Jackson Gravitt
A survey of Matthew’s interpretive history suggests that Matthew 5–7 was first nicknamed the “Sermon on the Mount” by Augustine in his commentary on these famous chapters.1 The nickname obviously stuck, as did Augustine’s idea to treat the Sermon on the Mount as an isolated unit. By choosing to comment on these chapters exclusively, Augustine practically divorced the sermon from the rest of Matthew, offering no comments on how Jesus’ words fit into the larger context of the Gospel.
This trend has continued until the present day. This is not necessarily bad: the Sermon on the Mount is rather dense, and there is plenty of content to unpack and explain. However, biblical studies is built on the premise that context is key. The Sermon on the Mount, like any other pericope, fits into its broader literary context in an organic way. Specifically for this study, we notice that Matthew links the Sermon on the Mount and the healing of the leper that directly follows it (8:1-4) by telling us that the sermon and miracle share the same audience.
Linking the Sermon and the Miracle
In Matthew 5:1, we read, “Seeing the crowds, [Jesus] went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him.” The Sermon on the Mount was for “the crowds.” This becomes clearer in 7:28: “And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching.”
If we look forward two more verses, there is another reference to the crowds in 8:1: “When he came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him.” The “great crowds” of 8:1 must be the “crowds” of 7:28–29. The audience for the sermon in 5:1–7:29 and for the miracle in 8:1-4 is the same.
Matthew 5:1–8:4 should thus be read as a single literary unit since Jesus interacts with the exact same audience throughout these two scenes. To divorce these two events might leave us with an incomplete story that distorts the message Jesus and Matthew intended to teach their respective audiences.
The Theology of the Sermon on the Mount
In 5:1, Jesus “ascended into the mountain [ἀνέβη εἰς τὸ ὄρος]” to preach to the crowds. This is an allusion back to Moses “ascending to [God] into the mountain [Sinai]” to receive the law (Exod 24:12, καὶ εἶπεν κύριος πρὸς Μωυσῆν ἀνάβηθι πρός με εἰς τὸ ὄρος).2 Matthew here sets Jesus up as a New Moses: just as Moses ascended Mount Sinai, Jesus here ascends the mountain to preach his sermon.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Jesus preaches on the Mosaic Law in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus’ Beatitudes (5:3–12) echo the blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience listed in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28.3 Matthew 5:21–48 is an exposition of the Decalogue in which Jesus shows the true requirements of the law, explaining that the law not only condemns murder and adultery but also the anger and lust that lead to those sins.
Jesus’ thesis statement comes in 5:48: “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” If we come to this verse having already allowed our eyes to be fixed on the Old Testament law, then we see that Jesus is quoting the Levitical Refrain: “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” (e.g., 11:44–45; 19:2). Yet Jesus here intensifies the law’s requirement: the law’s standard of holiness is perfection. Partial holiness will not be enough to enter God’s kingdom.
The crowds to whom Jesus preaches are students of the scribes and Pharisees (7:28–29). Throughout his sermon, Jesus critiques the crowds’ reliance on their own law-keeping. Particularly apt is his statement in 5:20: “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” The crowds saw their teachers as righteous people, yet Jesus points at these teachers and says that they are not good enough to enter heaven’s gates. If the teachers are not good enough, that is, of course, very bad news for the students.
Finally, Jesus’ parable of the houses built on sand and stone (7:24–27) serves as a fitting conclusion to the sermon. Reminiscent of the Hebrew wisdom tradition (particularly Proverbs 1–9), Jesus presents a “way of life” and a “way of death.” If the crowds obey Jesus, they will live; if they disobey, they will be swept away by the storm.
Yet who among them had done what Christ commanded? Who had listened to his words and enacted them? The honest answer is that no one had. And if the crowds knew the Torah well, they would have known that Jesus’ sermon, like the law, left them hopeless.4 Jesus here gives a thoroughly theological sermon that explains to the crowds that they stand condemned and separated from God, desperately in need of grace.
The Sermon Off the Mount
Matthew records that the crowds do not leave Jesus after the sermon concludes (8:1). In 8:2, something rather unexpected happens: “And behold, a leper came to him. . . .”
