Sermon on the Mount Leader Guide: A Beginner's Guide to the Kingdom of Heaven

By Prof. Amy-Jill Levine

How is the follower of Jesus to understand the words of the Old Testament? How are those words relevant to the New Covenant he is establishing? What might the words of the Lord’s Prayer have conveyed to his initial followers, and why is that historical information essential to the prayer two millennia later?


In Sermon on the Mount, Dr. Amy-Jill Levine takes a detailed and colorful overview of Matthew 5-7, collectively known as Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Through Dr. Levine’s engaging method of biblical interpretation, readers will come away with a solid understanding of the Sermon on the Mount in its historical and theological context.


Chapters include:


The Beatitudes

The Extensions

Practicing Piety

Our Father

Finding Your Treasure
Living into the Kingdom



Explore the major topics in the most popular sermon ever delivered and unpack how Jesus makes his points using a solid knowledge of Hebrew Scriptures and moral teachings.
The Leader Guide includes session outline for each group meeting with Scripture, prayer, opening activity, discussion questions, activity, and ending call to action.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Release date: Aug 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501899928

Prof. Amy-Jill Levine

Amy-Jill Levine (“AJ”) is Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace and University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies Emerita, and Professor of New Testament Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University. An internationally renowned scholar and teacher, she is the author of numerous books including The Difficult Words of Jesus: A Beginner's Guide to His Most Perplexing Teachings, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi, Entering the Passion of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to Holy Week, Light of the World: A Beginner’s Guide to Advent, Sermon on the Mount: A Beginner’s Guide to the Kingdom of Heaven, and Signs and Wonders: A Beginner’s Guide to the Miracles of Jesus. She is also the coeditor of the Jewish Annotated New Testament. AJ is the first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute. In 2021 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. AJ describes herself as an unorthodox member of an Orthodox synagogue and a Yankee Jewish feminist who until 2021 taught New Testament in a Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

In Sermon on the Mount, Dr. Amy-Jill Levine (University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, Vanderbilt Divinity School and College of Arts and Science) encourages all readers, both Christians and those outside Christian communions, to reexamine the Sermon on the Mount—the large block of Jesus’s teachings found in chapters 5–7 of the Gospel of Matthew.

Recognizing how little most readers understand about Jesus’s first-century Jewish context, Dr. Levine (who prefers to be called AJ) guides readers through the Sermon section by section, and in doing so helps them to read it as a teaching given by one Jew to fellow Jews. As she has frequently noted: if we get Jesus’s context wrong, we’ll get him wrong. More, if we get the context right, we can find even more meaning in his words.

Without ever denying that the text is more than a historical artifact to Christian readers, AJ wisely and often quite winsomely insists that Christian readers must not treat it as less. The Sermon on the Mount is not only the Scripture of the church but also the teaching that made sense to the Jewish disciples who followed Jesus of Nazareth. To ignore that history means to miss the import of Jesus’s words—words that provide instruction on how best to live into the kingdom of heaven (see Matthew 7:24-27). More, readers who ignore that context have, over the centuries, imported anti-Jewish interpretations into the Sermon and, thus, deformed the Gospel.

This Leader Guide is designed to help Christian adult education leaders shepherd a group through a six-session study of the Sermon on the Mount, a study informed by AJ’s book. This guide contains quotations from her book that can serve as prompts for discussion, but groups will gain the most when the guide is accompanied by reading both Matthew 5–7 and AJ’s Sermon on the Mount.

About the Sessions

Here is an overview of the six sessions in this leader guide:

•Session 1, Introduction and the Beatitudes, orients participants to the Sermon as an introductory guide to the kingdom of heaven; it examines Jesus’s statements about blessedness (the Beatitudes) as indications of God’s will for those who gather in Jesus’s name in particular and for human life in general.

•Session 2, The Extensions, helps participants appreciate the utmost seriousness with which Jesus took the Torah and the Prophets—that is, the Scriptures of Israel—and examines how the fences he built around God’s Law to protect it enhance the lives of his followers, individually and communally, then and now.

•In session 3, Practicing Piety, participants will both discover Jesus’s views on the right and wrong ways to engage in expressions of faith and reflect on how appropriate practices can lead to peace with one another and within themselves.

•Session 4, Our Father, looks at how the Lord’s Prayer is a quintessentially Jewish prayer, reveals the historical nuances of the terms in each verse, and considers how its recitation can function as personal spiritual discipline, recognition of interpersonal reconciliation, and awareness of communal political and economic concerns.

•In session 5, Finding Your Treasure, participants will reflect on and reevaluate their attitudes toward wealth, treasure, and stuff, and will imagine how their lives and the world would be different were Jesus’s teachings about these realities to prevail.

•In session 6, Living into the Kingdom, participants will identify challenges to traveling along what Jesus called the narrow road leading to life and will talk about ways along the journey in which the church community members can support one another as well as those who belong to other communities.

Each of the six session plans includes:

•Stated goals for you to keep in mind as you lead discussions.

•The printed text, from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), of the portion of the Sermon on the Mount discussed in that session. (A few sessions contain additional Scripture texts as well, and all sessions refer participants to other passages in several discussion questions.)

•Extensive discussion questions to facilitate participants’ engagement with both the biblical text and AJ’s book. You likely won’t have the time or desire to use all of the questions; choose the ones most interesting or relevant to your group.

•Opening and closing prayers to ground your sessions in an atmosphere of worship.

Some sessions contain optional, easy-to-prepare, and easy-to-do activities to serve as icebreakers or interactive introductions to the session’s topic. Each session’s Leader Preparation notes will alert you to any extra materials you need or preparation to accomplish.

May God, in great grace, use this guide and your group’s study to draw you closer into the