Here is my third talk from St. Peter’s Kyrka in Stockholm; in addition, here ^ is a photo of Olaus Petri (1493–1552), the father of the Protestant Reformation in Sweden.
I. The Question Behind the Question
There is a deceptively simple question that preachers face every time the Sermon on the Mount encounters them: What am I supposed to do with this?! The question sounds practical, even pastoral. But beneath it lies a dogmatic abyss. How the preacher answers it depends entirely upon what she believes about Jesus Christ, about the Word of God, and about the relationship between what God commands and what God promises to give. The Sermon on the Mount is not merely difficult because its ethics are rigorous. Christ’s sermon is difficult because it forces the church to decide who is speaking and what kind of speech this is.
My teacher Robert Jenson begins an essay on proclamation with an analogously deceptive question: Just how does a sermon “say the same thing” as a passage of scripture? Jenson insists the question is irreducibly dogmatic. What makes a sermon right is not rhetorical skill or historical fidelity to the text alone. It depends upon what the church confesses about who speaks in scripture and who speaks in the sermon proclaimed from it. Both Jenson and Karl Barth arrive at a shared conviction: the kind of speech constituted by preaching is determined by how we confess the Triune God is at work in the world.
You cannot answer the hermeneutical question without first answering the theological one.
Stanley Hauerwas arrives at the same threshold from the direction of ecclesiology and Christology. “The Sermon on the Mount,” he writes, “cannot help but become a law, an ethic, if what is taught is abstracted from the Teacher.” When the Sermon is detached from Jesus and treated as a free-floating ethical code, it becomes exactly the kind of independent law that Barth devoted his vocation to refusing. The ecclesial habits that have generated centuries of anxious debate about whether Jesus’s teachings are meant to be followed, Hauerwas argues, “are but reflections of Christologies that separate the person and work of Christ.” The question of how to preach the Sermon is inseparable from the question of who Jesus is.
Martin Luther King Jr. understood something about this from the inside. The Sunday after his home was firebombed on January 30, 1956, Dr. King preached to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, “Jesus never left men with such illusions. Jesus made it crystal clear that his gospel was difficult.” And in the hours before his death, King uttered— as an aside— in his final sermon, “I just want to do God’s will.”
I just want to do God’s will.
At the heart of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is an irony. The law is written on our hearts; however, apart from the gospel, this condition actually describes our captivity to sin. If we are to be freed for what Barth calls “joyful obedience,” then the law and the gospel cannot be two distinct alternatives but mutually determinative words. As Robert Jenson insists of God’s act of creation, the commandments are not an alien imposition upon creaturely existence but its very constitution. The LORD distinguishes himself from the barren deities by creating with moral intention. The law is grace. Given that the Logos who speaks creation into being ex nihilo is none other than Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim, the Sermon on the Mount cannot be the crushing burden or the accusing threat— as it often strikes us.
Even this law, especially this law, must be grace.
Contemporary preaching of the Sermon on the Mount tends to collapse into one of two errors. The first is moralism: the text becomes a higher ethical demand, a summons to heroic discipleship. The second is what Jenson calls the “centuries-besetting curse of Lutheran preaching:” the reduction of the gospel to the assurance that God forgives you anyway, allowing the rigor of the text to dissolve into sentimental reassurance. Barth, Jenson, and Hauerwas together offer a way beyond both errors. The way forward is Christological— a confession of who Jesus is and what his word therefore does.
II. The Loquacious LORD
Jenson’s starting point is a Reformation radicalism that he judges the Reformation itself has not always been bold enough to sustain. The most radical insight of the Reformers, he argues, was not their retrieval of justification by faith alone but their rescue of the Word of God not as information but as Event. To call the scriptures God’s Word is not to say that the Bible contains reliable data about divine things. It is to say that the Bible does something. The Word works what it says. When it is rightly proclaimed, it acts upon its hearers. The text is not properly understood until it has done to its recipients what it says, until it has performed its proper work upon them.
This distinction between information and event is not a modernist conceit but a deeply biblical and patristic one. The dabar of the LORD in the Hebrew prophets is not reportage; it is an effective action in history. When God speaks the creation into being, the word is not a description of what will be but the very power by which creation comes into existence. Origen understood this when he spoke of the Logos as the power that heals and illumines as it touches the soul. What the Reformation recovered, at least at its most incandescent moments, was the ecclesial and homiletical form of this insight. The preached word, when rightly proclaimed, participates in the creative and redemptive power of the divine Word itself.
