Quotes from Scot McKnight

Morality is about a heart that is right before God.

Jesus reduced the Torah to two points — loving God, loving others (the Jesus Creed) — not to abolish the many laws but to comprehend them and to see them in their innermost essence

By the first century, Samaritans were the stereotype enemy of Judaism, the embodiment of heretical faith, and the denier of Jerusalem-centered hope and faith. They still exist today at the same location.

There's a difference between focusing on being right and focusing on being a follower of Jesus.

At the judgment Jesus will not ask us about our gifts. He will ask if our cheeks have touched the cheeks of those who suffer, if our hands have held the hands of those who endure pain, and if our gifts are directed at those who most need them.

In other words, in Jesus' demand to live righteously, which runs through the Sermon, we see an Ethic from Above, from Below, and from Beyond—but it is an ethic his followers are to perform. The best way to preach the Sermon is to preach what it is: a demand on the disciple.

Since we are committed in the church to the scriptural revelation as the norming norm, we need to remind ourselves that our task ultimately is to conserve the gospel revealed in Christ by addressing our world in its local manifestation with the grace of God. We will discover that we each have something to say about that grace and for our world.

We aren't called to live first-century lives in the twenty-first century, but twenty-first-century lives as we walk in the light of the revelation God gave to us in the first century.

tetragrammaton

Zealots: a Jewish movement in the first century AD that focused on the use of violence to restore the Land and establish the kingdom of God.

Many in our day climb under the moral shade of Matthew 7:1 to take the supposed high road in saying, "I'm not the judge." Those who take this supposed high road may be missing the whole point of Jesus' words: sin is sin, and one cannot follow Jesus and turn a blind eye to sin. What Jesus is calling us to here is not the absence of moral discernment.

The Sermon on the Mount crystallizes what Jesus gave to his disciples as the new way of life, the kingdom way of life in a world surrounded by the power brokers of empire.