Dennis Hamm SJ - Building Our House on Rock

BUILDING OUR

HOUSE ON ROCK

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT AS JESUS
VISION for OUR LIVES
AS TOLD BY MATTHEW AND LUKE

BUILDING OUR

HOUSE ON ROCK

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT AS JESUS
VISION for OUR LIVES
AS TOLD BY MATTHEW AND LUKE

Dennis Hamm, SJ

Copyright 2011 Dennis Hamm, SJ
All rights reserved.

Published by The Word Among Us Press
7115 Guilford Drive
Frederick, Maryland 21704
www.wau.org

15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN: 978-1-59325-181-9
eISBN: 978-1-59325-411-7

Imprimi potest: G. Thomas Krettek, SJ
Provincial, Wisconsin Province of the Society of Jesus
May 26, 2009

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible with Revised New Testament and Revised Psalms, Copyright 1991, 1986, 1970 by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C. Used with permission.
All rights reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Scripture passages marked LXX are translated by the author from the Greek Old Testament, Septuaginta, Id est Vetus Testamentum graece iuxta lxx interpretes, edited by Alfred Rahlfs, Two volumes in One (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Copyright 1979).

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com.

Scripture passages marked NRSV from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, Copyright 1989, 1993 Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States. All rights reserved.
Used with permission

Cover design by John Hamilton Design

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the author and publisher.

Made and printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hamm, M. Dennis.
Building our house on rock : the Sermon on the mount as Jesus vision for our lives as told by Matthew and Luke / Dennis Hamm.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
ISBN 978-1-59325-181-9
1. Sermon on the mountCriticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.
BT380.3.H36 2011
226.906dc22

2010043317

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Even after two thousand years of prayer, preaching, and commentary, we are still learning how to read the gospels. With more biblical scholars alive today than have ever existed, we are coming to appreciate, now more than ever, the role and skill of the gospel writers. After all, the human authors of the gospels are still our main interpreters of the words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth.

Over those two thousand years, Jesus Sermon on the Mount has intrigued scholars and laypeople alike and has been the subject of much study and debate. Many books have been written about Jesus teaching and what he meant by it. In this book I want to pay special attention to the distinctive ways in which the evangelists Matthew and Luke present and interpret the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and in the Sermon on the Plain, Lukes version of these teachings.

At first this attention to similarities and differences may feel like scholarly fussiness. My hope is that you will soon begin to appreciate the authorial brilliance and pastoral wisdom of both Matthew and Luke as they mediate the sayings of Jesus for their respective audiences to help them live the faith. Such study eventually affects our own faith and life.

What we call the Sermon on the Mount is, of course, Jesus speech in chapters 5 through 7 in the Gospel of Matthew. But there is another briefer version of that speech in Luke 6:20-49, which is sometimes referred to as the Sermon on the Plain (because Luke pictures Jesus speaking these words at the foot of a mountain, on a plain; see 6:12, 17). And Luke has conveyed much of Jesus teaching that Matthew transmits in his longer version of the Sermon in other contexts in his gospel. Because Matthews version of the Sermon is so much fuller, Lukes version has suffered comparative neglect over the centuries, much as the short Gospel of Mark had been overlooked because almost all of Marks narrative shows up in Matthew and because Mark lacks much of the teaching of Jesus that appears in Matthew and Luke. Now I hope you will take the time to savor with me what we learn when we seriously consider Lukes version of the sayings of Jesus that appear in Matthews Sermon on the Mount.

THE GOSPELS: A FAITH UNDERSTANDING OF HISTORICAL REALITIES

Before going further, its important to review a recent phase in the history of gospel study because it sheds light on the approach I have taken here. You may have heard of a research project called the quest for the historical Jesus. This is a rather recent scholarly endeavor, just a little over one hundred years old. Aware that the four canonical gospels are not simply collections of historical data such as archival records but rather documents meant to interpret the memory of Jesus words and deeds for the living of Christian faith, many scholars have tried to access the Jesus behind the documents. The means for this quest have been the use of such tools as the history of first-century Palestine, archeology, first-century Roman and Jewish texts, comparative cultural studies, and certain criteria used to assess the historical authenticity of words and deeds attributed to Jesus.

However, some of these criteria rely on assumptions that dont necessarily assure us of historical accuracy. For example, one criterionwhether the sayings of Jesus are discontinuous with the Judaism of his timepresumes that Jesus controversies on particular interpretations of the Mosaic law entailed a full-scale rejection of it. Yet there is no reason to assume that Jesus prophetic critique of some of the leaders of Israel meant that he was rebelling against the essential traditions of this people. Another criterionwhether Jesus sayings were discontinuous with the early churchpresumes that the gospel writers put words in Jesus mouth to validate their traditions and that Jesus followers failed to follow and transmit their masters teachings. But there is no reason to think that the early bearers of the apostolic tradition readily departed from the teaching of their Lord and Master, for whom they were willing to die.

Still, as the historical Jesus project has continued, the labor of some painstaking and careful scholars has yielded important insights, three in particular. First, we have learned much about the historical context of Jesus and the early Christian communities, especially about the diversity of first-century Judaism. Second, this study has led us to take seriously the Jewishness of Jesus. For all the startling newness of the good news that he embodied and preached, that preaching can only be fully understood as spoken by an exponent of what scholars call second-temple Judaism, the faith and practices of the people of Israel that developed after the Babylonian exile in a variety of expressions.

Third, the quest for the historical Jesus has further clarified the nature of the four gospels. Now we understand better than ever that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are indeed expressions of a faith understanding of the historical realities of the public life of Jesus of Nazareth. While the historical quest yields a picture of a marginal JewJesus, the craftsman from Nazareth, who taught and healed and was crucified by the Romansthe gospels proclaim that Jesus was also the long-awaited Anointed One and, quite unexpectedly, also the Son of God, the Wisdom of God made flesh, and the risen Lord of the end-time people of God. The gospels claim, moreover, that Jesus death and resurrection occasioned the promised end-time outpouring of the Holy Spirit that enables those who through baptism and faith become communities of disciples to live the way of life that Jesus taught his first followers.