Irony

There’s a delicious irony surrounding the Sermon on The Mount. On the one hand, many humanists and some non-religion-based writers praise it for its sheer beauty of expression and the soaring simplicity of its message. One other hand, evangelical Christians, by and large, ignore this passage from Matthew as they pound upon the strict and cruel dictates of their Old Testament god. The whole sermon seems to embarrass them. In fact, some 46.1% of the voters in the last presidential election, many of them avowed proponents of state-supported religion (theirs), voted for a man whose life could be used as a contra-comparison to the entirety of The Sermon. Go figure.

What is it about The Sermon that universalizes it so? It’s difficult to tell. Purportedly, from the writer of the Book of Matthew, the words came from the mouth of a man who called himself, “The Son of God.” Some believe that without question.

Others think perhaps there was a man who lived and preached, but the words writers attribute to him may have suffered the dimming ravages of time. Think about the task of writing a speech delivered in 1945, documented not by recording devices but only with the aged memories of those present, or more realistically, the second or third-hand accounts of some who claimed to have heard the words.

Some will say that it didn’t matter who heard or didn’t hear the sermon in person, a holy mandate caused the words to appear, in Matthew’s writings, exactly as the Galilean spoke them.

Then there are those who aren’t sure the sermon ever happened, but flowed instead from the creative mind of a later follower.

No matter what, careful reading and thought can create difficulties. Matthew reportedly wrote the account of The Sermon in Greek, but there is no hint of who translated the original Aramaic for his use or how many times it had been translated. Of particular difficulty for modern Americans, some who are neither well-educated nor particularly bright, is the commonly accepted translation of the word we know as “blessed” into “happy.”

That one has created some doozies among the “out of context crowd.” There are those who say, “Yes, we should be happy because we mourn. It will make us appreciate Heaven with greater rapture.” One translator, an expert in Aramaic, even translates into freedom from judgmental thought, i.e. improper spirits. Other, more modern pundits point out that money, more money, and more money, will chase away any blues creating a poverty of spirit. Send Joel Osteen money and be blessed accordingly.

That’s not what the Galilean said. If that is what we believe, perhaps it’s time to remove the plank from our own eye and think about what the Galilean did say. That’s the assignment for next week.