How low? How high?

One way to view the Sermon on the Mount is vertically, or by height and depth. We live in a time during which the moral “limbo bar” has been lowered to the ground and we seem to be excavating to descend it further.

The Galilean on the other hand, created a bar that was not a measurement of the depth of depravity, but a test of our ability to ascend to righteousness. In other words: a tall moral measurement.

When he tells us, for example, to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, it is, as we Southerners would say, “A hard row to hoe.” He’s asking us to leap pretty high. How many would make the effort these days when people tend to see the characteristics of good and evil so clearly—diametrically opposed as they may be.

He equates “lust-think” with the actual act of adultery. The concept of lustful impulses remains, however, one of the most solid bedrock principles of modern advertising. In modern mythology, some of us can not only get away with pronounced lust, we receive great rewards for it.

Perhaps the most difficult of the Sermon’s exhortations, at least for many of us, is that which urges us not to store up for ourselves treasures on earth. Some of the worst transgressors here are men and women clothed in their self-sewn cloaks of righteousness who flit to and fro upon the Earth while claiming to speak for “God.”

They don’t mention the Galilean a lot, never his most famous sermon.

Anyway, he despairs over divorce except in cases of adultery, yet we live in age in which modern churches proudly advertise special classes for divorced singles.

What are we to think? Anglican clergyman and theologian. R. F. Browning summed the opposing views about The Sermon clearly.

“On the one hand are those (predominantly Catholic) who have regarded them as commands

to be taken as they stand; for with the help of divine grace, they are able to be put into practice, at any rate by those with a special vocation to do so, such as members of religious orders. Others (mostly Protestant) have regarded the sermon as giving ideals to be striven towards; for a requirement to love as God loves (5: 46) is an impossible demand for perfection (Matt. 5: 48) which accuses the readers of their imperfections and which already Luke in his version (6: 36) modifies to the more practicable command to be merciful as God is merciful.” -  "Sermon on the Mount." In A Dictionary of the Bible.”

As we ponder the imponderable, it is instructive for us to remember that the Galilean didn’t require proof of loyal party membership by his listeners. He spoke to disciples, the rich, the unwashed, Jews, Romans, and Gentiles alike. Perhaps he intentionally left it to each individual to whether that person would strive for the heights or wiggle as far as possible into the depths of depravity and despair.

That is where we find ourselves this fine Sunday morning in America. It is our destiny to think. The Galilean set the limits of our yearning. A modern motivational guru, Dale Carnegie finessed the message when he said. “Two men looked out from prison bars, one saw the mud, the other saw stars.”

That is the challenge of modern life. Do we see a bar over which we may climb to seek righteousness or a bar designed to measure how far we may sink down and away from it?