Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Preaching and Teaching from the Gospels in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
Now we come to the Gospels. I shall not enter, in the first place, into technical discussions as to what a gospel is. Some of you in theological colleges have read books and essays on whether or not the gospel belongs to the category of Greco-Roman biography and that sort of thing. I have yet to see anybody converted by that point.
It’s worth exploring … don’t misunderstand me … at a certain scholarly level, and it does help you to engage in questions of history. Somewhere along the line, if you have a decent theological training, you should be exposed to the debate and read authors who offer warnings about simplistic judgments and so on, but at the end of the day, it’s not the sort of thing you want to include in a sermon. It’s sort of background stuff that you get at college that makes you a more informed and careful person. It’s not the sort of thing you incorporate into the sermon.
Similarly, once again it is important to see our canonical gospels are made up of many genres, each with its own challenges and interests: narrative, history, parable, beatitude. Beatitude comes from the Latin beatus. Catholics tend to refer to it as macharism, which comes, of course, from the Greek makarios. It’s the same thing.
Apocalyptic, history, genealogy, and many, many more things. In addition, there are form-critical categories, miracle stories and other things. All of those things are worth knowing something about, but at the end of the day, you can be so locked into discussing forms that you miss what the text says.
If this were a conference that were extending for a month on literary genres, then one would spend a whole hour or two just on parables, a whole hour or two just on beatitudes. Fair enough. All of those things are worth thinking about, but that’s what homiletics courses are for in theological colleges, and this is rather a bird’s-eye view of the whole. Granted these two limitations about what I’m not going to do, perhaps the following points may prove useful.
1. It is important to identify some of the distinguishing marks of canonical gospels.
It is important for reasons I shall make clear in a moment. The very expression, the gospel of Matthew or the gospel of Mark, comes from a particular background that is worth thinking about. The early church spoke simply of the gospel, the good news about Jesus Christ, and all that involves.
Then, it is the gospel according to Matthew or the gospel according to Mark. Each of them was telling the same thing (the gospel) but with a different slant. It was the gospel according to Luke. That’s how our gospels got their names, but in the first instance it was not a literary genre called a gospel (Luke’s a gospel). It was the gospel. That is, the good news according to Luke or John or whatever. There is a sense in which to speak of the gospel as a literary genre is in some respects a betrayal of the way the early church thought of what they were doing.
Once you’ve seen that point, I don’t mind talking about the gospel of John and what a gospel is so long as you understand that is not the way the New Testament writers spoke or wrote. This is a later systematics literary category in exactly the same way that tomorrow we’ll see first-century writers did not speak about a literary genre called apocalyptic.
It’s still a useful category, but that’s a later literary critical designation rather than something that was used in the first century. When I speak of what gospels are, I want to acknowledge in the first instance what I really mean by that is what is being done in our canonical gospels, and we use gospels in this context in more or less as a quasi-genre sense.
If you want to use the term gospel only in the biblical sense, then call the Gospels something else. Call them anything. It doesn’t really matter; it’s just a label. What do those four books do? That is still a question worth asking because they do something. They have certain shapes. They do certain things. They function in certain ways, but understand it’s still using gospel in a sense different from the way the New Testament writers used gospel.
If we approach the canonical gospels from that point of view, then there are certain commonalities that need to be understood, and these points are extremely important for a preacher.
A. They have a variety of beginnings.
Matthew begins with a genealogy. Mark just begins by announcing the gospel of Jesus Christ and plunges in. John has that long prologue, if you recall, that takes the Word back to eternity past. Without exception, they begin the story of Jesus somewhere in space-time history with John the Baptist. All four of them. How much they give of Jesus’ birth varies. Matthew and Luke quite a lot from slightly different vantage points; Mark nothing; John tracked back to eternity but with allusions to his parents in the book.
B. How they end in detail varies quite a bit, but what is always there is framed by John the Baptist.
You have the beginning of Jesus’ ministry moving toward the cross and the resurrection. In other words, a canonical gospel is the story of Jesus’ life and ministry and death and resurrection introduced by John the Baptist with various bits and pieces put in or emphasized or shaped. That’s what you have.
In that sense, the so-called Gospel of Thomas, a second-century Coptic document, is not a gospel at all. It has been referred to in history as the Gospel of Thomas, but it’s not a gospel at all, and most of it certainly didn’t come from Thomas. It is merely a collection of loose sayings. There are two little snippets that make historical allusions, but that’s it. Some of those saying have parallels with the canonical gospels, but they’re not gospels in any sense we’re using the term at all. A lot of the stuff is just second-century ecclesiastical tradition.