Jenson draws from this the principle that a sermon is not a commentary about the text but a continuation of its address. The text as biblical text is part of an ongoing conversation, the single history of God’s self-revelation that culminates in Jesus Christ and continues in the church’s proclamation. When the preacher speaks from a text, she is not translating ancient speech into contemporary idiom; she is allowing the same Word to happen again. The sermon “says the same thing” as the text not by repeating its words but by sharing its motion— the motion of death and resurrection, law and gospel, judgment and promise.
The governing rule Jenson derives from Nicaea and Chalcedon is that all right preaching must somehow be about Jesus Christ, the one in whom God and humanity are united. This is not a Christological allegory applied to otherwise non-Christological passages but a recognition of what the text already is. If the scriptures witness to God’s single conversation with humanity, and if that conversation reaches its irreversible climax in the resurrection of Jesus, then every text participates in that climax, whether or not it names Jesus explicitly. The calling of Samuel is about Jesus, not because we must artificially import him into 1 Samuel 3, but because the world in which Samuel hears the divine voice in the night is the same world in which God will raise his Son from the dead.
The story is not yet finished when we read it.
Its finishing is underway even now.
From this, Jenson derives his second rule. All right preaching must take the form of law and gospel. Crucially, these are not two separate sections of the text or two sequential stages of the sermon. They are the dual function of every scriptural text when it becomes proclamation. A text is rightly understood only when it casts down and raises up. A sermon is a real sermon only when it enacts this rhythm. Hauerwas’s insistence that the Sermon cannot be abstracted from the Teacher is the ecclesial form of this homiletical claim. For Jenson, the text participates in the living conversation of divine address. For Hauerwas, the Sermon is intelligible only as the speech of the one who gathers a people around himself.
Both accounts refuse the reduction of the Word to information.
The Word is an event.
The event has a name.
And he has a Bride.
III. The Existence of the World is the Event of Obedience
Before the sermon can be understood as law and gospel, the law itself must be understood correctly. Jenson observes, following the creation narrative of Genesis, that the LORD creates not simply by speaking but by issuing commands. “And God said, ‘Let there be light’” — and the command is obeyed: “there was light.” In other words, in the beginning there was Torah. “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens’” — and the command is obeyed: “It was so.” Who was present prior to creation to obey the LORD’s command? The text of Genesis itself supplies the answer in the only plural the creation narrative permits: “Let us make man in our image.” As the Nicene Creed formulates it into dogma, “We believe in one LORD, Jesus Christ, by whom all things were made.” Christ’s obedience to the Father’s commands is the very means of creation. The existence of the world is the event of obedience.
The commandments are therefore not an alien imposition upon a world that would otherwise be free. They are the constitutive grammar of creaturely existence itself.
As Jenson writes in his Large Catechism:
”The commandments appear in scripture as God’s own second-person word of his intentions for his human creatures... God’s work on creatures is not random but morally purposeful. He creates and redeems us to be this and not that: faithful rather than questing, pious rather than neglectful, communal rather than autonomous, chaste rather than liberated, helpful to the fabric of community rather than harmful to it.”
To hear God’s command, Jenson insists, is “to be refreshed in my very being,” not condemned, not crushed, but restored to what one most deeply is. Thomas Aquinas formulates the same insight: “the law is the grace of the Holy Spirit.”
The commandments— and so, the Sermon on the Mount— just are the grace of the Holy Spirit.
This is utterly unlike the experience of deity that pagan converts discovered upon entering the church. They came from religious cults with no moral content, oriented to the religious needs of the worshipper. Marduk guaranteed cosmic order but issued no commands. The Roman imperial pantheon required patriotism but had no intentions for human flourishing. With the gospel, these converts entered what Jenson calls “a cult oriented not to their religious needs but to the mandates of a particular and highly opinionated God... a cult that made explicit moral demands.” The disorientation was enormous. And that disorientation is exactly the right response, not because the demands are crushing but because they reveal the kind of God with whom one is now dealing— a God who cares, who has intentions, who will not leave his creatures alone to construct their own meaning.
