Remember last week, those of you who were here, about how we said that maybe there’s another way to look at the Sermon on the Mount, other than the way we usually do. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus talks about things like turning the other cheek, loving our enemies, choosing forgiveness and reconciliation rather than retaliation, and trusting God for our needs.

 Instead of seeing Jesus as piling on what we consider to be all these hopelessly idealistic and unrealistic ways of living, one on top of the other, we thought that maybe we should take him very seriously. We talked about swallowing the whole thing, swallowing the Sermon on the Mount hook, line, and sinker and seeing how these things might work together, instead of trying to bite of a piece of it here and there.

  Maybe loving our enemies, for example, helps us to trust God for the things we need. And trusting God for the things we need helps us to make peace. Maybe living humbly and meekly, will help us to forgive one another. And forgiving one another might help us to live less judgmental lives.

  Well we are back in the Sermon on the Mount again this week, this time at the end of the Sermon. Let’s read that starting at Matthew 7:24. “‘Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise person who built her house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!’ Now when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.”

  There is, incidently, a very specific reference Jesus is making here. Remember that Israel is a pretty arid place. River beds dry up in the heat of the summer. What would happen is that folk would go out and find a piece of land to build a home. And if they were trying to get it done quickly, they would find a place where the foundation could be dug relatively easily, which would be in the sandier soil.

  The problem was you didn’t realize you had built your house in a dry river bed until the next spring when the storms and rains came. Suddenly, the dry river bed, which had looked like a pretty decent front yard, you know, that kind of southwest desert thing, turned back into a river, and your house got washed away.

  Jesus is telling the people his way of doing things is like building on the rock rather than the river bed. We also talked last week how about those ways of living that strike us as more realistic to the world as we know it, than what the Sermon on the Mount suggests, come with their own difficulties. So maybe Jesus isn’t being so unrealistic, after all. We choose to live in some pretty hard ways in this world with our need to prove ourselves, exact revenge, keep an eye out on those who are a threat to us, and meeting violence with more violence.

  And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus isn’t offering a trouble free life. Jesus doesn’t say storms don’t come to houses built on the rocks. I think he is looking at this world in a very real way, and believing he has the alternative that will withstand the storm. Tomorrow will bring its own troubles, he said in this sermon, even if we live in the ways he suggests in the Sermon on the Mount. But it’s not like what we call the more realistic ways ward off trouble, either. I think Jesus really believed the what he said in the Sermon on the Mount makes sense.

The more I have read and thought about the Sermon on the Mount these past couple of weeks, the more I have realized that it’s not simply about laying out a way of living for us, but it’s showing us what Jesus believed, what his faith was like.

  This was reinforced when I discovered this week that some theologians and Biblical scholars have begun to look at the Apostle Paul’s understanding of the faith of Jesus. One of them, N.T. Wright, who is appreciated by evangelicals and more liberal folk alike, says we need to, for example, correct what he and others believe to be a crucial mistranslation in Romans 3:22.

  That verse is in the middle of one of Paul’s famously long theological arguments, and it has been customarily translated to read that “the righteousness of God comes through faith in Jesus Christ for those who believe.”

  The crucial translation error that Wright and others claim is that the verse should really read that “the righteousness of God comes through the faith of Jesus Christ for those who believe.”

  Suddenly righteousness or salvation isn’t a matter of our faith, but a matter of Jesus’ faith, if these folk are right. And we see his faith laid out for us in the Sermon on the Mount.  

  Jesus believed that through his mission, God was leading us to a new world where peace prevails, where we choose forgiveness over retaliation, where the meek inherit the earth, and all those other things in the Sermon on the Mount that we dismiss as hopelessly other worldly are what this world is going to become. Jesus believed God was bringing a new creation, and we were called to build that new world with him.  

Richard Hayes in his book The Moral Vision of the New Testament writes this about The Sermon on the Mount. “...its directives must be read through the lens of the image of new creation. Otherwise, ‘Turn the other cheek’ becomes a mundane proverb for how to cope with conflict. But this is ridiculous: if the world is always to go on as it does now, if the logic that ultimately governs the world is the immanent logic of the rulers of this age, then the meek are the losers and their cheek-turning only invites more senseless abuse. As a mundane proverb, ‘Turn the other cheek’ is simply bad advice. Such action makes sense only if the God and Father of Jesus Christ actually is the ultimate judge of the world and if his will for his people is definitively revealed in Jesus. To use Matthew's own language, turning the other cheek makes sense if and only if it really is true that the meek will inherit the earth, if and only if it really is true that those who act on Jesus' words have built their house on a rock so that it will stand in the day of judgment. Turning the other cheek makes sense if and only if all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Jesus.”

  That’s what the faith of Jesus was. And some suggest that the Apostle Paul argues that it is in Jesus’ faith that we become righteous.
 
  The verses right before this passage we read from the end of the Sermon on the Mount, go like this. ““Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of God in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.’

  Even if we lived in all the ways The Sermon on the Mount suggests, that doesn’t mean that we’ve still figured out what Jesus was about. Here is something else from Richard Hayes.

  “Let it be said clearly, however, that the reasons for choosing Jesus' way of peacemaking are not prudential. In calculable terms, this way is sheer folly. Why do we choose the way of nonviolent love of enemies? If our reasons for that choice are shaped by the New Testament, we are motivated not by the sheer horror of war, not by the desire for saving our own skins and the skins of our children (if we are trying to save our skins, pacifism is a very poor strategy), not by some general feeling of reverence for human life, not by the naive hope that all people are really nice and will be friendly if we are friendly first. No, if our reasons for choosing nonviolence are shaped by the New Testament witness, we act in simple obedience to the God who willed that his own Son should give himself up to death on a cross. We make this choice in the hope and anticipation that God's love will finally prevail through the way of the cross, despite our inability to see how this is possible. That is the life of discipleship to which the New Testament repeatedly calls us. When the church as a community is faithful to that calling, it prefigures the peaceable kingdom of God in a world wracked by violence.”

  The Sermon on the Mount is not the ultimate self-help guide to better living, nor is following its precepts what saves us. It’s about trusting the faith of Jesus and his belief that his cross and resurrection leads to a new creation. The Sermon on the Mount is about his faith becoming alive in us.

  It says at the end of the Sermon on the Mount that people hooped and hollered when Jesus was done because they had never heard anything like it, not from any of the priests, or Pharisees, or anyone else. Maybe they saw it as not some religious treatise Jesus was trying to put on them, but as his testimony to his faith.    
 
  The crowds reaction is also a sign that his faith comes alive in the context of the community of faith, the church, on whom God has poured out the Holy Spirit. The new creation doesn’t come because some people here and there believe in Jesus, but because the church has let the faith of Jesus come alive in it. Together we are building this new world with the living Jesus, a world he saw so clearly in The Sermon on the Mount. It does leave you amazed.

  When we come to the Lord’s Table and are invited to remember Jesus. We are invited to remember his faith. But the invitation isn’t just to each one of us, but to the church to remember why we are together and what Jesus’ faith was about. And his faith is pretty well laid out for us in The Sermon on the Mount. Is it possible that redemption comes not simply in the way Jesus died, but also in the way he lived and that it is his faith that just might save us?

  Before we come to the Lord’s Table this morning I’m wondering what you think about the faith of Jesus. What did his faith look like? What did he believe God to be? What did he imagine faith requires of us? And are we comfortable taking the emphasis off ourselves and instead of claiming that our faith in Jesus saves us, that it is the faith of Jesus that saves us?  Can we believe that “the righteousness of God comes through the faith of Jesus for all of those who believe.”