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Citation: Witherington III, Ben. “The Ethics of Jesus Revisited.” 
Keynote presentation at the Wesley Ministry Conference and 
Symposium, Tyndale University College & Seminary, Toronto, 
Ontario, April 24, 2017. Session 2 (MPEG-3, 39:43 min.)

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You. That sounded like good Methodist singing to me. I'm all for it.

John Wesley was deeply concerned about ethics. You don't devote eleven of your standard sermons to the Sermon on the Mount and not get that message across. 44 standard sermons, one fourth of them are on the Sermon on the Mount. Check it out.

John Wesley was not a Calvinist. In fact, he had a lot of arguments with Calvinists, and part of the upshot of that is that he disagreed with them on the function of ethics in the Christian life. If I were to summarize his view, it would be, you're not eternally secure till you're securely in eternity.

And because that is so, you must work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it's God who works within you to will and to do that is salvation is not just about belief. It's also about living out that belief in your behavior. And your behavior matters. It counts. It's part of the sanctification of you.

We have gotten to a pretty squirrely place in the church because while we may have done a pretty good job at preaching our theology and being theologically proper and correct, my granny would say we're in a mel of a Hess in regard to ethics.

And she's right. She's absolutely right. So what I want to do in this and the subsequent sessions is I want us to revisit the ethics of the New Testament, starting with Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and we'll expand from there. But one more cultural thing that you need to understand before we do that is that these ancient cultures were collectivist cultures. They did not favor the modern, radical, narcissistic individualism of late Western culture, whether it be American, Canadian, whatever.

European? Absolutely not. In antiquity, your group identity was primary and your individual identity entirely secondary. Did you notice that people in the Gospels don't have last names? I'm trusting you know that.

Christ is not Jesus's last name, right? Magdalene is not Mary's last name. People don't have last names. The cell phone logs must have been complicated. You know, people were identified by gender, generation and geography.

Jesus was Jesus of Nazareth. Okay? Or you might be identified by a patronymic. Simon is Simon barr Jonah, which means son of Jonah or son of John. But Jesus called him KFOs, which means Rocky.

So his real name was Rocky Johnson.

I'm just saying. But it's a patronymic. He is identified by the group he's a part of. He's part of his father's clan. Jesus is identified by the place he's associated with.

He's from the town of Nazareth. Or you might be identified religiously. Simon the pharisee. Simon the zealot. But again, group identity primary, individual identity secondary.

So when you read the New Testament, please don't put the emphasis on the wrong syllable. It's not about your individual identity. Your salvation is not about your individual identity. Paul puts it this way. In one corinthians twelve y'all.

He was a good Southerner. Y'all have all been baptized into one body by the Holy Spirit. And it's that from that same spirit that we all drink. This is a group identity. Paul never calls a particular individual a Christian.

He says, instead, you are all in Christ, in the body of Christ. Group identity primary. Individual identity secondary. Now, how does this affect the way we look at ethics? Big time?

The ethics of the New Testament are a community ethic. They're not an individual ethic. They're not sort of Don Quixote to dream the impossible, dream to fight the unbeatable foe. No, ethics is not an individual quest for perfection. It never was in the New Testament.

It never is in reality. The ethics of the New Testament are a group ethic for a particular community of faith. And if individuals do not have allegiance to Jesus and that community, you can't simply willynilly impose Christian ethics on them. You have to persuade them that that's the right life.

You have to persuade them that this is the right way to live. The Christian ethic is an ethic of a community, and it requires a community's reinforcement. You're not asked to do this alone. You're doing it together with a group. Keeping that in mind, I want to read you a quote from one of my favorite American authors, John Update.

He says this about the Gospel of Matthew the kingdom is the hope and pain of Christianity. It is attained against the grain, through the denial of instinct and social wisdom, and through faith in the unseen. Using natural metaphors as effortlessly as an author quoting his own works. Jesus disclaims nature and its rules of survival. Did you hear that?

Jesus disclaims nature and its rules of survival. Nature's way obvious and broad, leads to death, says Jesus. This other way is not natural and is difficult. Come in by the narrow gate, says Jesus. Christ's preaching threatens men and women, the virtuous even more than the wicked, with a radical transformation of value, whereby the rich and the pious are damned and harlots and tax collectors are rather more acceptable.

