Quotes from Scot McKnight

Hear O Israel, the Lord our God. The Lord is One. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.

This is an empire called "narcissism.

Purity is not the same as morality but is about who or what is fit for the temple, and so classifications are made.

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.

In other words, one metaphor (salt) speaks of the role of Jesus' people to Israel and the other (light) to the Gentile world.

Then Martin says, as if he is writing a commentary on Matthew 6:19–24: "The acid test is not what we say, but what we do; not what we promise in words, but what we actually give in money.

Salt, which was obtained from the shores of the Dead Sea, was added to sacrifices and thus was covenant salt (Lev 2:13); salt purified things (Exod 30:35). Salt flavored things (Job 6:6), and seasoning is found in the parallel at both Mark 9:50 and Luke 14:34, and it was a preservative.

The might that made Rome an empire will bow to the might that makes God God and the Lamb the Lamb. Brian Blount sums it up best: Babylons will be "sLambed.

When Jesus calls his disciples 'the salt,' instead of himself, this transfers his efficacy on earth to them. He brings them into his work." But he adds the warning of Jesus: "The call of Jesus Christ means being salt of the earth or being destroyed.

The power of military might is a Babylonian reality, not a new Jerusalem one. The Lamb was slaughtered because he refused to use Babylon's weapons, and the way of the Lamb is to conquer by the "sword from his mouth," not a sword drawn from a scabbard. The Word of God is the weapon of choice for those walking in the way of the Lamb.

Dissidents pause with these words as a motto: "Not so with you!" Power for Jesus was power for the other and not power over the other. The way of the dragon aches for power over, and the wild things wield the dragon's power over and climb their way into high places where they exert power over others.

The weapon of choice for Jesus was the cross. The Lamb of Revelation slays with the sword that proceeds from his mouth. Christian realism compromises the way of the Lamb because true realism is a deep reality that sees God on the throne and the Lamb in its center.

Our churches have not discipled people in the last forty years in Christoform power but have instead discipled them into playing Babylon's power games. They have decided who might be their next king, only to realize that kings become wild things. Instead of giving more and more power to presidents, to senators, to representatives, to Washington DC and states and cities and villages and towns, we need to search again for Christoform power.