Today we listen to another portion of the Sermon on the Mount which is the central core of Jesus’ project for human beings. Tradition was extremely important for the Jewish people and rabbis of that time. Each rabbi taught exactly what he had received from his professor adhering strictly to the Ten Commandments and the Jewish traditions of the time. Yet any one in that crowd would have noticed that Jesus’ teachings go far beyond the demands of the Old Testament law and practices of that time. Even as he speaks to the crowd, Jesus phrases his statements in such a way to mark off a new teaching based on his personal authority. During his teachings at the Sermon on the Mount, he often says: “You have heard it said… now I tell you.”
He moves beyond the simple legal definitions of external acts into the realm of our heart and soul. Before an act of murder was wrong. As an example of how radical this would have seemed to the people, Jesus talks about planning or desiring someone’s murder as being wrong. Before loving your friends and family was good. Now Jesus says love your enemy. Obviously, all this is five steps or more beyond what the people in the crowd had heard from the rabbis. Jesus even says that Moses in his interpretation of the Law made accommodations for our hard heartedness and stubbornness. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus announces the unaltered intention of God for us as his sons and daughters. The Law in the Old Testament was centered on God’s will but had been diluted with our human interpretations. The Sermon on the Mount is a like a ray of laser light that should burn right through all our old ways of justifying our sins, our attempts to live as so-so children of God, our rationalizations, or our desire to pick and choose what we want we want to do. The Sermon on the Mount is built on the will and Word of God. It seems radically new and different, but it is really a call to return to initial intentions of our Creator.
For that reason, Jesus says very clearly today that his intention is not to abolish the law but to fulfill it – to bring it to fulfillment in each of us. He is calling all of us today to take God’s will into our hearts and souls and live it out in our daily lives with family, friends, neighbors, enemies, classmates, and fellow workers.
The greatest Christian is simple one who lives out that personal conversion. Lent is our annual time to deepen our conversion and abandon our idea of being nice, our justifications, our rationalizations, our comfortable lukewarm life.
But whoever obeys and teaches these commandments
will be called greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.
Image: CANVA CJ 09 March2026 AI generated.