V.
(1) What is known as the Sermon on the Mount is obviously placed by St. Matthew (who appears in the earliest traditions connected with his name as a collector of our Lord’s “Oracles” or discourses) in the fore-front of his record of His work, as a great pattern-discourse, that which more than any other represented the teaching with which He began His work. Few will fail to recognise the fitness of its position, and the influence which it has exercised wherever the Gospel record has found its way. More than any other part of that record did it impress itself on the minds of men in the first age of the Church, and more often is it quoted by the writers of that period — St. James, and Barnabas, and Clement of Rome, and Ignatius, and Polycarp. More than any other portion, in recent time, has it attracted the admiring reverence even of many who did not look on the Preacher of the Sermon as the faith of Christendom looks on Him. Not unfrequently its teaching, as being purely ethical, has been contrasted with the more dogmatic character of the discourses that appear in St. John. How far that contrast really exists will appear as we interpret it. Two preliminary questions, however, present themselves: (1) Have we here the actual verbatim report of one single discourse? (2) Is that discourse the same as that which we find in Luke 6:20-49, and which, for the sake of distinctness, we may call the Sermon on the Plain? Following the method hitherto adopted in dealing with problems which rise from the comparison of one Gospel with another, the latter inquiry will be postponed till we have to meet it in writing on St. Luke’s Gospel. Here it will be enough to state the conclusion which seems to be most probable, that the two discourses are quite distinct, and that each has traceably a purpose and method of its own. The other question calls for discussion now.
At first sight there is much that favours the belief that the Sermon on the Mount is, as it were, a pattern discourse, framed out of the fragments of many like discourses. Not only is there a large element common to it and to the Sermon on the Plain, but we find many other portions of it scattered here and there in other parts of St. Luke’s Gospel. Thus we have: —
(1) Matthew 5:13
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(2) Matthew 5:18
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(3) Matthew 5:25-26
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(4) Matthew 5:32
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(5) Matthew 6:9-13
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(6) Matthew 6:19-21
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(7) Matthew 6:22-23
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(8) Matthew 6:24
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(9) Matthew 6:25
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(9) Matthew 6:26-34
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(10) Matthew 7:7-11
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(11) Matthew 7:13
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(12) Matthew 7:22-23
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In most of these passages St. Luke reports what served as the starting-point of the teaching. It conies as the answer to a question, as the rebuke of a special fault. We might be led to think that the two Evangelists, coming across a collection more or less complete of our Lord’s words (I use the term as taking in a wider range than discourses), had used them each after his manner: St. Matthew by seeking to dovetail them as much as he could into a continuous whole; St. Luke by trying, as far as possible, to trace them to their sources, and connect them with individual facts. This line of thought is, however, traversed by other facts that lead to an opposite conclusion. In Chapter s 5 and 6 of the Sermon on the Mount there is strong evidence of a systematic plan, and therefore of unity. The Beatitudes and the verses that immediately follow (Matthew 5:2-16) set forth the conditions of blessedness, the ideal life of the kingdom of heaven. Then comes the contrast between the righteousness required for it and that which passed current among the scribes and Pharisees; and this is carried (1) through their way of dealing with the Commandments (Matthew 5:17-48), and (2) through the three great elements of the religious life — almsgiving, prayer, and fasting (Matthew 6:1-18). This is followed by warnings against the love of money, and the cares which it brings with it, as fatal to the religious life in all its forms (Matthew 6:19-34). In the precepts of chapter 7 there is less traceable sequence, but its absence is as natural on the supposition of missing links in the chain, as on that of pearls threaded on a string, or a tesselated mosaic made up of fragments. The Sermon, as it stands, might have been spoken in thirty or forty minutes. There is no reason to think that this was the necessary or even customary limit of our Lord’s discourses. Assume a discourse somewhat longer than this, heard by a multitude, with no one taking notes at the time, but many trying, it may be some years afterwards, to put on record what they remembered; and then think of the writer of a Gospel coming to collect, with the aid of the Spirit (John 14:26), the disjecta membra which all held so precious; comparing, if he himself had heard it, what others had written or could tell him with what he recalled; placing together what he thus found with a visible order, where the lines had been left broad and deep; with an order more or less latent, where the trains of thought had been too subtle to catch the attention of the hearers — and we have a process of which the natural outcome is what we find here. On these grounds, then, we may reasonably believe that we have substantially the report of a single discourse, possibly with a few additions from other similar discourses, — the first great prophetic utterance, the first full proclamation of “the perfect law of liberty” (James 1:25), the first systematic protest against the traditions of Pharisees and scribes — that protest in which we find the groundwork of holiness, and the life of Jesus translating itself into speech. That it was not more than this; that it did not reveal doctrines which, from our Lord’s own teaching and that of His apostles, we rightly hold to be essential to the true faith of Christians; that it is therefore wrongly made, as some would fain make it, the limit of theology — is explained by the fact that our Lord spake the word as men were able to hear it; that this was the beginning, not the end, of the training of His disciples; that the facts on which the fuller doctrines rested as yet were not. And so He was content to begin with “earthly things,” not “heavenly” (John 3:12), and to look forward to the coming of the Comforter to complete what He had thus begun. Those who would follow His method, must begin as He began; and the Sermon on the Mount, both in its negative and positive elements, is therefore the eternal inheritance of the Church of Christ, at all ages “the milk for babes,” even though those of full age may be capable of receiving the food of higher truths.