Two worlds are colliding. Amazement prevails. Jesus's healing and preaching go together in the gospel accounts, and his preaching is healing of a sort, for words heal and hurt, especially in an oral culture, for it banishes worldly anxiety. The gospel overthrows common sense and materially verifiable rules that, like the money changers in the temple, dominate the world with their practicality nonsense, says Jesus. Repent the kingdom of God is at hand.

I think that Update is right about most of that. I think it's fair to say that we have learned a lot in New Testament scholarship over the last four or five decades. To demonstrate not only the orality of the New Testament culture, but the strength of oral memory and how important that is, I would recommend one of my good friends books, richard Bachham's Jesus and the eyewitnesses. Terrific book. He's really right, I think.

The four Gospels are grounded in eyewitness testimony, either directly or indirectly, and there is no great chronological Grand Canyon size distance between what we have in the Gospels and what Jesus actually said. It is of course true that each Gospel writer presents Jesus teaching in his own way and with some editing, serving the larger agendas of the Gospel they were writing. Nobody would dispute that, I think. But it doesn't follow from this that we are not dealing with faithful testimonies about the teachings of Jesus well grounded in what the historical Jesus actually said. One of the real deficiencies in an otherwise wonderful book by my old friend Richard Hayes, the moral vision of the New Testament is that he doesn't deal with the ethic of Jesus.

It's unfortunate. John Wesley would have said what? That's not a Methodist thing to do. We need to study the Sermon on the Mount. We have to take into account, of course, the Gospels writers editorial agendas, but we can be very confident that what they are presenting ultimately goes back to Jesus himself, especially when we have traditions recorded in several Gospels that can be compared.

And there's a good reason to do so. If the Gospel writers were to be asked who it was that most influenced their thinking about both theology and ethics, surely they would say Jesus. Arguing that we shouldn't take into account Jesus's thought because he didn't write any New Testament books is rather like arguing that we should ignore the teachings and actions of King David because he didn't write any Old Testament books. Wrong. His shadow is long in the Old Testament, and just for the record, he probably wrote some pretty good songs in the Psalms.

The issue is not so much who wrote what in an oral culture. The issue is influence, importance. And clearly there is no figure in the New Testament more important in regard to our ethical and theological thought than Jesus. It seems to me methodologically crucial that we treat the Gospels as testimonies not to the theologies of the evangelists or to their ethics, but to the way they represent and portray the theology and ethics of Jesus himself. In other words, the Gospel writers are not mainly trying to convey their own thoughts and deeds, but someone else's Jesus's.

And when we actually examine the ethics found in the Gospels, we discover that Jesus is often discussing subjects that we don't discuss in Sunday School, like Corbin Washing of hands permissible work on the Sabbath, which, by the way, is Friday night, not Sunday rules about ritual purity. By contrast, what we do not have in the Gospels is discussions about food offered to idols, circumcision for gentiles, and other issues we know that were hot button issues in Paul's Day in his largely gentile churches. This is a telltale sign that the Gospel writers are not reading their own angsts and concerns and ethical agendas back into the life of Jesus, much less creating Jesus material out of whole cloth. But there is yet another reason to take a hard look at the ethics of Jesus. It seems clear to me that those teachings were the most profoundly influential ethical teachings outside of the Old Testament.

On the writers of the New Testament, especially Paul and James, were you aware that there are over 20 partial citations, allusions or quotes from the Sermon on the Mount in the book of James? James is recycling Jesus, or Paul, have you read the second half of Romans twelve or 13 or all of Romans 14 into Romans 15? He's recycling Jesus even when Jesus is not being quoted by them or others. It is Jesus's moral vision that is informing what they say, and we'll say more about that in a moment. So there's one more final reason to consider Jesus from an ethical point of view.

He provided in his person a moral example by his own behavior, especially in regard to the issue of suffering and death and response to abuse and violence. Paul, the author of Hebrews and others call us to imitate Christ and his behavior. And here I need to take a little bit of a Christological right turn. The reason they exhort us to do that is wait for it. They believe it can be done by the grace of God and in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Christ's behavior can be imitated and Christ's character is being formed in you. Can I get an amen? That's what the Gospel is all about, becoming more Christlike. But that presupposes, you know, what his behavior was and what his character was like in a biblically illiterate world. We have to start over from scratch with Jesus and introduce people to who he was, what he was like, what he said and what he did.

I'm very pleased to say that we today know far more about the ethos and ethic of Jesus than we have at perhaps almost any time in church history, not only because of historical research, but also because we've finally woken up to what we're dealing with. Jesus, in his public discourse, with either disciples or in the public, was a sage. The form of his teaching is wisdom, literature. It is not prophecy, it is not law. It is wisdom.

