When Jesus calls a man," said Dietrich Bonhœffer, "He bids him come and die." Hardly anything so bears out the truth of that statement as the Sermon on the Mount. If we open our hearts fully to receive what Jesus says there, it will strike deep into us like some deadly weapon.
"Unless your righteousness is superior to that of the Pharisees," He says, "there is no hope of you even entering God's Kingdom" (5:20); "You shall be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect," He says (5:38); and He uses the most extravagant language to drive home the point that no price is too high to pay for that righteousness. Of course, Jesus spoke in the idiom of Eastern peoples who love to use dramatic exaggeration for the sake of emphasis; He does not mean us literally to hack off our limbs or pluck out our eyes. But if He did not mean us to take Him literally, He did mean us to take Him seriously. He was in dead earnest. His words are like a surgeon's scalpel, cutting away the protective layers of the respectable self we present to others until He has laid bare the moral sickness beneath it. No-one can submit himself to these sayings and survive unscathed.
Why does Jesus attack us so ruthlessly? With the Beatitudes, He began His sermon on such a comforting note. The poor, the bereft and the meek (those who have nothing, those who have no-one and those who are nobodies) were greeted with such cheering assurances. Those who knew themselves to be moral failures were made such promises and given such good hope. Men who felt themselves entangled in the net of an accusing conscience (a net woven of the threads of the Law of Commandments) felt themselves freed and able to breathe again, welcomed to a fatherly love that lifted them out of their slavery to guilt. Love, not Law, was the truth that set you free. Now Jesus seems to fling the net of the Law back over them. "Do you suppose that I have come to abolish the Law? I tell you 'No'; but to bring it all to fulfilment."
The demand God's Law makes upon us is bad enough. It never lets us off the hook, nor eases our sense of failure. But at least its demands bear only upon our behaviour; a man always knows where he stands because what is reckoned up is his record. And whilst none of us is exactly proud of our record, we can always hope that when the bill comes in we shall be offered a generous discount on it!
Few of us have committed murder, for example. That we have sometimes wished to we may be in no position perhaps to deny. But we have held our hand, and our self-restraint ought surely to stand to our credit. Again, whilst few of us in our sex-obsessed society would pretend that our eyes have never wandered, at least we have not run off with our neighbour's wife. In the matter of adultery, we have kept our hands clean; and not without some effort, if the truth were told. That counts for something, surely. Nor are we liars. Perhaps we have maintained a discreet silence sometimes when we should have spoken up; and we are not past a bit of exaggeration, or even an occasional white lie (to avoid an unnecessary fuss that would have done no-one any good, be it understood), but we have not perjured ourselves; and we are certainly not compulsive liars. In fact, there have been times when we have been honest to our own hurt, and God will surely not be so unjust as to forget it. Besides, it is not as though we have never done any good at all. We have done our fair share of helping lame dogs over stiles, and we will give anybody a helping hand (within reason, of course). No, no. If the Law of Commandments is the standard by which we are to be measured, we may not fully measure up - the debit side of God's 'Account Rendered' may be depressing; but there is a credit side, and the offer of a special discount.
But now this Jesus of Nazareth renders us an account which none of us can hope to pay at all. Not our record is called into account, but our heart. Even our secret thoughts are reckoned in (and as I heard the singer Frankie Vaughan say once in a TV interview in England, "We all have thoughts, we all have thoughts."). We may not have clawed out anyone's eyes, but we do sometimes have 'a tiger in the tank.' We may not have committed adultery, but if God is going to reckon in the furious eagerness of our imagination, it is all up with us. We may not have openly lied, but if God is going to charge us with the jealousy that is eating us while we shake hands so affably with the head of department, then who can pay?
And when we are taken a level deeper, as we are taken by Jesus, into the crypt of the deep mind, the 'unconscious,' where so many concealed buttons are pressed that make us tick, and where those dreams are brewed that sometimes so disturb us, our situation becomes desperate. We all know what wolves prowl in those dark cellars of the mind: rages, lusts, hatreds, evil cunning. Is God going to reckon all that against us too? Jesus says He will. It is in the heart, He says, that God looks for righteousness. "Thou desirest truth in the inward parts," David reminds us (Psalm 51:6); and "Thou discernest my inmost thoughts. Even before a word is on my tongue, lo, O Lord, Thou knowest it altogether." (Psalm 139:2-3).
