Matthew 5-7: The Sermon on the Mount (5)
The Fourteen Triads: Practices The great barrier to taking the SoM seriously is, as we observed earlier, their seeming lack of contact with our daily reality. We noted the various attempts to account for this each of which ended up treating them as anything but what on the face of it they appear to be. That is, practical instruction for Jesus’ hearers about living faithfully through the crisis of that time, God’s coming to judge his people for their default on the very reason for which he brought them into being. I introduced Glenn Stassen’s way of resolving this seeming unreality or impracticality by treating Jesus’s teaching as triadic rather than dyadic, that is having three elements rather than just two. Instead of traditional teaching – Jesus’ prescription Stassen believes they consist of traditional teaching – vicious cycle – Jesus’ prescription. This means the parts that seem the most difficult and remote from reality to us are not what Jesus says we ought to be doi...