Under the Old Testament law, lepers were perhaps the most unclean of all the unclean. According to the leper laws recorded in Leviticus 13–14, lepers were excluded from the community of God’s people, forced to live outside the city (13:46). They were thus spatially alienated from God, never able to come near the temple. Lepers were subjected to a level of shame, being forced to publicly condemn themselves as “Unclean! Unclean!” (14:45). The disease could be deadly. It was often even a sign of God’s curse and judgment (as in the case of Miriam in Num 12, Namaan in 2 Kgs 5:1–14, and Uzziah in 2 Kgs 15; 2 Chron 26:19–21). Finally, the disease was incurable. Lepers were thus not only unclean—they were hopelessly unclean.
When a person began to suspect that he might have leprosy, he was to go to the priest, who would function as a doctor of sorts. It was his job to determine whether the disease was actually leprous or not, and he would then make the declaration of “clean” or “unclean.”
We see, then, that when the leper comes to Jesus, he is making a theological statement. Instead of going to the regular priest, the leper chooses to approach Jesus, recognizing Jesus’ priestly office. Moreover, the leper’s statement, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean” (8:2) is an even more shocking theological statement. Whereas the regular priest could only make a declaration of “clean” or “unclean,” this leper believes that Jesus can actually change his state of being from unclean to clean. The leper’s theology proves true: “Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, ‘I will; be clean’” (8:3).
If we bear in mind that the crowd for the Sermon on the Mount witnesses this miracle, we begin to see the point of both the sermon and the miracle more clearly. After the sermon, the crowds feel hopeless and devastated. Yet when they see the leper walk up to Jesus, they might understand that the leper is a picture of themselves.
The leper was unclean, separated from the people of God, and cut off from the presence of God. His disease, like the crowds’ sins, was leading him toward death, and there was nothing he could do to heal himself. If the crowds were hopeless, then the leper was even more hopeless. Yet the leper comes boldly towards Jesus, admitting his need, and Jesus stretches out his hand and heals him. If Jesus is willing and able to heal and save the leper, he is willing and able to save all those in the crowds who are spiritually unclean.
Jesus’ long Sermon on the Mount points the crowds to their need for grace, and Jesus’ short, four-word “Sermon off the Mount” teaches the crowds that they can find salvation in him.
Lepers Transformed into Priests
In Matthew 8:4, Jesus finishes his conversation with the leper by giving him a rather obscure command: “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a proof to them.” Why would the Greater Priest send the leper back to the lesser priest? And what is “the gift that Moses commanded”?
Many commentators have struggled to identify “the gift that Moses commanded,” but the confusion is unnecessary. Leviticus 13–14 is the only part of the Mosaic Law that speaks specifically about leprous people. In that passage, we learn of a sacrifice that lepers were supposed to offer if they were healed somehow of their leprosy.
Leviticus 14 teaches that former lepers were to go to the priest and bring with them “two male lambs” and “one ewe lamb” (14:10). The priest would kill one lamb for the guilt offering and would put the blood of the lamb on the leper’s right earlobe, right thumb, and right big toe (14:14). This sacrifice echoes an earlier sacrifice mentioned in Leviticus 8, when Aaron and his sons were consecrated as priests by Moses. For their ordination, they brought a ram to Moses. The ram was killed, and Moses applied its blood to their right earlobes, their right thumbs, and their right big toes (8:22–24).
Though the two rituals were both fairly lengthy and had other important parts that they did not share with each other, we are still right to see a connection between them. There is nowhere else in the Old Testament that the blood of a sacrifice was applied to a man’s right earlobe, right thumb, and right big toe. When a former leper underwent his cleansing, he went through the same ritual that a priest went through. This did not make him a Levitical priest, but it was, undoubtedly, a priestly rite.
This makes Matthew 8:4 a crucial part of our literary unit. Jesus not only heals the leper of his disease, but he also transforms his life. Symbolically, it is as if he makes the leper into a priest.
Lepers could not live among God’s people (Lev 13:46). However, the priests did not even get their own portion in the land of Canaan because God wanted them to live among the people in order to minister to them (Num 18:20). Lepers could not enter into God’s presence in the temple, but priests were called to serve in the temple of God. Lepers were perpetually unclean (Lev 13:45), but priests were commanded to be perpetually clean, insofar as was possible (Lev 21–22).
Jesus’ command to “offer the gift that Moses commanded” is the conclusion of our literary unit, but it might also serve as its climax: Jesus’ grace transforms lepers into priests.
