms that he has come not to abolish but to fulfill the Law and the Prophets (5:17), and gives six antitheses ("You have heard… but I say to you") that drive the moral demand of the Law inward to anger, lust, divorce, oaths, retaliation, and love of enemies. Chapter 6 turns to the practice of righteousness before God — almsgiving, prayer, and fasting — with the Lord's Prayer at the center (6:9–13), followed by teaching on treasure, anxiety, and seeking first the kingdom. Chapter 7 closes with warnings against judging, instructions to ask, seek, and knock, the Golden Rule (7:12), the narrow gate, the test of false prophets by their fruits, and the parable of the wise and foolish builders. The crowds were astonished, "for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes" (7:29). The Sermon is not a new law replacing Moses but the authoritative messianic interpretation of God's will, and it presupposes the grace and power that come through union with the Teacher himself.