Sermon on the Plains

“He went down with them and stood on a level place. A large crowd of his disciples was there and a great number of people from all over Judea, from Jerusalem, and from the coastal region around Tyre and Sidon, who had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases. Those troubled by impure spirits were cured, and the people all tried to touch him, because power was coming from him and healing them all (Luke 6:17-19).”

Having finished the Sermon on the Mount, let’s examine Luke’s Sermon on the Plains.  Some struggle to explain how Matthew or Luke could have remembered so precisely a sermon Jesus had given forty years before.  For example, in the episode of the Chosen where Jesus is preparing for the Sermon, Matthew helps Jesus craft the speech, writing it down for him, but Matthew did not become a disciple until after the Sermon.  

After spending the last two months on the Sermon on the Mount, I hope you will agree that it is not just a collection of sayings, but a coherent sermon with a definitive point: obeying the Law is not enough.  We need to strive for perfection.  We do so with humble and contrite hearts, through the power of the Holy Spirit and through constantly working to rid our lives of hypocrisy and judgmentalism.

How did the text for these sermons get captured so accurately?  Many suggest that people had better memories in the days before recording equipment.  As well, a public figure in older times often gave the same speech more than once.  When Davy Crockett was running for congress, he and his opponent went from town to town and gave the same speech in each town, so much so that once, Crockett gave his opponent’s speech for him, word for word.  It seems possible, even likely, that Jesus gave this sermon more than once.  And if that is so, like any great preacher, he could have had different points he could drive home by altering some of the language.  So on the one hand, I am convinced Matthew and Luke are capturing completely different events, on the other hand, it seems likely to me that the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plains are variations on a theme.  

I do not want to discount the work of the Holy Spirit in helping ensure the text is correct by any means!  If Moses could capture the Creation account so precisely (another blog series perhaps) many thousands or millions of years later, I am sure that Matthew and Luke got this right as well.  And of course, this speaks to the larger question of the reliability of the Bible.  

I believe the main point of the Sermon on the Plains is very similar to the one in Matthew (“Be perfect as your Father is perfect”) and is captured in Luke 6:36, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”  Considering my last post, you may think I planned it this way, but I assure you I did not.  When I started diving into the Sermon on the Mount back in early December, I wanted to follow that with an exploration of the Sermon on the Plains.  The diversion to Micah was driven by events of the world and was a one-off.  Given that the two main points are identical but for the one word, can we infer that being merciful is a crucial part to chasing perfection.  

I hope you’ll enjoy an in-depth look at the Sermon on the Plains in coming weeks.