Back to the Garden

    He went up the mountain…           Our gospel lesson this evening begins on a geographical note. “When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain.” We might be inclined to overlook a detail like this, thinking that the really significant details are WHAT he said, not WHERE he said them. Indeed, this passage which is regularly referred to as “The Sermon on the Mount,” is recorded in Luke’s gospel as “The Sermon on the Plain.” Surely the gospel writers must have been more interested in the sayings of Jesus than the locale of their utterance?             Not so fast, for as far as Matthew’s depiction of these events is concerned, the geography tells us exactly what kind of story this is. Where Jesus delivers that sermon, it turns out, is key to understanding what is going on here. For in Jesus’ ascent up the mountain we hear an echo of another mountain long ago in Israel’s history from which the Laws of God came forth. That mountain was Sinai, and with all of Israel assembled