Mountain verses Plain
Matthew and Luke both record Jesus teaching a large crowd about the kingdom of God. Luke’s Sermon on the Plain is much shorter than Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. Despite this, much of the material from the Sermon on the Mount appears elsewhere in Luke’s Gospel, so he was aware of it, but either chose to put it elsewhere where it fitted better with what he was doing or his sources included it as part of other events. Beyond the difference in length, their settings are also different. But they are not as different as their labels may suggest.
Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount is named so because Jesus is on a mountain while he is teaching:
Matthew 5:1-2: When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them.
In Matthew, Jesus sits down to speak. Being seated was the normal position of a teacher in first century Israel, so this is not out of the ordinary. It also fits with the predominantly Jewish audience attributed to Matthew’s Gospel.
The mountain top teaching setting has strong echoes of Moses who received the law from God on Mount Sinai in the book of Exodus. The presentation of Jesus as a prophet-greater-than-Moses is linked to the prophecy in Deuteronomy 18:18:
“I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command.”
Matthew makes comparisons between Jesus and Moses in other places in his Gospel as well (e.g. Matt 1:18-25; 2-4; 17:1-8, see Nolland 2005), so such a comparison before such an important segment of Jesus’ teaching is not surprising.
Luke’s Sermon on the Plain takes place, as the name might suggest, on a flat plain:
Luke 6:17, 20: He came down with them and stood on a level place…Then he looked up at his disciples and said…
Before the teaching of the Sermon on the Plain, Luke recounts how Jesus spent the previous night up a mountain in prayer. In the morning, Jesus calls the disciples up to him and distinguishes the 12 apostles from the larger group (Luke 6:12-16). They then all come down the mountain where Jesus teaches the crowds of disciples and people from the surrounding towns (6:17-19) – more on that later. Unlike in Matthew where Jesus sits down to teach, Luke has Jesus standing to teach: he stands on a level place after coming down the mountain and heals all those in the waiting crowd who need it and then starts teaching.
The differences in location between the two Gospels are reconcilable. The most obvious view is that Jesus taught material in the same vein as these two sermons in many different places and to different audiences. Like many speakers today, he could alter the length and content of this teaching the suit the occasion and audience. Such a situation could have led to Matthew and Luke receiving accounts of different instances of Jesus’ teaching, thus explaining the differences between them.
The other factor that should also be considered is that Matthew and Luke are both trying to achieve different things in their Gospels. Matthew has structured his account around five blocks of teaching (mirroring the five books of Moses): Matt 5-7, 10, 13, 18, and 23-25. The Sermon on the Mount is the first of these five blocks. By contrast, Luke’s narrative pivots around Jesus beginning to travel towards Jerusalem in Luke 9:51. The material before this pivot takes place primarily in Galilee and after is the journey to Jerusalem. So Matthew and Luke have arranged their material in ways that best suited their creativity as authors as well as the message they wanted their audience to understand.
Disciples and Crowd
The audiences of Matthew and Luke’s sermons are also of interest as it impacts who the Sermons are intended for. By audience I mean the people they describe as hearing Jesus’ teaching (as distinct from the people they wrote their Gospels for). In both Gospels, great crowds have come from the surrounding towns and Jesus’ has healed them (Matt 4:24-25; Luke 6:17-19). Both also direct the sermon primarily to the disciples:
Matthew 5:1-2: He went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying…
Luke 6:20: Then he looked up at his disciples and said…
It is worth noting that this group of disciples is broader than just the 12 apostles. In Luke’s account, Jesus has just called the 12 apostles from among the disciples (Luke 6:12-16), indicating that there were more than 12 disciples present. The size of the group of disciples is less clear in Matthew 5 as the calling of the apostles occurs later in the Gospel (Matt 10:1-4).
However, both end the sermon by mentioning a wider audience:
Matthew 7:28: Now when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astounded at his teaching.
Luke 7:1: After Jesus had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum.
So it seems that both are in some way directed to both the immediate group of disciples and a larger crowd who came initially to receive healing but have also heard Jesus teaching about the Kingdom of God. It is therefore possible that the teachings on both sermons have value for both believers and non-believers. For believers, they provide guidance about living the Kingdom lifestyle. After all, Matthew’s beatitudes are often considered as ethical instructions. For non-believers, the sermons are an insight into the Kingdom of God, outlining some of the morals and virtues that should shape the lives of Kingdom people.
Looking at the audience and settings of the two sermons highlights the ways in which they are both different and similar. There are enough similarities between them that it is possible to think of them as two different accounts of the same event. At the same time, their differences introduce the possibility that they are two different events. I think one of the beauties of the Sermons on the Mount and Plain is that they have many layers of meaning, some of which I have touched on in this series of posts. If anything, this series has highlighted for me how much I still have to learn, particularly about the Sermon on the Mount.
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