God reckons up, not just our actions, but our secret thoughts. "I tell you," Jesus said, "on the day of judgment men will render account for every idle (careless) word they utter." (Matt. 12:36) Everyone knows these days that those utterances reveal what goes on in our deep minds, at levels deeper than we can consciously reach down to control them. Jesus drives the Law's judgments deeper than the surface of our behaviour and wields their sword in the secret regions of inner motive. He demands the whole of us. "The tree must be good to its very roots." And whether our rages, our lusts, our deceits and all the rest have taken control of our actions, or, like Rip van Winkel, are slumbering in our deep mind, they are our rages, our lusts, our hates, our deceits ... and those dreams we are embarrassed to recall sometimes when we wake and dismiss from our mind are our dreams. And all these things in us are an offence to God. Whether we have consented to them little or often they are evil in us, and God is enemy to that evil.
We cannot draw near to God except we cross a danger zone where His wrath and judgment fall on all this. If, not the Law, but this Sermon on the Mount is the measure of God's demand on us, then our situation is not just grim, it is impossible. We are all dead men. Instead of easing the Law's demands, Jesus intensifies them out of all proportion. His demand is total. Nothing is negotiable. We may, like the Pharisee, make our passions knuckle under so we hammer out an upright life as morally solid as a piece of heavy industrial machinery, but if the rubble under the concrete floor must also appear to God's X-ray vision then we might as well not have bothered. Build such a righteousness as high as we like, it is still only an elaborate cover over the corruption within. As Jesus said of the Pharisees, "You are like white-washed tombs: outwardly they appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men's bones and all kinds of filth." That kind of righteousness God has to reject, no matter how laboriously we have built it, because it is not true. It is a cover; the sickness beneath is not healed.
When a man takes the Law of God for his standard and seeks to become righteous by shaping his behaviour to conform to it, he has already missed the point, he is already on a false path, for righteousness does not come that way. Not a man's behaviour, but the man must be righteous. No amount of striving will avail him, because he is still, while he strives, full of unrighteousness within. He may strive manfully, may indeed succeed splendidly, but it is all wasted effort because he himself is not changed. The more he succeeds, indeed, the more thoroughly deceived he becomes. He cannot see his heart for looking at his works.
The only righteousness that will satisfy God is His own.
And that is something that cannot be achieved by us, it can only be received. It is a gift of God, not an achievement of man. As Paul said of his fellow Jews: "Being ignorant of the righteousness that comes to us from God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit themselves to receive God's righteousness." (Rom. 10:3) No-one can become good by trying to live up to an ideal, even God's ideal as it is embodied in the Law. That is not the way. The true righteousness is a gift, not a performance. We have to be good, as Jesus said, with the goodness of God, not with some other goodness of our own. When Jesus said He came, "not to abolish the Law and the prophets, but to fulfil them," He did not mean that we are to address ourselves grimly to the task of keeping the Law's commandments, but that we must have the righteousness that becomes ours independently of the Law altogether, as Paul says in Rom. 3:21. The Law bears witness to it, but cannot produce it. The righteousness God gives does meet His requirements: "the just requirement of the Law is fulfilled in those who walk by the Spirit," as Paul says in Rom. 8:4; but it is fulfilled in them, not because they keep the law, but because they receive the Spirit.
The big question is: How is this righteousness given, and how is it received?
There is no doubt of the answer Jesus gave. The gift of God's righteousness becomes ours by way of faith, in the experience of being forgiven. God on His side receives us with forgiving love; we on our side receive Him with repentant faith: and in the process He gives us His Spirit to dwell in our hearts (our deep minds included) and so brings His own righteousness alive deep within us. It is by His forgiveness that He cleanses us.
"Now you are made clean by the Word (the word of forgiveness) that I have spoken to you," He says. (John 15:3) Let us try to see how.