In the winter of 1996, anti-semites smashed the window of Judith and Martin Markovitz’s home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, destroying the electric menorah they had kept lit for Hanukkah. The Markovitzes were the only Jewish family on their street. By nightfall the following day, all eighteen of the other homes on their street were lit with their own electric menorahs. A woman named Margie Alexander had organized it. When asked what motivated her, she said simply, “I’m a Christian, a Roman Catholic.” When asked about the possibility that her home might become the next target, she said, “We can’t just give in to the world’s darkness.”
What is striking about Margie Alexander is not the heroism of the gesture but the clarity of its grammar. She did not agonize over whether the situation required a response. She knew what she was supposed to do. “We had no choice,” she said. “Most of us, we’re Christians.” The commandment oriented her. It told her that her life had a direction, that the God who made her had not left her to construct her own ethics when a neighbor’s window was shattered in the dark. This is exactly what Jenson means when he says that to hear God’s command is to be refreshed in one’s very being.
The law is not the problem.
The law is the gift.
After one of my first sermons in my first parish, a furious mother with three kids in tow demanded of me, “Do you mean to tell me that Jesus wants me to forgive my unfaithful husband?” I evaded her question as long as I could before finally stammering, “Yes, I think Jesus would want you to forgive your husband.” She nodded and said, “Good. I think so too. How? With all the chaos in my life right now, knowing what I am supposed to do — it feels like a gift.” The commandment oriented her. What she needed was not relief from the commandment but the community and the grace to keep it.
The law’s goodness was never in question. Only its power.
IV. To Preach the Sermon on the Mount is to Preach Jesus
In his Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth famously inverts the Lutheran law-gospel distinction. The resulting gospel-law thesis grows directly from his Doctrine of Election, which Barth calls “the sum of the gospel.” In election, that is, in Jesus Christ, God wills to be for humanity and for humanity to be with God as covenant partner. That God is Triune means this decision precedes creation. The Word who will become flesh in Jesus Christ is already the basis of creation itself. The finger that inscribed the law on tablets of stone belongs to a nail-scarred hand.
This is the Barthian form of the same claim Jenson makes from Genesis. Barth reaches it through election; Jenson reaches it through creation. Both arrive at the same conclusion: the law has never been independent of the grace of the one who gives it. The law does not create the need that the gospel fills. The gospel, the eternal decision of God to be for his creatures, is the ground from which the law always already speaks.
The ordering matters enormously. To begin with law and move to gospel is to begin with the human being’s subjective experience of accusation and move toward divine promise as its relief. For Barth, this privileges exactly the wrong starting point. It makes the individual’s experience of guilt and need the hermeneutical key to revelation rather than God’s eternal decision in Christ. And it produces the very problem Jenson identifies in Lutheran preaching: a law that accuses followed by a gospel that merely negates the accusation. Neither word has said anything real.
Consider what happens when the law is severed from its gospel ground. Barth watched the German Church in the 1930s discover that a law independent of the gospel is a law available for any content. As Richard Evans notes in The Coming of the Third Reich, political tribalism had extended into every corner of German life: “Choirs, sports clubs, libraries, youth groups, women’s organizations, dramatic societies, even pubs, identified themselves in political terms: as Social Democrat, nationalist, Centre, and so forth.” German politics had become a lifestyle brand, a totalizing identity that supplied meaning, belonging, and ultimate significance. When the law is separated from Jesus Christ and made to stand independently, it does not remain neutral. It gets filled.
In a course on Karl Barth, my teacher George Hunsinger told us about a Christian church located just outside the walls of Dachau concentration camp. The prison guards and the camp commandant almost certainly attended that church. Every week they walked from the gas chambers and the gallows, through the razor wire, past the cattle cars, to the church where they confessed their sins, received absolution, and prayed to the God of Israel. Then they walked back to the camp and resumed their killing without thinking it contradicted their calling themselves Christians. “Such happens,” Hunsinger said, “when you reduce the gospel to forgiveness and you evict Jesus Christ from every place but the privacy of your heart.” The Barmen Declaration’s first thesis is Barth’s direct repudiation of this evacuation: “Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in the holy scriptures, is the one Word of God which we have to hear, and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.”