C. Although there are different emphases in the four books we call gospels, in each case the story must be seen to fit into this story.
That is, the particular shaping of what’s in Luke is a shaping that is still subsumed under this story line: the coming of Jesus, his ministry, his death, and his resurrection. The good news is bound up with who Jesus is and his death and resurrection.
That means for the preacher you cannot handle much of any part of the text without keeping that massive storyline in mind. Thus, when we looked at Matthew 11:2–19 in the opening sermon, I tried to say a little bit about how Matthew 11 through 13 works. Jesus is increasingly being rejected. Then I traced through the big chunks all the way through to the various forms of rejection and briefly mentioned, just on the fly, this is part of the move toward the cross.
You have to keep people orientated to this larger move. The Messiah has come and he’s heading for the cross. All of the Gospels in one fashion or another work the same way in that regard with different flavors and all the rest, but that is what the gospel according to … Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John … are all about. There are many, many, many implications of this for handling individual pericopae. Suppose you’re handling Matthew, chapter 8, verses 1 to 4.
“When he came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, ‘Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.’ Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. ‘I am willing,’ he said. ‘Be clean!’ Immediately he was cured of his leprosy. Then Jesus said to him, ‘See that you don’t tell anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.’ ”
Everybody knows that story if they’ve been around church for a while, but sometimes that story then gets handled by a preacher … “1. Jesus is always willing to make you clean. ‘I am willing,’ he says. 2. You have to ask him. 3. Just as somebody was cleansed of leprosy, you can be cleansed of your sin.”
I suppose there’s some value in such inferences. It’s not entirely wrongheaded, but it’s not very intelligent. It’s not reading this really very carefully within the book. It’s not understanding what it contributes to the storyline. Let me unpack it a bit further. For a start, you need to observe the larger structure. I’ll say something more about structure in a moment, so I won’t deal with it here, but you’re dealing now with themes that are very important that, ultimately, take you to the cross.
How does the book begin? 1:21: “You shall give him the name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” Where does this cleansing theme work out throughout the whole book? It turns out to be worked out about sin and the curse and judgment and all of that and all kinds of dirtiness that is finally removed by the cross.
Then this gift of Moses as a testimony to them. Is Jesus bowing to the law? There’s a sense in which he’s bowing to the law in his day, but it turns out, thus, if the priest then declares this man really is clean, what Moses has prescribed ought to be done becomes a mute testimony to who Jesus is, and who is he? You’re going to find that out by looking at the chapters before, the Sermon on the Mount, and what Jesus says about prophecy and fulfillment. We’ll come to that in a moment.
What happens in the next two chapters, full of miracles and full of all kinds of things, culminating in high points like, “He took up our infirmities and carried our diseases,” quoted from Isaiah 53, that take you to the cross, so that at the end of the day even the law becomes a kind of testimony to who Jesus is as he’s on his way to the cross.
One way or the other, you’re going to find out if you start pushing beneath the surface a little bit that one thing or another is tied to the main storyline that takes you, finally, to the cross, or you really haven’t understood these books at all. It can’t be artificial. It’s not that there’s no ethical injunction that should receive its proper space and healings and exorcisms and all that.
They all have to receive their proper space, but in terms of the large vision of what is going on, this is not a book about miracles. It’s not a book about ethical teaching. It’s the good news. It’s a book about the gospel. It’s a book about Jesus and the cross and the resurrection. That’s what it’s about. That’s where the whole denouement goes. It’s the story line.
We’re returning to principles of narrative. There is a sense in which there are little narratives in the book, but you must never so read the little narratives that you forget the big narrative. It would be like reading a whodunit, and then you preach from the whodunit one little scene and you forget there’s a story out there. At the end of the day, you can make those little scenes say almost anything you like by choosing the right scene.
It’s extraordinarily important in the Gospels that you keep the big picture in front of your eyes all the time, all the time, all the time. It is especially important to remember this because so much of contemporary scholarly literature on the four gospels in one fashion or another puts down the cross. It’s done in different ways in different gospels.
