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“What is the Sermon on the Plain?”

Everyone who has spent any time at all in the Bible knows the Sermon on the Mount. The fifth through seventh chapters of Matthew describe the Lord Jesus taking to an impromptu “pulpit” on a mountain in Galilee, leading to three full chapters of teaching that began with his disciples and expanded to the crowds that followed him. Most Christians are well acquainted with it, and most Bibles with chapter headings commence Matthew 5 with the title “The Sermon on the Mount”.

What else would you call it? If there’s a better idea, nobody seems to have come up with it.

Times and Places

The Sermon on the Plain is a different story.

First, its location is not definitively established. Luke tells us the great crowd that gathered there was made up of Jews from “all Judea and Jerusalem”, but also Gentiles from Tyre and Sidon presumably drawn by the Lord’s increasing fame. Tyre and Sidon are north of Galilee, while Judea and Jerusalem are south. The absence of any mention of Galileans suggests the sermon took place north or south of Galilee, Judea being likelier in my view.

Second, in Luke 6, the Lord is praying on a mountain, then comes down to “a level place” to teach the gathered crowds, hence the informal title given to the sermon that follows. In Matthew, he goes up, in Luke he comes down.

Still, because of content similarities between the two sermons, some readers speculate that these are actually different accounts of the same events. That could be. Both sermons begin with beatitudes and end with the parable of houses built on rock and sand, and their settings are not irreconcilable. However, most commentators see no compelling reason to mash the two sermons together. It seems far more likely, to me at least, that the Lord preached many of the same truths to different audiences, blessing those who listened with open ears and making the rest accountable for what they had heard.

Comparing Two Sermons

Others have done the work of noting all the similarities between the two sermons, so it may be easier to quote them here than recycle their labors. Krisan Marotta at Wednesday in the Word provides this content comparison, which I have edited slightly:

Beatitudes: Luke 6:20-26; Matthew 5:3-12
Love your enemies: Luke 6:27-36; Matthew 5:38-47
Golden rule: Luke 6:31; Matthew 7:12
Judge not: Luke 6:37-38; Matthew 7:1-2
Speck and log: Luke 6:41-42; Matthew 7:3-5
Tree and fruit: Luke 6:43-45; Matthew 7:16-20
Lord, Lord: Luke 6:46; Matthew 7:21
House on the rock: Luke 6:47-49; Matthew 7:24-27

That’s a lot of thematic territory in common, though when I ran a document comparison on the two out of curiosity, it turns out the similarities are more in the content than in the Lord’s actual wording, as often happens when preachers re-use some of the same material in different venues. The sole exception is the speck and the log, which in the ESV is word-for-word identical in strings of 24 and 23 consecutive units, suggesting the Greek originals for that section were copied by one or both gospel writers from a common source and edited only slightly.

Luke certainly leaves open that possibility when he refers to the multitude of compiled narratives that already existed by the time the writers of the synoptic gospels buckled down and got to work. These were necessary resources for Luke, who was not present for either sermon and had to rely on written accounts or eyewitness reports. Matthew probably used them as well, given that he too was writing almost thirty years after these events took place. When the Lord promised the Holy Spirit would “bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you”, he was assuring his disciples of divine aid in faithfully reporting what they saw and heard in their own words, not guaranteeing a verbatim transcript such as we might read from in a courtroom today.

The Differences

What’s more interesting to me is the differences. Luke’s account is thirty verses or so while Matthew’s fills three chapters. That means either Luke or the Lord Jesus left out a great deal that we find in his more famous sermon, undoubtedly with good reason. The Sermon on the Plain does not touch on the subjects of salt and light, on Jesus’ relationship to the law and prophets, on the subjects of anger, lust, divorce, the making of oaths or revenge. Nor do we get his teaching on giving, praying and fasting without ostentation, the Lord’s Prayer, the incentive of treasure in heaven, or any teaching on several other subjects the Lord held forth on in Galilee.

That said, the Sermon on the Plain does include several things the Sermon on the Mount does not. Matthew has no “woes”, while Luke has four in parallel with four “blesseds” compared to Matthew’s nine. Consider: the Sermon on the Mount was preached in Galilee to men and women who acknowledged God as their Father. To these folks, Jesus mentioned God’s fatherhood seventeen times. In stark contrast, the audience for the Sermon on the Plain included large numbers of Judeans and people from Jerusalem, the headquarters of the Lord’s pharisaic opponents, to whom our Lord’s “woes” were frequently addressed. How many times did Jesus mention God’s fatherhood to them? Exactly once.

Luke’s sermon also includes sections on disciples and teachers, the tendency of good and evil people to produce treasure in accordance with their natures, and the blind leading the blind, subjects Matthew covers in chapters 10, 12 and 15 of his gospel.

In Summary

I and many other readers conclude that the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain took place in front of largely different audiences in different places on different days. Perhaps these crowds even had different spiritual temperatures, as there is a notable difference in tone in some sections. Nevertheless, we may observe that our Lord taught many of the same things in different words. The fact that he returned to the same subjects repeatedly should reinforce for us their importance.