In The Jesus I Never Knew Philip Yancey exposes his own puzzlement with the Sermon on the Mount -- especially the Beatitudes.
Here are some of his thoughts regarding how the sermon describes Christ's dual message: absolute Ideals and absolute Grace.
For years I had felt so unworthy before the absolute ideals of the Sermon on the Mount that I had missed any notion of grace.
Once I understood the dual message, however, I went back and found the message of grace gusts through the entire speech.
It begins with the Beatitudes--Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek; blessed are the desperate--and it moves toward the Lord's Prayer-- Forgive us our debts...deliver us from the evil one.
Jesus began this great sermon with gentle words for those in need...and continued on with a prayer that has formed a model for all twelve-step groups. "One day at a time," say the alcoholics in AA; "Give us this day our daily bread," say the Christians. Grace is for the desperate, the needy, the broken, those who cannot make it on their own. Grace is for all of us.
For years I had thought of the Sermon on the Mount as a blueprint for human behavior that no one could possibly follow. Reading it again, I found that Jesus gave those words, not to cumber us, but to tell us what God is like.
The character of God is the subject of the Sermon on the Mount.
Why should we love our enemies? Because our merciful Father causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good. Why be perfect? Because God is perfect. Why store up treasures in heaven? Because the Father lives there and will lavishly reward us
Why live without fear and worry? Because the same God who clothes the lilies and the grass of the field has promised to take care of us.
How could I have missed it? Jesus did not proclaim the Sermon on the Mount so that we could furrow our brows in despair over our failure to achieve perfection.
He gave it to impart to us God's Ideal toward which we should never stop striving, but also to show us that none of us will ever reach that Ideal...it forces us to recognize the great distance between God and us, and any attempt to reduce that distance by somehow moderating or watering-down its claims misses the point altogether.
...The Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and covetous. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace.
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