There’s a vast literature on Luke/Acts that says Luke really isn’t interested in atonement theology. There are some excellent books that rebut that. That’s a major theme. There is a major vision in scholarly literature that John really doesn’t have a theology of atonement or sacrifice or substitution; he’s interested in revelation and he’s interested in knowledge and he’s interested in faith, but he’s not interested in the cross. After all, there is no Romans, chapter 3 in there where God set forth Jesus to be the propitiation for our sins. None of that, is there?
I would want to argue back (I alluded to it briefly in the opening lectures) that John’s emphasis on the cross is carefully couched in forms and structures that are appropriate to that point in redemption history when so much was still a bit hidden. It wasn’t unpacked. You don’t have a Romans 3 here because you’re on the wrong side of the resurrection, but you do have the Bread of Life Discourse, and what I signaled to you earlier about that was that bread dies so we might live.
You do have the good shepherd dying for his sheep, and you do have Caiaphas uttering a prophecy that is far more significant than what Caiaphas thinks. You do have Jesus, the Lamb of God, and you do have the serpent brought up on a pole. It’s there again and again and again, and it takes a certain kind of spiritual blindness to see the obvious. It’s obvious not because we’re evangelicals and talk about those things but because the plotline of John moves to the cross, doesn’t it? On the very face of it, that’s where the story is going.
To say, therefore, the cross is not important or the cross is merely a revelatory event or something … “All we need is a theophany for that.” But tell Forestell that in his book, The Word of the Cross … He’s just plain wrong! People say similar things about Matthew. “Matthew’s really interested in law. Luke is really interested in discipleship and fulfilling the Old Testament. Mark? Goodness knows what he’s fulfilled in, but it certainly isn’t the cross.”
Likewise, that is where contemporary scholarship is going. Don’t believe it. Don’t hesitate to disagree with commentators. We’re usually wrong. Collectively, I mean. What, then, is the obvious movement of thought in each book? That is the question to ask. Keep the big picture at hand all the time.
I have to say, sometimes it’s people who are well trained in Greek and Hebrew who lose that, precisely because we’re so focused on understanding the text fairly and carefully, which we must do. It takes so much energy to look up all the Greek words and make sure we understand the syntax and read the commentaries and so on, that we focus so narrowly. Not only have we lost the wood for the trees; we’re now focusing on the third knot of the fourth branch of the fifth elm from the right and lost the whole forest.
You cannot do that in narrative material, and the Gospels, after all, are narrative material. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be doing that exegesis. The best of you will, but you have to keep the bigger picture in mind as well. Work very hard at relating pericope to the larger chunks and the larger chunks to the entire gospel. Work very hard at that.
2. Whenever they were written (at whatever date you think the Gospels were written), the storyline related by each gospel is located between the Old Testament and the post-Easter church.
That is to say, it’s a story about Jesus. You think, “Don, good grief! That’s so obvious. What on earth do you have to tell me that for?”
The reason I have to tell you that is because, if you’ve been reading much contemporary literature, that’s not the impression you get. You see, these books (we are told again and again and again) are really reflections of what is going on in the community, so John’s gospel is ostensibly about Jesus, but what’s really going on is the conflict between the church and the synagogue.
Therefore, what lessons you draw from John’s gospel have very little to do with what it says about Jesus. They’re just sort of stories and the accuracy isn’t very good and historicity is a bit low and the language is wrong. What it’s really talking about is conflict between church and synagogues, so we reconstruct the church/synagogue conflict and out of that we preach our message.
I would want to argue on both historical grounds and literary grounds that is just really weak scholarship, however faddish it is. For a start, it belongs to that sort of now aged and dying form of historical critical exegesis that is no longer reading the text. What it’s doing is reconstructing something behind the text and preaching the reconstruction.
There was a whole period of “biblical theology” that didn’t do any biblical theology at all. What it really did was reconstruct things. The texts were only witnesses to what really happened and what really happened the scholars have told you about. Then you preach what the scholars have told you really happened behind what the texts say. That’s coming to an end for one reason or another. There are still people doing it, of course, but it’s bad history.
Suppose somebody in Australia were to write an extremely important book on the history of World War II 50 years after, and you interviewed as many witnesses from the war as you possibly could and you tried to draw some moral lessons from it. That is less likely today because you’re not allowed to do that in a postmodern world, but suppose you tried to write a book on World War II and draw some lessons from it.
Then suppose somebody else in Australia wrote a book on World War II during the 1950s. Clearly, if you compared those two books (one written on World War II with the same level of scholarship more or less as the one written on World War II by someone three and a half decades later), the books would have, in fact, different emphases, different tones. One is written before Vietnam. One is written a little closer to the events.