We have seen that we cannot draw near to God except we cross the danger zone where His condemnation and judgment bear down upon us. It is to alert us to that truth that Jesus speaks as he does in this sermon. He is speaking to us in His Father's Name, and He is telling us that we cannot face God without a reckoning. We cannot meet Him at all except we meet Him first as our Accuser, our Convicter, Whose hostility to the evil that is in us is total and non-negotiable. He will not pretend to us that He has any other intention but to destroy it.
It grieves and wounds Him. If He is to embrace us as a Father does His child, He must embrace to His heart, not just us, but with us the evil that is in us. If He does that, it will wreak havoc in His own heart; it is 'death' to Him. What the Cross of Jesus testifies to us is that God is willing and able to suffer that hurt; in the Biblical phrase to 'bear our sin'. Only because He suffers the 'death' our sin deals Him is He able to receive us at all. The sufferings of Jesus on the Cross are the visible embodiment of the invisible pain God must bear when He receives sinners. Indeed, it is in Jesus that this pain of God is fully borne, in real life. There the price was paid once and for all, exhaustively. Beyond the hurt these condemning words of Jesus do to us, we must see the hurt God the Father suffers when He gathers us to His heart, and with us, our sin and all its issue. Only because God meets that cost are we welcome to His love.
So the ground of our acceptance can never be in ourselves at all, but only in God, in the price He pays to receive and forgive us and go on loving us.
When I am forgiven it is that love that is shed abroad in my heart, that Spirit of love that fills me. The love which fills my heart when I repent of the sin that wounds it and I believe in it, is a love which has a death to sin at the heart of it. It is a righteous love, a Holy Spirit which is communicated to me. Receiving His Spirit, I receive His righteousness. It is begotten in me by God. It is both imputed and imparted.
Reminding them of their conversion experience, Paul wrote to the converts in Thessalonica, "You have no need of anyone to write to you about love to the brethren, because you've all been taught by God to love one another." (I Thess. 4:9) When were they so taught? They were taught it by God in the experience of being forgiven as they believed the preached word of the Cross. As they did so the Holy Spirit made it an actual, dynamic reality in their hearts and lives, so they were able to love as they knew they were loved.
As truly as there is sin in me and a nature prone to sin, so when I receive to my heart the forgiveness of God, Christ is in me just as truly, and a new nature conceived in righteousness. That I am a sinful man is the truth about me: that I am at the same time a new creature, made good with the goodness of God in this new heart that is given me, is also the truth of me. Of the two, blessed be God, the second is the bigger truth.
We have to hear Jesus say it to us: "If the capacity to love so as truly to forgive even those who wound and hurt and oppose you has not come to real birth in you, then you have not been converted at all. You are deceiving yourself." That is why, in this Sermon on the Mount, He puts a heavy emphasis on us being reconciled in love and forgiveness to each other ... and being true to our partners ... and being transparently honest ... and loving our enemies the way we have discovered God loves us who were His enemies. It hurts, of course. But a 'man in Christ' has found the strength and the will to bear that hurt and love that way.
If the thing Jesus is talking about has really happened to us, we know what He is talking about and have no quarrel with it. If it has not, we do not know what He is talking about and cannot come to terms with it.
The man we are in Adam and the man we are in Christ - the one born of the flesh, the other of the Spirit; the one inherited, the other imparted - struggle together. But if there is a struggle at all, we may reassure our hearts before God, for as John said, "Little children, we are to love, not just in word and speech, but in deed and in truth. By this we shall know that we are of the truth, and reassure our hearts before Him." What will deprive us of that reassurance is to feel no constraint upon our spirits at all to love.
There is no way we can remove the offence of these words of Jesus except we first allow our very being to be called radically into question and condemned, and then receive as a gift of God's amazing grace His forgiveness and a new heart.
If that happens, a new heart we shall have. If it doesn't, we shan't.
People object to the Sermon on the Mount. They say it is an impracticable ideal; we can't live up to it. Of ourselves, neither we can; but of God - by way of His forgiveness of our sins and His gift of His own Spirit to dwell in our hearts - not only can we, we must.
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