Barth drew a further implication from his reading of Romans. Christians should resist the absolute claims of the state, ideological leaders, and political parties by depriving them of their pathos. “State, Church, Society, Positive Right, Family, Organized Research,” Barth wrote, “live off of the credulity of those who have been nurtured upon vigorous sermons-delivered-on-the-field-of-battle and other suchlike solemn humbug. Deprive them of their PATHOS, and they will be starved out; but stir up revolution against them, and their PATHOS is provided fresh fodder.” Political activity is important and necessary, but should be engaged “as a game that is played in full and vigilant awareness of its relativity.” To invest it with ultimate meaning, to treat any election as a Flight 93 moment, is to hand to Caesar what belongs to God alone. The Sermon on the Mount, preached rightly, becomes one of the most powerful acts of political deprivation available to the church. A community that attempts earnestly to love its enemies starves political ideologies of the passion they need for their own sustenance.
Hence, when the church opens the Sermon on the Mount, it cannot treat it as an independent moral code that stands alongside or over against the gospel. It can only read the Sermon as the word of the one who is himself the gospel, the Word of the Logos who was with God, who is God, and through whom all things are being transfigured into his likeness.
To preach the Sermon is to preach Jesus.
To preach the Sermon is to preach Jesus, not as an exemplary ethical teacher whose demands we are now obligated to attempt but Jesus as the one in whom God’s eternal decision for humanity has been enacted, in whom the law’s demand has been fulfilled, and from whom the law now comes as an invitation into the life he makes possible from the Last Future.
V. Law as the Form of the Gospel
The antitheses in the Sermon on the Mount are among the most demanding passages in the New Testament and among the most frequently mis-preached. The moralistic reading treats them as a straightforward escalation: the old law forbade murder; the new law forbids anger. The effect is an ever-tightening moral vice until the congregation sits in comprehensive guilt, waiting to be released by the assurance that God is merciful. This is precisely the pattern Jenson identifies as the centuries-besetting curse: law as accusation, followed by gospel as negation. You are guilty, but God forgives you anyway. No sooner has the law been announced than it is annulled. Thereby neither the law nor the gospel does its proper work.
Jenson’s account of creation illuminates what is actually happening in the antitheses. If the commandments are the grace of the Holy Spirit, if they constitute the same moral address by which God calls creatures into being, then Jesus’s antitheses are not intensifications of the law but revelations of its interior logic. Murder is forbidden not because killing violates a rule but because human life is made for communion. The world God is making is a world of reconciliation. When Jesus forbids anger that destroys relationship, he is not raising the bar; he is disclosing what the bar was always pointing toward — showing us the commandment from inside its own fulfillment, from the vantage of the kingdom whose coming reveals creation’s telos.
The antithesis on love of enemies receives the sharpest illumination here, ”Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.” The command is grounded in the character of the Father, “who makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good.” This indicative about who God is and what God does is itself the content of creation. The God who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good is the same God who said “let there be light” and whose command was obeyed. His generosity toward his enemies is not a new policy but the expression of his eternal nature, his life as the one who gives without reserve. The community that has given its ultimate passion to a political cause cannot love its enemies because it has already decided that its enemies are not neighbors but threats. The Sermon on the Mount, preached rightly, is an act of political deprivation. It starves ideologies of the passion they need by constituting a community whose common life is defined not by shared enemies but by the love of the one who loved his enemies unto death.
Stanley Hauerwas illuminates exactly this movement.
He writes:
”The disciples endure injustice with the hard meekness that still hungers and thirsts for righteousness. Yet the righteousness of this new people is blessed by the mercy seen in the forgiveness that Christ showed even to those who would kill him. Such a people are capable of peacemaking because they are sustained by the purity derived from having no other telos but to enact the kingdom embodied in Jesus.”
The love of enemies is not a demand issued to solitary individuals straining after an impossible virtue. It is the description of a community whose peacemaking flows from a single End— the kingdom embodied in Jesus, the same kingdom whose constitution the Father spoke into being at the beginning.
VI. A People Has Been Made Possible
Stanley Hauerwas cuts through the two standard errors with unusual clarity. The Sermon, he argues, “is not a list of requirements, but rather a description of the life of a people gathered by and around Jesus. To be saved is to be so gathered.”
Salvation is baptism into Christ’s body.