A Picture of the Cross
Surely, Matthew had Jesus’ death in mind when he wrote this literary unit. At the cross, Jesus would take the uncleanness of his people and would be taken “outside the gate” and “outside the camp” to suffer for their sins in their place (Heb 13:12). Isaiah predicted that he would bear our griefs, carry our sorrows, be pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, and take “the iniquity of us all” (Isa 53:3–6).
When Jesus touched the leper, he should have become ceremonially unclean. We have convincing reasons to conclude that he did not actually become unclean,5 but, as we read this text, we are invited to look forward to the cross, to the place where “he who knew no sin became sin” for us (2 Cor 5:21). We are all spiritual lepers, but Jesus took our spiritual leprosy upon himself to make us clean.
Yet this story goes even further. Christ did not only “become sin” for us. He took our sin so that “in him, we might become the righteous of God” (2 Cor 5:21). At the cross, Jesus gifted us with his own righteousness so that we might receive the promises and blessings of God that he rightly earned and deserved. In Christ, we are counted “holy, blameless, and above reproach” (Col 1:22).6 As Paul says, “For as by one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Rom 5:19). Surely, as Jesus dispelled the leper’s uncleanness and made him into a purified priest, Matthew meant for our minds to be drawn to the “great exchange” of the cross. We have here the doctrine of double imputation spelled out in narrative form.
“I Will; Be Clean”
It seems that Matthew meant for his readers to read 5:1–8:4 together. Jesus taught the crowds through both his sermon and his miracle, and we would do well to pay attention to both, lest we hear only half of Jesus’ message.
Read together, we see that the Sermon on the Mount exposes the crowds’ sins and causes them to look for God’s mercy, which can only be found in the Christ who says, “I will; be clean.” The salvation Jesus brings is not only abstract or positional; it is also transformative. Jesus takes lepers and turns them into priests.
Jackson Gravitt teaches Bible and Church History at Rhea County Academy in Dayton, TN. He is currently pursuing an MATS degree through Erskine Theological Seminary.
Image: Mosaic from Monreale Cathedral
- Augustine, The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1948). Thus Martin Luther wrote of “the three chapters of St. Matthew, which St. Augustine calls the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount” in his Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2017), vii.[↩]
- Craig Blomberg, “Matthew,” in Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, ed. G.K. Beale and D.A. Carson (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 20 mentions that “Jesus on the mountain” is a more common theme throughout Matthew than in the other Gospels, probably since Matthew was written to a Jewish audience that was familiar with Moses and sensitive to the Torah. McKnight, The Sermon on the Mount, 38 also helpfully notes, “Moses also descended the mountain, as does Jesus in Matthew 8:1, and Matthew’s words here are almost verbatim from Exodus 34:29.”[↩]
- This is perhaps more clear in Luke’s version of the Beatitudes (Luke 6:20–26). There, each blessing is matched with a “woe.” This models the two Mosaic passages mentioned here: if God’s people obey the Mosaic law, they will be blessed in their cities, fields, wombs, etc. (Deuteronomy 28:3–4), but, if they disobey, their cities, fields, wombs, etc. will be cursed (Deuteronomy 28:16–18). In Luke, the curses are made explicit; in Matthew, they are implied (perhaps because Matthew expects his Torah-observant audience to be able to infer the curses).[↩]
- See the crowds’ response in Matthew 7:28. The Greek word used here is ekplesso. Ekplesso is a compound word containing “ek” (out of, from) and “plesso” (senses). While the ESV’s “astonished” is an appropriate word that fits most contexts, it is worth noting that ekplesso can also denote feelings of fear. Perhaps Matthew implies that the Sermon on the Mount leaves the crowds scared senseless.[↩]
- John Calvin wrote: “Under the Law, the touch of a leper was infectious; but as Christ possesses such purity as to repeal all filth and defilement, he does not, by touching, either pollute himself with leprosy, or become a transgressor of the law… [Jesus] descended from heaven even to hell, and yet contracted no stain from it, but, retaining his innocence, took away all our impurities, and sprinkled us with his holiness” Calvin’s Commentaries, Volume XVI: Harmony of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Grand Rapids, Baker: 1999), 374.[↩]
- Variations of this phrase (or at least the ideas present within it) appear across Paul’s corpus (e.g., Rom 7:4; 1 Cor 1:8; Eph 1:4; 5:27).[↩]