The 50s for most Western nations were somewhat triumphalistic, yet, at the same time under the fear of nuclear warfare, but now when you write a book about World War II, you’re this side of Vietnam. The Cold War is more or less dead. Lots of regional conflicts, but there is more despair set in. There’s less triumphalism but more angst. The books would be different. They’d have different stances, and you could reconstruct very carefully at least a little bit about where their authors are, especially if you know what the history of that period is in great detail.
But now, you’re someone who is from Mars. You don’t know anything about earth life except you have this marvelous little machine that understands their language and you can talk to people and read their books very quickly, but you don’t know anything about human history. You arrive here, and you pick up these two books on World War II. You say, “I’d like to know something of the history,” so you read that one and you read that one. What could you reconstruct of the history of the authors from such an experience?
The answer is not much or a great deal, but it would be wrong. You could draw some correct inferences. One is writing out of a context where there is a little more triumphalism around; the other one is writing out of a context where they’ve been through some hard knocks. One is writing with more freedom, and one with a bit of angst. One is writing with more access to direct witnesses; one is writing a little further removed. In both cases, surely, the primary interest would be on World War II.
Surely, if this person from Mars were looking at the book, they’d want to say, “These are two very interesting books about World War II. I’ve learned a great deal about World War II. One focuses a few more on sea battles (the Battle of Leyte Gulf and so on) and others are focusing a little more on the Battle of the Bulge and what happened at the Ardennes breakthrough and so on but they both refer to the same things in similar chronology and what they’re doing. Yes, yes, they’re talking bout the same thing, and I know more about World War II.” He’s not likely to say, “I know more about the dirty 60s.”
Somehow New Testament scholarship in all of its great wisdom wants to read the Gospels basically as means by which you reconstruct the history of the early church even though we have virtually no other access to that history except New Testament documents. Not the earliest period. By the sub-apostolic period you’re beginning to get other sources. We don’t have any other sources.
Although I’m the first to want to argue that Matthew doesn’t sound exactly like Mark and Mark doesn’t sound like John, you can draw some careful inferences if you’re very cautious and humble about the whole thing about what kinds of communities they were in and what kind of slants they were pressed by and what kinds of agendas were on their tables. Yes you can. You cannot reconstruct the early history of the church from the Gospels, at least not responsibly.
In any case, that’s not what the Gospels are for. It’s not what they’re about. The Gospels are about Jesus. What I want to encourage you to do by going over these points that will be obvious to some of you and maybe threatening to others is regain confidence in the Gospels. Use the Gospels to preach Jesus. That’s what they were written for. Use the Gospels to preach Jesus. It seems so obvious, but it’s something our generation has somehow lost.
3. With these first two points in mind, it is critically important to see what the Gospels are focused on and what we must preach is Jesus, his teaching, his works, his authority, his purpose, his identity, his relationship to the Old Testament, his relationship to the church, his death, his resurrection, his significance, and his character.
That’s what you must preach. That is what you should be after. Not only the character of the early church but such themes as discipleship, the nature of faith, us, conflict between church and synagogue, and the like. There are huge tomes, learned dissertations, popular books on the theme of discipleship in Mark.
Give me a break! You can say something about the theme of discipleship in Mark, but there is no way Mark wrote his book primarily to talk about the theme of discipleship. He wrote his book to talk about Jesus. There is no theme of discipleship in Mark abstracted from what he says about Jesus, so if you want to talk about discipleship in Mark, it must be subsumed under the main plotline, which is all about Jesus. In that framework, you may say something about discipleship in Mark, but only in that framework.
Endless treatments on the law in Matthew and almost none of them say anything about the plotline that takes you to Jesus and the cross, and that’s why almost all of them are horribly skewed. They have good insights on this passage or that passage, but they’re lost. They’re not reading what’s obvious.
Some of us from sort of “evanjelly” background do something similar when every time we come to a gospel we make it into a nice little pious potpourri. We come to Peter walking on the water, and the whole point of the exercise is, “You can do anything if you have faith, and if you lose it, you sink,” or something like that, but nothing about Jesus. Something about the storms of life … We have to make an application, don’t we? We don’t normally walk on water, but we do have storms, in a metaphorical manner of speaking.