There is no salvation outside of the church exactly because incorporation into the Christ-community just is salvation.
This reframing is not a softening of the Sermon’s demands but a relocation of them. The demands are real. But they are description, not prescription. They reveal the shape of the life that comes into being wherever Jesus gathers a people to himself.
Jenson’s account of gospel as promise clarifies what this description is pledging. The gospel is not general assurance that things will be all right. It is the assurance that this— the resurrection of Jesus and the new creation it entails— will come. Promise is speech that opens the future by referring to a specific content. Every text of the scriptures, when read as divine address, promises some facet of this same future.
The Beatitudes are saturated with this kind of promise, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” This is not a general therapeutic assurance. It is an announcement about the End, the consolation of the new creation, when God will wipe every tear from every eye, when the mourning that belongs to the old age will be swallowed up by the joy of the resurrection. The promise is eschatological, which means it is unconditional. An End cannot be conditioned. The comfort promised to those who mourn does not await their achievement of a certain quality of grief. It is given to them in the person of the comforter himself.
Hauerwas deepens this very point, “Perhaps no beatitude is more Christocentric than Jesus’s commendation of those who mourn, for they are, like him, prepared to live in the world renouncing what the world calls happiness and even peace.” To mourn in this sense is to be Christologically formed, to have one’s desires so shaped by Jesus that the world’s happinesses no longer satisfy. This is the law functioning at its most uncomfortable, not simply exposing our distance from an ethical ideal but exposing the degree to which we have accepted the world’s comfort in place of the kingdom’s.
Hauerwas makes the Christological ground of each Beatitude explicit through Paul’s letter to the Philippians.
He argues:
”The source for any understanding of the Beatitudes must be Jesus.
It is from Jesus that we learn what it means to be ‘poor in spirit.’”
Paul does not assume that the community’s poverty of spirit is
identical to Jesus’s self-emptying, Hauerwas notes, “but rather that
Jesus’s poverty has made it possible for a people to exist who can
live dispossessed of possessions.”
The Beatitude is not a demand to achieve a spiritual state. It is the announcement that a people has been made possible — a people whose existence is grounded in the kenosis of the Son of God.
The preacher’s task, Jenson writes, is to come to every text armed with the Easter question: “What future does this text license me to promise solely on the basis that Jesus lives with death behind him?” For the Beatitudes, the answer is rich and particular. From “blessed are the poor in spirit” the preacher may promise: You do not need to pretend to adequacy before God. The kingdom belongs to the empty-handed, because the king himself came empty-handed, and his empty hands were filled with the fullness of the new creation. From “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” the preacher may promise: Your longing for a world ordered by justice will not be disappointed. The one who is himself the righteousness of God has guaranteed it with his resurrection.
Jenson’s attack on the reduction of the gospel to “God loves you anyway” is pointed and necessary. The problem is not that this slogan is false but that it is empty. It cannot answer the question, “Loves you for what?” When the gospel loses its content, the law loses its partner. The law accuses you of failing to achieve something, and the gospel tells you that your failure doesn’t matter. Neither word has said anything real.
This is the theological failure behind the church at Dachau. When the gospel is emptied of its concrete Christological content, it cannot generate the visible, counter-cultural community the Sermon envisions. It can only generate private reassurance. And private reassurance is perfectly compatible with walking from the gas chambers to the communion rail and back again without noticing any contradiction. The guards at Dachau were not hypocrites in the ordinary sense. They were the product of a homiletics — formed by sermons that gave them forgiveness without giving them Christ, absolution without the kingdom, comfort without the community that the Sermon on the Mount constitutes.
Instead, says Barth, the command is the promise, for the law is the harbinger of your future self. God not only tells you what he has made you to be; God will yet make of you what he intends. The Sermon’s demands become the shape of a gift. The indicative precedes and grounds the imperative. You are a child of the Father who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good; therefore, love your enemies. You are blessed and given the kingdom; therefore, live as those who have already received it.
