The Gracious Heart of the Sermon on the Mount
Jonathan A. Linebaugh and Jesus’s fulfillment of the requirements of his own sermon.
A version of this article originally appeared on Mockingbird.
There is perhaps no more famous discourse delivered by Christ than his fondly titled “Sermon on the Mount.” Spanning three whole chapters in Matthew’s Gospel, he invites every listener and reader to bask in the distinctives of the kingdom of God. With the Decalogue front and center, Jesus insists that every citizen of this heavenly realm reflect the love and righteousness that emanates from their Heavenly Father. They are loving and loyal to friends and enemies. They don’t retaliate when provoked and are aware of the needs of the destitute. They pray and fast and are filled with the hope of heaven, where their true treasure lies. In short, the people who populate this kingdom are “perfect,” just as their “heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48).
It’s not difficult to imagine the stunned silence on the faces of those in the crowd to whom Jesus spoke. Mind you, all of this exposition of the famed Ten Commandments comes on the heels of Jesus’s most provocative statement, in which he tells everyone within earshot that unless they possess a righteousness that “exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, [they] will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:20). In one fell swoop, a Rabbi from Nazareth has just decimated everyone’s heavenly aspirations. After all, if the Pharisees aren’t cutting it, how could a baker or a former prostitute ever make it? If the most devoutly pious Pharisees didn’t have enough righteousness to warrant entry, how could anyone else ever think of getting in?
Matthew records that the crowd marveled at Jesus’s words, but I’d wager everyone’s thoughts were also tinged with despair. For those who were doing their best just to keep up, those who had tried to order their lives around the Law’s commands, the same leveling word was sounded: your righteousness must exceed your expectations. You have to be perfect. Jesus’s most famous sermon seems, at first, to be somewhat of a downer. Who can live up to that? Who can meet that standard?
At the end of his discourse, the Lord relays a parable of two builders who endeavor to build houses for themselves (Matt. 7:24–27). One man is foolish and decides to construct his home on the sand, which means that when “the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew,” it wasn’t at all fortified to withstand such conditions. “Great was the fall of it,” Jesus declares. The foolish man’s house withered like tissue paper in a hurricane. The wise man, by contrast, laid his foundation on the rock (notice the definite article). Accordingly, when a similar torrent of rain and wind descended, his home stood firm. “It did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.” This, as was typical of Jesus’s early days of ministry, is a parabolic gospel, in which those who had ears to hear could discern the comfort afforded to them.
The overarching thrust of Matthew’s Gospel is, as Jonathan A. Linebaugh says in his new book The Well That Washes What It Shows, “the fulfillment of God’s plan for and promises to Israel.”1 Matthew’s insistence on this theme is conveyed through copious references or allusions to the Old Testament, as he notes the various ways that Jesus is the Christ of God, the long-promised Messiah who had come to remake the world in righteousness and inaugurate God’s kingdom on earth. Prophetic words are realized in him, as the Lord himself enunciates, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matt. 5:17). He had come to bring into existence (γίνομαι) and accomplish all that had been written and passed down in Holy Scripture.
Consequently, the Sermon on the Mount, while serving as a description of what life in the kingdom of heaven looks like, is best understood through the lens of fulfillment. The rubric for entry into this kingdom was being realized in and was indeed accomplished by the very one sitting in front of that crowd on the hills of Galilee. In him alone, the perfection of the Father was fulfilled. This corresponds to what Jonathan A. Linebaugh asserts throughout The Well That Washes What It Shows — namely, that “Holy Scripture, as God’s word, is the Father speaking in the power of the Holy Spirit to communicate and to give the Son.”2 What’s apparent throughout God’s Word is that we aren’t merely privy to information about the divine life. Rather, we are invited to partake in it by faith in the one who brings it about in his life, death, and resurrection.
Accordingly, the Word that is living and active (Heb. 4:12) is a Word that carries out a dual purpose: to show and to wash, to use Linebaugh’s terminology. “God speaks to show,” he writes, “to unveil honest human need: there is sorrow, bondage, shame, sin, and fear. But God also and finally speaks to wash, to deliver and redeem those in need: there is hope, freedom, mercy, forgiveness, and peace.”3 This ministry of showing and washing is akin to the law-gospel paradigm that emerged during the days of the Protestant Reformation. Scripture reveals who we are: our insecurities, fears, faults, and failures. Yet, at the same time, it welcomes sinners to find relief and resurrection in the blood of Christ that washes them white as snow. Diagnosis and healing. Truth and love. The soot and squalor of sin and death are cleansed by the Word who takes on flesh and dies for them. Indeed, the Word of God is a well of grace that washes what it shows.
With that twofold function in mind, we return to the Sermon on the Mount, to note how even amid a discourse laden with the morals and ethics of heaven, we simultaneously find a word of promise. Here’s how Linebaugh articulates it:
The Sermon on the Mount both shows the gap between perfect love and actual human life and washes it away. As Jesus announces in Matthew 5:17, “I have not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets; I have come to fulfill them.” It is first and finally Jesus who lives and dies what the Sermon on the Mount says: Jesus “turned the other cheek” as Roman soldiers struck him (5:39), he “hungered and thirsted” in the wilderness and on the cross (5:6), he “mourned” and wept at the tomb of Lazarus and in the Garden of Gethsemane (5:4), and he is the one who “makes peace” through the blood of the cross (5:9). It is Jesus who “goes the extra mile” with the most degrading piece of shame, torture, and death on his back (5:41), and it is Jesus who “loves his enemies” and dies and prays for those who nailed him to that tree (5:43-44): “Father, forgive them” (Luke 23:34). Jesus, and only Jesus, is “perfect as” his “heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). And yet it is this Jesus who “came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (9:13), who says to all who are “weary and heavy-laden,” “Come unto me and I will give you rest” (11:28).4
Far from being a manifesto detailing the prescriptions we are bound to perform if we wish to enter the kingdom of heaven, the gracious heart of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount is a biography of Jesus himself. All the iotas and dots of the law are realized in him. He is the rock upon which sinners are made wise, made whole, and made new (cf. 1 Cor. 1:30). His work for us is the house in which we are invited to find respite and relief from all the weights and pressures of sin and death. “What God does by speaking,” Linebaugh says, “diagnose and deliver, reveal human need and give Christological hope — is the question of the shape of Scripture.”5 From Jesus’s most memorable sermon to the Pauline epistles to John’s Apocalypse to the enigmatic visions of Ezekiel, and everywhere in between, every syllable of the Word offers us a glimpse of the only one who has ever measured up: Jesus Christ, the righteous.
Grace and peace to you.
Jonathan A. Linebaugh, The Well That Washes What It Shows: An Invitation to Holy Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2025), 76.
Linebaugh, 8.
Linebaugh, 1.
Linebaugh, 79.
Linebaugh, 4.