Is the Sermon on the Mount only for the end of the world?

Contemporary scholars debate whether Jesus is best understood as a Jewish Cynic – a teacher and healer, practicing eating commensality – a political revolutionary, or as an apocalyptic preacher proclaiming the imminent advent of God’s invincible apocalyptic kingdom.

Long before, Albert Schweitzer had made a case (over against liberal theologians) that Jesus was an apocalypticist whose moral advocacy of an egalitarian ethic of unconditional love and non-resistance is only plausible in light of an imminent end of the present age.

On Schweitzer’s view, the hard sayings of the Sermon on the Mount are aimed at the brief interval between Jesus’ proclamation of God’s imminent kingdom and its actual advent. Only as such are they literally doable.

Jesus’ hard ethical sayings (going a second mile, giving one’s cloak, turning the other cheek, resisting not evil, etc.) are generally well-known even if violated in practice. Most commentators and certainly the practice of the church (from at least Constantine, say 325 CE) did not organize its ongoing social life on this basis; it is an impossible personal ideal – some marginal groups and the Bruderhof notwithstanding.

But, as we noted in Schweitzer’s construction, the rigours of the Sermon on the Mount do not matter if the end of this present age and the unveiling of God’s triumph is close at hand as Jesus believed. It is, as he claimed, an “interim ethic” between now and then. The implication is fairly clear: Jesus’ impossible ethic can and should be followed since the social and political consequences don’t matter in light of the imminent end of this present age and the triumphant and radical apocalyptic advent of God’s new age.

In general terms, I agree with Schweitzer’s view of the “interim ethic.” But now, a caveat. Some readers may judge that I have over-stressed the impracticality and even the impossibility of doing the Sermon on the Mount. It is true that I have emphasized the rigour of these hard sayings. This is because I feel that I have interpreted human history correctly. The record is not great. It is the persistent starving, enslavement and killing that inspires my pessimism about embodying Jesus’ radical ethic of the do-ability of the Sermon on the Mount in everyday social life.