Jesus had strongly asserted that his teaching would not fit into the religious tradition of the Jews. His was new wine that would burst the old wineskins. His was the new material that could not be used to patch up the old system. His teaching and way of doing things presented something new and different, and the results would be a new world order, a vast paradigm shift, what Jesus called the kingdom of heaven.

Quote:  Luke portrays Jesus as redefining, both now and for the future, the way the world works; he is replacing common representations of the world with a new one.^[1] Jesus is calling for a paradigm shift of colossal proportions.^[2]

Today, we’ll begin our study of Luke’s account of what is usually called the Sermon on the Mount. The Bible contains two records of this sermon, one in Matthew and one in Luke. We could call the account in Luke the Sermon on the Plain.

^[1] Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997), 264–265.

^[2] Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997), 266.