Sermon On The Mount

The Sermon on the Mount can be interpreted in different contexts depending on your knowledge of the New Testament. The contents of this paper will examine Matthew 5:43-48 and provide insight on the context of the verses during the period Jesus made his Sermon on the Mount speech. This paper will investigate both the written and the historical significance of the text. I will not only explain the written and historical significance, but I will also provide an entire explanation of this particular Sermon on the Mount verse. When one has a thorough comprehension of Matthew 5:43-48, along with the context of the time where Jesus executed the sermon, it will grant the readers a deeper understanding of how we can incorporate the message into our
As hard as we try, we will never be perfect, or come close to being like God. God does not expect us to be perfect, but rather for us to strive to be perfect. Matthew 5:20 proclaimed, “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven”. If we read that verse and Matthew 5:48 together, we will see an intensification of the law, and the highest intensity is perfection. It seems that by the word “perfection”, the Hebrew bible defines it more as “without a spot”, whereas the Greek bible suggests that it is more “the wholeness and single-mindedness by which God goes about fulfilling purposes and the standard by which we are called to obey”. The Greek translation seems to be hinting more towards maturity and wholeness. The context of the word “perfection” is important if we must strive to be so, we must know what it entails; perhaps striving towards both meanings of perfection. It is important to stress the special quality that represents Jesus’ followers: their perfection is equivalent to their discipleship, the extent that they would follow
Gordon Cosby stated “Love our enemies? We have trouble loving our friends!”. God wants us to love our enemies, because He made us in his image, and he is“kind to the ungrateful and the wicked." Looking closely at the Sermon on the Mount, it seems as though it was not intended to be applied to our personal ethics. Joachim Jeremias argues that within the sermon Jesus gives us there is a clear instruction of how He wants His followers to “be signs of the coming Kingdom of God” Inspecting the singular to plural movements during the Sermon on the Mount leads us to conclude that Jesus is not addressing individuals, but rather the entire community of disciples. It appears that since we were told firstly to love our neighbours, others might have interpreted that to also say “and hate your enemies”, although that appears nowhere in scripture. Jesus began by stating “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’” Jesus was just acknowledging the common belief of His time, and also in ours. The teacher on the Mount teaches us by using antitheses, by contrast and shock. Loving your enemies would not have been a difficult concept to grasp, but rather a difficult action to carry out. It would have been especially difficult when the followers of Christ were told before in Exodus “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”, but in during