“…the weightier matters of the law are justice, mercy, and faithfulness.”
– Jesus (Matthew 23:23)
Christian traditions often have primary books and passages they emphasize in their teaching and ministry. For example, Dispensationalist traditions gravitates toward apocalyptic books and passages, which they believe are coded with predictions about the future. They center books and passages like Revelation, Daniel, and Matthew chapter 24. Another example is the Pentecostal tradition, which gravitates toward the book of Acts and to passages about spiritual gifts like First Corinthians chapter 12. Or, for yet another example, the Lutheran tradition gravitates toward the books of Romans and Galatians, which to them teach on justification by faith.
For Moravians, and other historic Peace Churches like Anabaptists, the bullseye of Christian teaching is the Sermon on the Mount. It’s the Center of Gravity.
The Holy Scriptures contain the revelation of God’s redemptive history—the inspired story of God’s covenant with God’s people. That’s the outer circle of the bullseye. That story climaxes in the story of Jesus in the four Gospels in the New Testament. Those are the two next inner circles. Then, the central theme of the Gospels is God’s in-breaking Kin(g)dom that is arriving and has now arrived in and through Jesus the Messiah. The core of that message is the Sermon on the Mount.
Here is how the Sermon on the Mount is introduced in Matthew:
Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them. Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him. Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them.
The Sermon on the Mount is the summary of Jesus’s core teachings about the Kin(g)dom of God that he declared and demonstrated as he traveled around first-century Judea-Palestine. If we think of Jesus’s ministry as a messianic campaign, calling disciples to join him in his redemptive mission, then the Sermon on the Mount was his “stump speech.”
Not only is the Sermon on the Mount the “center of gravity” for Christians because of the centrality of its message to Jesus’s life and ministry. It’s also the “center of gravity” because it prevents us from the imbalances of either Legalism on the one side or Cheap Grace on the other. The Sermon on the Mount invites Jesus’s disciples into a vision of the Kin(g)dom that expresses God’s love through works of faith in the power of the Spirit.
Join us as we explore this powerful and central set of passages this year!