All Episodes
Displaying 1 - 30 of 83 in total
Episode 1: Inauguration
The Sermon on the Mount, found in chapters 5 through 7 of the gospel of Matthew, contains some of the best-known and most challenging teaching of Jesus. In it, he teac...
Episode 2: The kingdom is at hand
In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus’ sermon about the kingdom of heaven doesn’t appear out of nowhere. Matthew tells the story of Jesus in such a way that the kingdom is the th...
Episode 3: Bookends… and everything between
The Sermon on the Mount contains multiple references to the kingdom of heaven. From that alone, one might see that the kingdom is the central theme. But there’s anothe...
Episode 4: You call that “blessed”?
The sermon opens with a set of “beatitudes” or statements about blessing. But what Jesus says about people who can be counted as “blessed” may seem odd—he describes th...
Episode 5: The haves and the have-nots
To understand the so-called “Beatitudes,” it’s helpful to read them alongside the similar statements of both blessing and woe that we find in Luke 6. Old Testament sch...
Episode 6: A humble hope
Remember the idea of bookends? Even the Beatitudes have their own bookends. These bookends let us know that the Beatitudes themselves have the kingdom of heaven as the...
Episode 7: Then how should we live?
As we’ll see as we go through our study of the sermon, Jesus is teaching his hearers about the nature of true righteousness. This is reminiscent of the Old Testament p...
Episode 8: Agents of shalom
The first half of the Beatitudes declare a truth that anyone familiar with the Old Testament already knows: God is the champion of the poor and needy. Things aren’t as...
Episode 9: Blessed are the merciful
In the Beatitudes, Jesus teaches that the “merciful” are blessed. A righteous person is also a forgiving person, as we will see in Jesus’ parable of the unmerciful ser...
Episode 10: A pure heart
Jesus says that the “pure in heart” are blessed. His words are reminiscent of Psalm 51, in which David repents of his sin with Bathsheba. But it’s not necessarily just...
Episode 11: Making peace
What does Jesus mean when he says "Blessed are the peacemakers"? As we’ll explore in this episode, we might understand God to be reclaiming the world from the brokenne...
Episode 12: Delighting in weakness
Perhaps the most striking and counterintuitive of the Beatitudes is Jesus’ statement that those who are persecuted for righteousness and their allegiance to Jesus shou...
Episode 13: Salt of the earth
You may have friends or relatives that you think of as "salt of the earth" kind of people. It’s meant as a compliment, to say that they’re honest, trustworthy, and so ...
Episode 14: The light of the world
The gospels, especially the gospel of John, portray the world as a place darkened by sin. And in John’s gospel, Jesus will declare himself to be the light of the world...
Episode 15: Everything written must be fulfilled
In the gospels, Jesus had argument after argument with the Pharisees. They were respected as the interpreters of God’s Law, but their teaching had led the people away ...
Episode 16: How righteous is righteous?
Before Jesus could teach the true nature of righteousness, he had to reassure his hearers that his teaching upheld God’s law—and he expected his hearers to be obedient...
Episode 17: Asking the impossible?
When it came to following the Law, some folks probably thought they were doing as well as could reasonably be expected for someone who hadn't been trained as a Pharise...
Episode 18: First things first
Jesus unsettled his hearers with the idea that the heart of the commandment against murder was about unrestrained anger. You would think that what he would say next is...
Episode 19: Making friends of enemies
One of Jesus’ examples about the need for reconciliation describes a person being taken to court for an unpaid debt. He says nothing about the legal merits of the case...
Episode 20: Thou shalt not covet (part 1)
In the Ten Commandments, God’s people are forbidden to commit adultery. Yet even someone with as legendary a reputation as King David was guilty of that sin. In this e...
Episode 21: Thou shalt not covet (part 2)
We live in a world dominated by electronic devices. Through them, marketers and advertisers continually manipulate our desires. And while we may consider ourselves inn...
Episode 22: Radical sacrifice
What does it mean to be a faithful Christian? How high does Jesus set the bar for true righteousness? Jesus has already taught the commandment against adultery in a wa...
Episode 23: What about divorce?
In our world, divorce is commonplace, even among Christians. Not surprisingly, then, Jesus’ teaching about divorce is controversial. In this episode and the next, we’l...
Episode 24: Hardness of heart
The rabbis of Jesus’ day had different views about divorce, and some of the teaching gave men a tremendous amount of power and freedom in ridding themselves of their w...
Episode 25: I mean it, I swear!
Have you ever heard someone swear “on a stack of Bibles” that what they were saying was true? Or have you heard someone say, “I swear to God”? Verbal formulas like the...
Episode 26: Say what you mean, mean what you say
Many of us have suffered from broken promises—or from the violation of what we took to be a promise. The Law of Moses required people to fulfill their oaths, but the l...
Episode 27: Justice or mercy?
The idea of an “eye for an eye” kind of justice is an ancient one, found even in the Law of Moses. And the principle may make intuitive sense: if you hurt me, I get to...
Episode 28: Don’t retaliate
An eye-for-eye kind of retaliation may seem fair, but in his teaching about righteousness, Jesus calls his hearers to something higher. He asks them to forgo retaliati...
Episode 29: Move the needle
Have you ever been attacked in a way you felt was undeserved? Everyone should have the right to be treated with fairness and justice, and one day God’s justice will re...
Episode 30: Us and them
Research has demonstrated again and again how easily humans form in-groups and out-groups, and the Pharisees seem to have reinforced that tendency with their teaching,...