The Sermon on the Mount and the Plain

Overview

A six-week study of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) read alongside the Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:17–49), one teaching preserved by two witnesses.

Both accounts open the same way: Jesus goes up a mountain, sits down, and teaches. It is the shape of Sinai, and on purpose. This time the one speaking stands where the LORD stood. At Sinai, Moses went up and received the law. Here, Jesus goes up and gives it, on His own authority: “You have heard that it was said… but I say to you.” Moses received. Jesus gives. That difference is the study’s focus.

Each week takes one movement of the sermon with five daily readings and a discussion guide.

Matthew and Luke: Witness or Editor?

Luke says up front how he worked, in the only Gospel preface that names a method at all. “Many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses… it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account” (Luke 1:1-4). Luke was not one of the Twelve. He records their selection just before the sermon (Luke 6:12-16) without placing himself in the list, and Colossians 4:10-14 sets him apart from “the circumcision,” the label Paul uses there for Jewish believers, which makes Luke very likely a Gentile. He was a physician (Colossians 4:14) and a longtime companion of Paul (Philemon 24; 2 Timothy 4:11), and the “we” sections of Acts, along with the two years Paul spent imprisoned at Caesarea (Acts 24:27), put Luke in Judea with time and access to interview people who had actually been on the mountain. Luke’s sermon is secondhand by his own account, and carefully sourced secondhand, gathered from people who were there while some of them were presumably still alive to be asked.

Matthew’s position is the opposite. Before he was an apostle he was a tax collector at Capernaum, called from his booth in the same scene the other Gospels record under his other name, Levi (Matthew 9:9; Mark 2:14; Luke 5:27). All three lists of the Twelve name him “Matthew the tax collector” (Matthew 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:15), and Luke’s own sequence has Jesus choosing the Twelve the night before the sermon and coming down to preach it the next day (Luke 6:12-17). If that order holds, and if the tax collector and the apostle are the same man, which nearly every ancient and modern reader agrees on, Matthew was already a disciple and already close enough to sit among the men who “came to him” when Jesus sat down on the mountain (Matthew 5:1). Papias, writing in the early second century and preserved by the church historian Eusebius, credits Matthew directly with compiling a record of Jesus’ sayings, which fits a man who had heard them firsthand. Matthew’s sermon is not an interview. It is a memory.

That difference is the reason two accounts are worth reading side by side rather than flattened into one. Matthew gives the fuller, more Jewish version because he was there and wrote for readers who needed the legal argument spelled out in full. Luke gives the shorter version because he was reconstructing it from witnesses and wrote for readers who needed the point more than the case law. Neither is the edited-down copy of the other. They are two honest records made two different ways, and they agree on everything that matters.

The Same Words, Other Voices

Matthew and Luke are not the only New Testament writers who show they knew this sermon. Its language surfaces again in books written by men who either heard it themselves or grew up in a church still repeating it.

James, who grew up in the same house as Jesus and did not believe in Him until after the resurrection (John 7:5; 1 Corinthians 15:7), echoes the sermon more than any New Testament writer outside the Gospels. Peter, who was there for at least the Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:14), quotes the beatitudes back at his own readers decades later. And Paul, who almost never quotes Jesus directly, breaks that habit exactly here, on enemies and on divorce, the two teachings in the sermon hardest to obey. The pattern argues something without needing to state it outright: this was not a sermon people admired once and moved on from. It was a sermon the whole New Testament kept reaching back for.

What You Will Study

How to Use This Study

See How to Use for practical guidance on working through this study individually or with a group.

Study Documents

• How to Use
• Journaling