Sermon on the Mount (Page 3)
Rome’s own theology of fasting gets direct scrutiny here, including how readily it mixes revelation with tradition until the two become hard to distinguish. Catholic penance, in particular, is charged with obscuring what Christ’s death on the cross already accomplished. A proper Protestant view of fasting has to be cleared of that obscuring layer first.
God genuinely leads his people into trial and temptation, this sermon insists, without leading them into sin itself, a distinction the seventh petition depends on. The ‘evil’ in view there is identified specifically as apostasy, a sin the modern church has largely forgotten to name. Christ himself, tested in Gethsemane, is what actually keeps believers from sinning inside their own trials.
The fifth petition, on forgiveness, dominates the Lord’s Prayer more than its brief wording suggests, containing Christ’s entire ministry compressed into a single request. Its shock value stays fully intact here; forgiving as we’ve been forgiven is grounded in the covenantal grace of union with Christ rather than in willpower. Matthew 18’s parable of the unforgiving servant supplies the warning against missing that grounding.
The manna story in Exodus 16 supplies the actual heart of the fourth petition’s daily bread, a connection this sermon says the catechisms have never adequately drawn out. ‘Give us today tomorrow’s bread’ captures the petition’s real, startling shape. Christ himself, as the eternal Sabbath bread, is what the petition has actually been asking for all along.
The third petition, ‘thy kingdom come,’ usually gets approached two ways, personal holiness or world renewal, and this sermon sets both aside in favor of God’s own work alone as the real focus, drawing on Isaiah 65 and Revelation 21. Real prayer, on this account, has to start with the end already accomplished rather than build toward it. What God does, rather than what we resolve to do, is where the third petition actually rests.
The Lord’s Prayer’s first three petitions, this sermon argues, are already answered by Christ’s own righteousness on believers’ behalf, no longer left as unfulfilled requests. The cross’s significance is pressed directly into that answer rather than treated separately. God delivers his people from their own cross the same way he delivered Christ from his, through resurrection rather than exemption.
The first petition of the Lord’s Prayer gets careful definition by what it is not, as much as by what it is, with Ezekiel 36’s promise of a name vindicated among the nations supplying real eschatological weight. Already and not-yet governs this petition the same way it governs the rest of the sermon. Those who genuinely pray for God’s name to be hallowed, the sermon promises, will themselves stand in the day of his coming.
‘Our Father in heaven’ raises a real question about what ‘in heaven’ actually means, a question Bultmann answers one way and this sermon answers quite differently. God remains genuinely transcendent even while becoming newly accessible, a paradox Romans 8’s language of adoption is meant to hold together rather than resolve. Christ’s own Sonship is the hinge that makes that access possible at all.
God’s Fatherhood, addressed corporately in the Lord’s Prayer’s ‘our Father,’ is not a private possession of the individual believer but a shared one. Three specific means of grace are identified as the ordinary channels through which that Fatherhood reaches his people. Galatians 4:7 makes the astonishing claim explicit: in Christ’s coming, God himself becomes the inheritance his adopted children actually receive.
Christ’s coming does far more than permit prayer; it gives believers a genuinely new obedience, exercised through him rather than achieved independently. Three specific ways Christ has brought about a new covenant are traced through the Lord’s Prayer itself. What that prayer actually teaches, on this reading, is inseparable from what the new covenant has already accomplished.