Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The fifth Sunday of Lent, March 22, 2026

Deuteronomy 7:7-11
Matthew 7:13-29

‘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.’

After eight weeks, we have now reached the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ authoritative interpretation of the law and the prophets. Last week finished the content of Jesus’ teaching; having heard the whole Sermon, we now have Jesus warning us to act on what we have heard. We are to choose the narrow gate and the hard road, not the wide gate and the easy road. We are to be good trees bearing good fruit, not bad trees bearing bad fruit. We are to do the will of Jesus’ Father, not simply religious deeds of power. And we are to build the houses of our lives on rock, not on sand. Jesus’ teaching ends as it begins, warning us that unless our righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, we will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

The church has always struggled with the Sermon because its commands seem to so obviously exceed our capacity, or even our desire, to obey them. The Sermon is a test for the Christian community; are we what we claim to be? It is not enough, Jesus warns us, to merely listen to his words or even to repeat them in prayer, song, and preaching, without acting upon them. We can have the most beautiful rituals, the most orthodox beliefs, we can study theology or stand at Flinders Street reciting the Bible into a microphone, but if we are not embodying the will of Jesus’ Father, we have not heard what Jesus has been saying on the Mountain. As John Wesley wrote:

‘One may be orthodox in every point, and may not only espouse right opinions, but zealously defend them against all opponents; that one may think justly concerning the incarnation of our Lord, concerning the ever-blessed Trinity, and every other doctrine contained in the oracles of God. That one may consent to all the creeds called the Apostles,’ the Nicene, and the Athanasian and yet ’tis possible that one may have no religion at all.’[1]

Not even charismatic deeds of power like prophesying and casting out demons in Jesus’ name will make us citizens of the kingdom of heaven.

It is impossible to read this part of Jesus’ first significant block of teaching in the Gospel according to Matthew without thinking about the prophecy of the great Judgement that ends Jesus’ last significant block of teaching. There we are warned that at the end of time the Son of Man ‘will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats’ based on whether they have fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, taken care of the sick, or visited those in prison. That prophecy is terrifying enough; today’s warning is even worse. I, for one, have no problem feeding the hungry and giving drink to the thirsty; I have more problems with loving my enemies and praying for those who persecute me; I seldom manage to refrain from saying ‘You fool’ to a brother or sister, which, according to this Sermon, means that I am liable to the hell of fire. (I have mentioned to funeral directors when chatting before services that the euphemism that will be used at my funeral is, ‘She did not suffer fools gladly.’) As I have said before during this series, there will have been parts of the Sermon that you find easy to follow, and parts that you find difficult, which is why we all need to take the beam out of our own eyes before removing the splinter from the eye of another.

Through this series, I have been pairing readings from the Sermon on the Mount with readings from the Torah. At the beginning of the Sermon, Jesus said that he had not come to abolish the law or the prophets, but to fulfil them. We often listen to the prophets in Christian churches, but we ignore whole swathes of the law not considered relevant to the Christian faith. But we cannot understand what Jesus’ fulfilling of the law and the prophets means if we do not know which parts of the law he is reinforcing and which he is challenging. In today’s reading, Jesus ends his Sermon in the same way that Moses ended the giving of the Torah: by offering a choice between life and death. At the end of the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses tells the Israelites:

See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death, and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. (Deuteronomy 30:15-18)

If the people of Israel obey the Torah, they will live long and prosper in the land the Lord gives them. Historically, the Book of Deuteronomy was constructed after the people of Israel had returned from the Babylonian Exile, and its underlying theme is that the Exile had happened because the people had failed to obey the commandments of the Lord. Without accepting that framing, that the people of Israel had brought the Exile on themselves, we can see that the choice between life and death that Moses offers the Israelites is a choice for this world and this life, between prosperity and adversity. That is not the choice Jesus is offering his followers at the end of his Sermon.

Whether we build our houses on rock or on sand, we face the same risks: the rain falls, the floods rise, the winds blow. Jesus does not promise that if we hear and act on his words, we will escape the dangers that others face. What he promises is that when dangers come, as they come in every life, we will be able to endure. Discipleship is not easy; following Jesus does not promise anyone an easy life, or numerous offspring, or landed prosperity. In fact, following Jesus might be the very thing that leads to our houses being battered by rain, floods, and wind.

Turning the other cheek and walking the extra mile in a world that demands retaliation will not gain us any friends. Whenever a nation is under attack or goes to war, there is a ‘rally round the flag’ effect. Christians who refuse to rally, to claim that their nation is always right and their nation’s enemies are always wrong, have never been popular. But Christians do not get to say, ‘my country, right or wrong’. As the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sir William Temple, said during World War Two, ‘The spirit in which we fight matters more than our winning. If we go Nazi and then win, it will be the same for the world as if the Nazis win.’[2] Christians do not support the actions of our allies and our nation just because they are our allies and our nation, and that refusal has never led to popularity.

Loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us may have those around us claiming that we are not paying due attention to evil, that it is immoral to forgive those who have committed appalling abuses of human rights. When I visited the Melbourne Holocaust Museum as a law student, one of the other students, braver than I, asked our guide whether she had forgiven the Nazis. She said that it was not her place to forgive because she had survived when so many had been murdered, and she could not forgive on behalf of the dead. She did not say whether she had forgiven them on her own behalf. I have remembered that conversation for more than twenty years because, while I am aware of my privilege in never being confronted with that dilemma, I suspect that I know what would be expected of me if I had experienced such a crime. Jesus, who forgave his persecutors on the cross, would want me to forgive, too. And, as theologian Miroslav Volf writes, ‘Only those who are forgiven and who are willing to forgive will be capable of relentlessly pursuing justice without falling into the temptation to pervert it into injustice.’[3] But to those who are not seeking to follow Jesus’ example, forgiving the perpetrators of injustice often looks like acquiescing in injustice.

‘The crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority.’ The church has always struggled with the Sermon and found ways to limit its demands to special groups of Christians, or to the end of time, but Jesus is not asking anything of us that he does not demonstrate himself. He is not only the authoritative interpreter of the law and the prophets; he is the one who demonstrates what that truly means in his life and death. Jesus shows us how to follow his Way: by placing God at the centre of our lives, loving and forgiving one another as God has loved and forgiven us. We are called to be the light of the world and the salt of the earth not in our own power, but in relationship with the God who feeds the birds of the air, clothes the lilies of the field, and loves his enemies all the way to the cross. At a time when the ostensibly Christian Secretary of War of the United States of America has quoted Psalm 144, “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle,” in a Pentagon Press Conference it is more important than ever to say that the Sermon on the Mount is no utopian hope or airy-fairy dream. It is the way all Christians are called to live, to the best of our ability.

The Sermon on the Mount is the constitution of the kingdom of heaven. We, who are citizens of the kingdom through God’s grace, will be hypocrites if we do not seek to live out the Sermon. We are going to fail, of course, because we are human beings, but as one of the commentators I read this week says, ‘Our faithful response may be squared with the imperfections of our obedience. But with our calculated, flagrant, and continued disobedience? Never!’[4] As the world becomes louder, angrier, and more dangerous, let us continue to seek to live as citizens of the kingdom of heaven, with our houses built on the rock. Amen.

[1] John Wesley quoted by Jason Byassee in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 1 (2010), p. 428.

[2] Canon A. E. Baker, William Temple and His Message, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946) p. 134.

[3] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), p. 123.

[4] W. Clyde Tilley, ‘Matthew 7:13-27,’ p. 278.