VII. The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus Making Love to Us
One of the most important features of Barth’s gospel-law thesis is its insistence on genuine human agency. Luther’s solution to works righteousness was to insist on human passivity. Humans do nothing, God does everything. But Barth resists this. What is wrong about works righteousness is not the fact that the human does something; it is that human action stands in contradiction to grace, competing with it rather than conforming to it. The solution is not to eliminate human action but to transform it — to make it a response of gratitude rather than a condition of gift. Barth’s actualistic ontology gives this its systematic form: the human being is a being-in-becoming, constituted by doing in correspondence to divine action. God acts toward humanity in the gospel. The human being receives the good news and responds with obedience to the law. The Sermon on the Mount is not an impossible demand that only Christ can fulfill. It is the shape of the obedience that the gospel calls forth, the form of the life that the community of the kingdom is being empowered by the Spirit to live.
In his commentary on the Sermon, Bonhoeffer identifies three primary reasons the church hides its light. It fears that obedience to Christ will provoke conflict with those who do not follow him. It loves the people in its life more than it loves Christ and so will not speak the truth of the kingdom to them. And it assumes the nation in which it lives is essentially Christian, such that the church is no longer summoned to live as a visible alternative to it. All three temptations are alive and well. The preacher who softens the Sermon’s demands in the name of pastoral sensitivity, who avoids the political implications of the kingdom’s ethics in the name of congregational unity, who assumes that civil religion and Christian discipleship are close enough to be interchangeable — that preacher has hidden the light. She has, as Bonhoeffer puts it, fled into invisibility and thereby denied the call.
Jenson’s account of preaching as existential address extends this further. The Word does not address us in order to leave us unchanged. It addresses us in order to create what it announces — to produce in us the poverty of spirit, the hunger for righteousness, the merciful heart that the Beatitudes describe. The sermon is not simply the announcement of a gift received passively; it is the event of the gift’s bestowal, in which the hearer is caught up into the motion of death and resurrection that the text enacts. When the preacher proclaims the Beatitudes as gospel, she is not describing a static state. She is announcing a becoming — a transformation already underway in the Spirit, of which the obedience the Sermon commands is both evidence and instrument.
The Sermon on the Mount is not a problem to be softened. It is not a riddle to be solved. It is not a stumbling block to be squared with the cross. The foolishness of the gospel is also the foolishness of Christ’s Sermon, for the preaching of the Sermon on the Mount, on the lips of a sinful preacher, is nothing less than the event of the Sermon on the Mount. “To the extent that preachers dare,” Jenson writes, “they dare to believe scripture and sermon are how God happens to us.”
But notice what this means. If preaching is how God happens to us, then Christ’s own preaching of the Sermon on the Mount was already this. When Jesus opened his mouth on that hillside and said “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” he was not merely teaching; he was doing what he came to do. He was enacting the kingdom he was announcing. That is, he was wooing his Bride into the life he was securing for her. The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus making love to his church from the very first word. It is the Bridegroom describing the home he is building, the future he is guaranteeing, the life he is making possible by being who he is.
The Beatitudes are not our requirements.
They are his vows.
And because the same Jesus who preached on the hillside is alive with death behind him, his preaching has not ceased. The Word who spoke creation into being from nothing is the Word who speaks from the text when the church gathers and a preacher dares to open her mouth. In his commentary on the Song of Songs, Jenson describes preaching as “Jesus making love to us.” The phrase is deliberately provocative and shockingly intimate. The sermon is not a report about Jesus; it is an event in which Jesus is present and active, wooing the church he loves into the life he has secured for her. When the preacher opens Matthew 5 and speaks, Christ is not being described. He is being enacted. The same love that moved him to ascend the mount and open his mouth moves through the proclamation of his church, because the church’s proclamation is his own continued speech.
In the Sermon on the Mount, through the lips of a preacher, the Bridegroom promises his Beloved that he will not leave her in her poverty of spirit. He will not leave her in her hunger. He will not abandon her to a world parched of righteousness. Like the Lover in the Song of Songs who comes near and pledges himself, on the Mount and in its proclamation, our Beloved describes the life we will live with him. And precisely because only one who lives with death behind him can make an unconditional promise, the future life Jesus describes is already being called into existence.
So hear the good news, even in the Sermon on the Mount. The kingdom is ours. The Beatitudes are not a list of what we must become. They are a portrait of what we are being made. He has gone to prepare a place for us, and here, in his Sermon, he has described it. He is loving us into his likeness. And he will not stop until the work is finished and the Bride is ready and the kingdom he announced on that hillside is all in all.
