Heartbreak

February is also Black History month. February 16th is the anniversary of M.E.S.H. IT WAS FOUNDED ON THE INTERNET IN 2011. ALTHOUGH I SPENT TIME MUCH EARLIER WORKING ON IT

It's not entitlement.

What is The Sermon on the Mount,

By BIBLE PROJECT SCHOLAR TEAM

(The mesh board thanks this organization for inspiring me tonight with their words) here is an excerpt by them:

The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus' most well-known teaching and one of history's most famous speeches ever. Jesus delivered this sermon 2,000 years ago, and the implications of these words are still shockingly relevant and meaningful.

Emphasizing humility, forgiveness, and generous care for our neighbors, Jesus encourages people to choose God's way of love, which will eventually renew all of creation. He calls this restored world God's Kingdom. This is a realm in which Heaven and Earth are inseparably combined, a place where life flourishes that's free from injustice, suffering, and death.

We're not sure if Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount as one big speech or if Matthew collected Jesus' key teachings over time and organized them into a sermon-style scene (recorded in Matthew 5-7). Either way, this sermon contains some of the most rigorous ethical demands in the Bible. It has wild ideas like "blessed are the peacemakers" and "love your enemies" and "pray for people who persecute you."

These ideas might pass for utopian ideals, but they're nonsense (and weak) in our modern empires, where leadership usually means strength and power, than vulnerability and love.

In the Gospel of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount story, Jesus is intentionally portrayed on a large hill (or mountain, Matt. 5:1), speaking to a group of hurting Jewish farmers and day laborers who have been oppressed by Rome (and other powerful nations) for too long. They're sick of being bullied, mocked, and taxed into poverty by those in power. And like their Hebrew ancestors, who had long ago been slaves under brutal Egyptian tyranny, they are in need of a rescuer.

Enter Jesus of Nazareth-the humble teacher everyone whispers about. Family and friends are saying good things, but the power guys are getting irritated about everything he says.

By the time of the Sermon on the Mount scene, many already considered Jesus a great prophet like Moses. Matthew says that crowds gather, and Jesus ascends a "mountain." This mountain teaching with oppressed people sounds familiar -think about Moses giving instructions at Mount Sinai to the Hebrew people recently freed from enslavement. With all these symbols working together, many in the crowd are wondering if Jesus will be some kind of rescuer: "Is this Jesus a new kind of Moses?"
Matthew compares Jesus to Moses but takes care to show he's not the same as Moses, nor is his instruction a simple repeat of Moses' law. In Matthew 5:17, Jesus says he is not abolishing what Moses gave; he's "filling it full." Jesus' teaching deepens and expands that first instruction (Hebrew: torah) from Moses.

To better answer the question "What is the Sermon on the Mount?", we need to dig deeper into the three key distinctives we've briefly mentioned. We need to look at:

1. How Matthew portrays Jesus as a new Moses

2. How Jesus' teaching "fills full" the Hebrew Bible's law

3. What Jesus means when he talks about God's Kingdom

Jesus as the New Moses

Throughout the biblical story, God instructs people in many ways, but two teachers-Moses and Jesus become primary human instructors. Moses was the only one who experienced God face-to-face (Exod. 33:11), and Jesus is God himself in the flesh. In Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, through Jesus, God shows up like a newMoses, arriving to rescue not only all of Israel but all of humanity.

As such, Matthew casts Jesus not only as a new Moses but also as a greater Moses. Somehow, in a speech where Jesus never tells people to respect him or to bow down, the crowds still recognize strong authority in Jesus' words. His teaching seems to have the ring of truth, and it fits with the Hebrew Bible's instruction they already know, yet it leaves them utterly astonished (Matt. 7:28).

Jesus is disrupting the common expectations of their world. Moses' teaching also disrupted the common expectations of the Egyptian empire and its Hebrew slaves. Moses taught an enslaved people to become free, not by turning to violence but by turning their attention to God and following his lead-trusting his instruction-which becomes a core theme in the Exodus narrative. That had to sound crazy to enslaved people. Just follow God and trust him to deal with their enemies? But they did, and God set them free as promised.

Like most of us throughout history, the crowds listening to Jesus assume that evil gets eradicated from our world with strong military power and the wealth it takes to build armies. But Jesus goes nowhere near that or an idea that depends on

force coercion or violence.