He taught in Parables aphorisms proverbs. Riddles oneliners. He never, ever used the prophetic formula. Thus saith Yahweh quote he does not speak like a prophet, he speaks like a wise man, he speaks like a sage. And his ethic is a wisdom ethic.

Now, it is a wisdom ethic shaped by an eschatological worldview. He believes the divine saving activity is breaking in to a theater near you and you'd better repent, just as his cousin John did. He has an eschatological worldview, but his form of ethical teaching is wisdom.

T. S. Elliott once put it this way where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in infinite information in a computer age? That is indeed the question.

Too much information, too little real understanding, and even less wisdom. We are inundated with information, and we lack wisdom. If we get back to the teaching of Jesus, there's a chance we may find a glimpse of the wisdom. Clarence Bauman, in his treatment of the Sermon on the Mount, once said this the Sermon on the Mount has been dramatized, secularized, universalized, criticized, psychologized, politicized, and radicalized. All true.

This material is in all likelihood, and I'm talking about Matthew five through seven, not something Jesus said on one occasion. Matthew five through seven is an evangelistically formed discourse of Jesus's greatest hits. That's basically what it is. There are actually six discourses in Matthew, one of which is in Matthew 13. Totally devoted to parables.

This one, however, is the leading or first teaching of Jesus. And notice, while the crowds can listen, who is he teaching? He's teaching the disciples in Matthew five through seven. This is not an ethic intended to be imposed on a general, unsuspecting public. This is an ethic for the disciples of Jesus.

It presupposes a relationship with Jesus, a personal relationship with Jesus. And Jesus calls all of us by name. Some time ago, I got a letter in the mail from Time magazine. You know how these form letters come? And Time Warner big company, they left it to their computer to insert my name to make the letter look personal into little spaces pre programmed into the form letter.

And the computer read my name dr. Ben WITHERINGTON III. But that was too much for those little tiny spaces, even at zero nine font times New Roman. So the computer, being smart, lopped off all the middle bits, and the letter read, dear Dr. Third, I'm not kidding.

I have this letter as one of the most important persons in your neighborhood. Dr. Third, we're making this personal appeal for you to renew your subscription to our Great American News Weekly. Surely, Dr. Third through a personal appeal, you will want to keep abreast of domestic and foreign affairs.

So please, Dr. Third, just write your name at the bottom of this page. Dr. Third tear it off, put it in an envelope, send it back to us in the self addressed, stamped envelope, and we'll continue to send you week after week of our Great American News Weekly. Yours sincerely, Time Incorporated.

I was tempted to write them back. Dear Inc.

When the world tries to be personal, it treats persons like numbers and things. When Jesus is personal, he calls you by name and invites you into community. But there is a proviso. He says, if you're going to be part of my community, you need to take up your cross and follow me. Or as Dietrich Bonhoeffer once so wisely put it, when Jesus calls you to follow him, he calls you to come and die.

Die to your old self. So how should we look at the eschatological sapiential ethic of Jesus? Well, first of all, the ethic of Jesus presupposes that God has already intervened and is saving us, and that this ongoing saving activity is not once in the past, but continually through the person of his son Jesus and his followers. If you analyze the Sermon on the Mount, it begins with the attitudes and it ends with a parable. This is straight up wisdom.

Literature, friends. You need to study this. Not as law versus grace or commandments versus nice ideas. You need to understand this as wisdom for living. That's what it is.

It is not in the main law. In fact, Torah is seen as a form of wise teaching. That is. Law is only a minority of wisdom. And it's only one form of wise teaching.

It's not the only form. Another form would be beatitudes. Another form would be parables and so on. The law is not seen by Jesus as the only norm of life. It is part of the norm of life.

And when you're reading the Gospel of Matthew, if you don't read it in light of the Book of Syracuse, shame on you, because Jesus is drawing on the Book of Syracuse again and again. For example, when he says take my yoke upon you, embrace it. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. That's kind of an oxymoron. Have you ever seen an easy yoke or a light burden before?

It's kind of like Microsoft Works. It's an oxymoron.

But if you really know that he's echoing Syrac where Syrac says, the law is the yoke you must take upon you. And though it be heavy, it will be sweet. Jesus is paraphrasing Syrac. But now he's saying it's not the law that you take on. It's my yoke.