Somehow we don’t ask what the pericope is doing in its context or what it says about Jesus. You have whole streaks of interactions between Jesus and what’s going on all around him and things they’re talking about, but in every case the lesson is, “Some believed in him, and you should, too.” The primary lesson in sermon after sermon after sermon in evangeli-land is, in fact, very subjective, very individualistic, and is really talking about faith, but it’s not talking about Jesus!
We talk about how you come to Jesus and we talk about how you get your faith and what faith is based on and what discipleship looks like, but you don’t talk about Jesus! It’s not that everything you say is wrong; it’s that the focus is wrong. The Gospels are about Jesus and who he is and what he says and what he does and why he came … his death, burial, and resurrection.
Within that framework, I still want to say you can say something intelligent from the Gospels about faith and about discipleship and about exorcism and about all these other things, so long as in sermon after sermon after sermon that is subsumed under the dominant, driving, impassioned concern to preach Christ and Christ crucified. I just cannot make that point strongly enough.
4. The Gospels are often wonderful places for building connections of two sorts: first, with the Old Testament and second, with the later church.
I was going to give you streaks of examples here, but because time is going so quickly I will just have to make a few allusions. You’re preaching from John 2 and Jesus’ words about being the temple. Now you’re into the whole area in which Jesus is the antitype of all kinds of types.
That’s a big theme in John’s gospel. Jesus is the temple. He’s the serpent in the wilderness. He’s the Lamb of God drawn from various Old Testament themes. He’s the Old Testament manna. Jesus in John’s gospel is also the Passover. He’s also the Feast of Lights. Jesus in John’s gospel is the water poured out in the Feast of Lights.
In this connection, then, when you come to something like John 2, you have a wonderful opportunity for explaining a little bit about the background of the temple along the lines I suggested yesterday in terms of the biblical theology with all of these Old Testament connections. Just as you could get at that sort of subject by getting in there from the Prophets or from the foundation of the tabernacle in chapters 32 through 34 of Exodus, so you can get into it from this point. You can move that way if you wish to at that point.
Likewise, in Matthew, chapter 8, for example, you have this pericope I mentioned about the man healed of leprosy who goes to the priests. After that you have the account of the faith of the centurion, about which I shall say nothing. Then you have these words: “When Jesus came into Peter’s house, he saw Peter’s mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever.
He touched her hand and the fever left her, and she got up and began to wait on him. When evening came, many who were demon-possessed were brought to him, and he drove out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick. This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah: ‘He took up our infirmities and carried our diseases.’ ”
When I wrote my commentary on Matthew for the Expositor’s series, I spent hours (probably days) reading, studying, thinking that one through, trying to understand what it meant, for the truth of the matter is several of the Gospels (Matthew and Luke, in particular) are loaded for bear with these connections with the Old Testament. Some of them are not easy. “Out of Egypt have I called my son.” I spent a long time working on that one.
What does this mean? Most of us think, for example, Isaiah 53 is primarily about Jesus dying for our sins. “He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities.” When it says he bore our infirmities and carried our sicknesses, if you read the context of Isaiah 53, surely it is in the context of using sin and sickness metaphorically for bearing all of our lostness rather than healing us. Yet here, it’s connected with healings done in the passage.
Then, of course, we carry our baggage, too, today. Huge questions running around the church. “Is there healing in the atonement?” Some people say, “Yes,” and, therefore, think you must be healed or there’s something wrong with you. Other people say, “No, there’s no healing in the atonement. You get your sins forgiven. That’s it.” Well, I had already worked through that one. I had come to the settled conclusion that there’s healing in the atonement, all right. There’s also a resurrection body in the atonement. It just doesn’t mean you get it … yet.
In other words, everything we get from God that’s good is connected theologically and biblically in one way or the other to the atonement, but just because it’s in the atonement doesn’t mean you can claim it as your right right now. You may get a healing and you may not, but you’re not going to get the resurrection body right now. I’ll tell you that right now! If I could, I’d put in for one.
What does it mean here, then? It took me a while to work it through, and I came to the conclusion (I’m still convinced it’s right) that Jesus sees his healing miracles as themselves the product, the outflow of the cross work still to come. That is, the miracles were not simply displays of power, although they were that. They were not simply acts of compassion, though they were that.
They were the preliminary fulfillment of what will take place, finally, on the last day: perfect health, perfect resurrection holiness, and wholeness secured by the cross work. The kingdom was in-breaking. It was a sign that the kingdom was dawning because of the cross work still to come, and it was in that sense it was fulfilling Isaiah 53.
