The identity of Jesus disclosed in the "antitheses" in the Sermon on the Mount

For many months I was agitated by Albert Schweitzer’s question about Jesus: Who is this figure who stands opaquely behind the creation of a culture that permeated and shaped Western civilization? The search for Jesus’ identity and the source of his convictions and mission are rooted in his humanity and not in some esoteric notions of his divine nature.

In dredging my resources for an answer, I recognized that a starting point had to be his relation to the environing Judaism. This I approached by examining the implications of the Sermon on the Mount.

Was Jesus, especially in the Antitheses, enunciating a New Law binding on those who entered the present and coming Kingdom of God that focused especially on inwardness and unconditional love of the divine demands?

Or, alternatively, did he remain within traditional Judaism and the Mosaic Torah? Is Jesus a new Moses with a new law, or does he fit within the prevailing interpretation of the legal tradition as defined by the leaders among the scribes and the Pharisees?

The answer I now see is rather close at hand. Jesus is a Jew; the formative influences in creating his world and value view are to be found in the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and in the Law and the Prophets.

However, Jesus goes against the stream in his appropriation of this traditional legacy. The Gospels’ display of Jesus’ Messianic identity show him as sovereign authority over his community’s social life in light of the coming and present kingdom. He is a prophetic reformer.

He claims to lay bare the divine will as its meaning is disclosed to him in many of the everyday experiences of the flowers of the field and the birds of the air. He appropriates where he sees fit; innovates where new vision occurred; revises where required. To use a term popular among some literary interpreters, his Messianic authorities allow him to perform a bricolage of God’s moral demands. He does not repudiate the law of Moses; rather he reveals its meaning by selection and interpretation.

But this alienates him from his contemporary scribes and Pharisees who object to his innovative interpretations of their ancestral material.

Moreover, he teaches as one who has authority; he feels he really understands what God intended in Israel’s past and what God will do in the very near future to destroy evil power and inaugurate his kingdom. The religious leaders cannot tolerate Jesus and his radical reformation of the tradition and conspire to bring about his death.

Is this supersession of the law of Moses? In part, yes, because it differs from an undivided loyalty to the Torah. But in another way, no, because it retains its Judaic structure of morality as obedience to God’s law and selects from the repository of Jewish experience whatever demands continue to express God’s will.