The yoke of my personhood and my wise teaching. Notably, in Matthew 517 through 20, what we have is Jesus saying that he is not only fulfilling the law, but what also the prophets. He's fulfilling the whole Old Testament, not just the law, but the prophets. And he's taking a sages point of view about those things. Law is not prophecy.

How then is the law fulfilled? We can understand how predictive prophecy is fulfilled. But how then is Torah fulfilled? The answer is in the eschatological ethical teaching of Jesus. It plays out.

It is worked out not by laying down the law and picking up the gospel, but by incorporating the law into the ethical teaching for Jesus's followers. Luther sent us down a rabbit trail we shouldn't have gone down when he placed too strong. A contrast between law and gospel. Unfortunately, Luther hadn't read the sermon on the mount in its original context. Here's an interesting fact.

In earliest Christianity before the Council of Nicaea in Ad. 325. No passage was more commented on in the whole New Testament by the Church fathers than the Sermon on the Mount. This was number one on the hit parade with a bullet. And part of the reason for that is the most copied, used and favorite gospel in the early church was not John or Mark or Luke, it was Matthew.

This is why it's first in the canon. This is why we have more manuscripts of it than any other gospel. Matthew's gospel number one with a billboard bullet. And in that gospel, no teaching was more important than the Sermon on the Mount. This was viewed by the earliest church as not only a crucial part of Christian ethics, but the whole gestalt in which all other Christian ethics should be seen.

And this is why it came from Jesus to us. Matthew five one says that when Jesus saw the crowd, he went up on the mountain, sat down and taught his disciples. This is not an ethic to be imposed in parliament in Britain or in Congress, in America on unsuspecting nonchristian people. This is an ethic that if Christians would embrace and live up to, the world would look and say, maybe I ought to be like that, almost thou persuadest me. This material then, is directed towards the disciples and it presupposes that the grace and personal relationship with Jesus disciples have is the basis for it.

If you look at Proverbs one through six, and I would encourage you to do so, and then read through the topics addressed in Matthew five through seven, you will go Yahtzee, it's almost the same. Listen to this. In Matthew five through seven, like in proverbs one through six, we have the following topics teachings on self control in regard to anger. Teachings on self control in regard to sexual expression, prohibition of oaths, exhortations to love enemies. Exhortations to prayer fasting alms giving instructions on health and wealth, loyalty and trust in God to reduce anxiety prohibitions about judging other or using profanity or the Golden Rule or the Narrow Path.

All of this is in Proverbs. It's also in Matthew five through seven with an eschatological twist blessed are those who mourn now, for they will be comforted at the Escaton. One of my favorite Far Side cartoons is one where there's this meek, mild mannered man sitting in front of an accountant's desk and the accountant is saying, I have good news for you. And the meek man is sitting there trembling. And the sub caption says, the day after the meek inherit the earth.

What we have in Matthew five through seven is a compendium on many of the topics sages regularly in Judaism addressed. Not only should you read Proverbs one through six, you should read the whole book of Sarak and compare it to this material. Now, here's the interesting thing. Jesus is offering both conventional wisdom like honor your parents, even though he's busily redefining what counts as the family of faith in Mark 331 to 35. So there is both conventional wisdom.

And there is counter order wisdom that goes against and beyond the Mosaic boundaries. For example, Moses tells you how to swear, how to do a proper oath. Jesus says no oaths. Moses limits revenge. The Lex talionis was never meant to license revenge.

It is only an eye for an eye, only a hand for a hand, only a foot for a foot. Only one life for one life. It's meant to limit, not license, revenge taking. Jesus says no revenge. Period.

Forgiven them. Moses says, here are the grounds for divorce. Erwat davar deuteronomy 24. Now, what does that phrase in Hebrew, erwat davar mean?

It means some unseemly thing. The rabbis interpreted it in at least three different ways. Some rabbis said, if your wife does some unseemly thing like commit adultery, you may divorce her. Moses permitted divorce. Jesus did not.

Another rabbi said, Some unseemly thing means any objectionable practice. Even if she burns the matzah balls, you may divorce her. A third rabbi said, if your wife is some unseemly theme thing, you may divorce her. There were various interpretations of that little Hebrew phrase. Jesus cut to the chase and said, no divorce in the kingdom of God.

Just no divorce. And by the way, Paul got the memo. Read one corinthians seven. He says, the Lord says no divorce. Jesus is not just reaffirming Mosaic teaching.