Once you see that, you can tie it with all kinds of things in the gospel of Matthew, and you’re driving to the cross. Do you see? John 3:5. The new birth. You must see that eventually, I think, tied to Ezekiel 36, and if so, you’re into the whole new covenant/old covenant theme with massive structures borne along. I preached that this morning in a context in which I assumed the people knew very little. If I were preaching that at a preacher’s conference, to coin a phrase, then I might have unpacked that far differently.
If I had been explaining that passage in a context where I was trying to create biblical theology, I would have spent far more time showing the way that passage is tied to Jeremiah 31, which doesn’t mention the Spirit just the same, and the way it’s tied to Zechariah and the way it’s tied to Zephaniah and the way it’s tied to Joel and the way it’s tied to new covenant languages at the time of the Eucharist and so on.
There are connections there that are inner-canonical. The Gospels are often very good places (precisely because there are all of these allusions back to the Old Testament) for making those connections back. They do it in different ways, Matthew and Luke often by direct explicit quotation.
John has fewer quotations but more allusions. They’re a little subtler and harder to tease out, but they’re there. One of the reasons why I’m convinced John’s gospel was written for people who knew the Old Testament is because there’s so much of John’s gospel that really can’t be understood unless you know the Old Testament.
Either he was writing for people who knew the Old Testament or he was stupid, because you don’t make all those sorts of allusions to things that can’t possibly be understood unless people have that kind of common background knowledge with you. Since I assume the apostle of love was not stupid, I’m driven to the conclusion that he was writing, instead, for people who had that kind of knowledge, that kind of background.
At the same time, the Gospels are very useful, as well, for making connections with the later church. One of the things the Gospels are doing is telling you how we got from there to here. There is this Old Testament Bible we’re using. How do we get from there to here? One of the things the Gospels are doing in their function in the early church is making that connection: how we got from there to here.
Not only, therefore, is this important for notions of unpacking kingdom (where that comes from) and ethics (all this Sermon on the Mount thing) and important also for explaining the historicity of Jesus and what bearing that has, but canonically it’s helping people who are this side of the cross, resurrection, and Pentecost to put their Bibles together and see how it is Jesus who does it.
5. There are structures and themes to preserve that can enhance your preaching.
Let me take but one example, and then we’ll pass. There are many, many structures in the Gospels that need careful delineations. Some writers find structures, I think, where there aren’t any, but some structures are so bold they stand out and hit you when you start looking.
For example, in Matthew’s gospel, the principle discourses are framed by expressions like we find in the Sermon on the Mount. “Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them, saying …” Then at the end, “When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching.” That kind of frame of the discourses is very common.
You don’t get that in Luke. In Luke, you have many, many more independent sayings that are put down in topical array ordered by the evangelist himself. When you get to the Sermon on the Mount, quite apart from what you do with the Beatitudes at the beginning and the salt and light and that sort of thing, you come to this massive section (chapter 5, verses 17 to 20) which clearly is controlling all the antithesis in chapter 5.
“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,” and so on. That whole paragraph. Then when you get to the end of the Sermon on the Mount, before you have the final antitheses, building on the sand versus building on rock, and so on and so on … (You have four of those antitheses.)
Before you get there, you get chapter 7, verse 12: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” You have an inclusio. That is, at the beginning and at the end of the body, you have this reference to the Law and the Prophets and how Jesus and how his Word and works and so on sum up that whole thing.
If you think this is an accidental thing in Matthew, it crops up a little later in the passage we also looked at on the first day, Luke, chapter 16. “The Law and the Prophets prophesied until John. From that time the kingdom of God is preached.” One of the dominant themes in Matthew and, indeed, of the Sermon on the Mount, is the Law and the Prophets as the corpus of God’s truth now being fulfilled in Jesus and his teaching and preaching ministry.
You can’t read the Sermon on the Mount responsibly without seeing the main body of the Sermon on the Mount is bracketed by that theme. In fact, the introduction and the conclusion both lend into it, and the structures internally all have to do with it. Instead of treating the Sermon on the Mount, then, as sort of nice, pious sayings to encourage people to be good boys and girls, in fact, although there’s all of this powerful ethical injunction, it is tied at the same time to massive structures about how your whole Bible comes together.
You see these things most clearly once you discern the literary structures of the Sermon on the Mount that are actually there in the text under your nose. Structures.