In fact, he is going to say that much of Moses teaching was given for the hardness of heart, like the law of retaliation, like the law of divorce. But from the beginning, this was not God's original creation design in the Escaton. We're going back to the creation design, says Jesus. We're starting over from scratch. Jesus's teaching is not a repristanizing of Moses.

It is an intensifying of some of the demands. It's offering new demands as well. It is precisely because Jesus believes that God's eschatological reign is breaking in through his ministry that he also thinks that new occasions teach new duties. This is why he comes to speak of a new covenant, which is not merely a renewal of any previous covenant. In the new covenant, there is something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.

There is both familiarity and unfamiliarity. So it is not ever sufficient to see what Jesus is doing in the Sermon on the Mount as merely a renewal of old rules and regulations with new sprinklings on top of the cupcake. This is not true. Moses never prohibited oaths or divorce and contra conventional wisdom. Jesus is not simply offering practical advice on how they should live if they want to be healthy, wealthy and wise.

Mr. Ramsay has done many good things to help Christians get out of debt, but he doesn't understand the eschatological and sapiential ethic of Jesus at all. He assumes that the health and wealth gospel is right. But that's not a version of the Jesus gospel. It's a perversion of the Jesus Gospel.

Jesus substitutes a very different kind of wisdom for the world's normal wisdom. Normally, it would be called revelatory wisdom. Now, if you read Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, the Old Testament wisdom books, wisdom in those places are based on observation of nature and human nature. It's what my granny would call common sense, right? When I went off to seminary, my grandmother said to me, don't become an educated fool.

She also said, don't be so open minded that your brains fall out. And the third piece of advice from my Southern Baptist granny was, don't go up there and lose your religion. Well, you know, there's an anti intellectual attitude that's still alive and well in Protestantism, especially conservative Protestantism. The truth of the matter is that Jesus does want to learn some things. And when you compare Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job to what Jesus is doing, those three books are about learning from human experience and from nature.

Go to the ant hill and observe, says the writer of Proverbs. You're learning from nature a close, keen, critical evaluation of nature and a close, critical evaluation of human nature. Jesus says there's a third kind of wisdom it's revelatory, and it goes even against and contrary to natural wisdom. If anyone would come after me, let Him take up his cross and follow me. This isn't nature wisdom, which is flight and survival.

This is not human nature wisdom. This is God's wisdom. This is a matter of faith because this wisdom comes from above. It's not self evident to those who are looking on from the outside. Just as salvation or God's divine saving activity is breaking into human history in the ministry of Jesus, so the explanation of what is happening in this eschatological moment is a word coming from above, and it may appear counterintuitive.

It is difficult for a rich man to get into the kingdom of God. It's as difficult as a camel crawling through the eye of a needle. C. S. Lewis once wrote a poem about this.

He said, but imagine how the camel must feel stretched out to a thin thread from the tip of his nose to his bloody tail, so he could squeeze through the needle hole.

What is not possible for human beings is nonetheless possible for God and by the grace of God. The ethic of Jesus is grounded in the amazing supernatural grace of God and how that can change human nature. It's not business as usual anymore. If anyone is in Christ, they are a whole new creation. The old has passed away, says Paul in two corinthians.

He does not say the old is in the process of passing away, and eventually it'll be gone. No, the Greek is very clear. The old has passed away. If anyone is in Christ, they are already a new creature. The point is, we have to live like it by following the ethic of Jesus and Paul and others.

The problem when the preacher tells the congregation to flee sin is that they may flee it, but they leave a forwarding address.

My granny used to say, if you act like a skunk, people will get wind of it.

Ethics is the living out of our salvation day by day, and it's what Jesus calls us to in the Sermon on the Mount. So what are the topics Jesus is handing to us and how should we view it? John Wesley had a really good insight based on his reading of Augustine. Augustine put it this way give what thou commandest, Lord, and then command whatever you will. Give us what you would have us do, and then command whatever you will.

Or John Wesley put it this way, and I like this even better. He said, all of the commandments of God are covered promises. All of the commandments of God are covered promises. That is, when God says, thou shalt love the Lord your God, he means, by the grace of God you will. All of the commandments are covered promises enabled by the grace of God.

Put another way, the imperative presupposes the indicative. What God is already doing in renovating who you are as new creation is the basis for the exhortation. Go on and behave like Jesus, believe like Jesus, live like Jesus.

Well, that's a beginning, but it's only just the beginning. And so we will carry on and look in more depth subsequently. Thank you.

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