Should Jesus's Inaugural Address Be Our Torah?

Why is no one advocating having Jesus's words from
a mountain placed in our schools and court houses?

What if we Christians were to consider the Sermon on the Mount the defining document of our faith and our equivalent of the Jewish Torah? Christians in the first century apparently did, as they included summaries of Jesus's first discourse in their Didache, a catechism for new believers.

Ask any Jewish believers what their defining scriptures are and they will surely cite the Septuagint, the Five Books of Moses, as the foundational statement of their faith. They revere the entire Hebrew Bible, of course, but see their sacred Writings and the books of their Prophets as inspired  commentary on the faith, whereas the Torah, the Law, is regarded as its very core.

Jesus, as a devoted Jew, makes it clear in this inaugural address that he did not come to negate God's Law but to "fulfill" it. In other words, Jesus came to further reveal God's original purpose for giving this life-giving Torah. 

Jesus begins this discourse with a series of blessings experienced by those steeped in God's will and God's ways. His eight introductory sayings begin with a description of how blessed those are who recognize their utter poverty and dependence on God and end with how thoroughly blessed those are when they are hated and maligned for being faithful subjects and citizens living under God's reign. 

Jesus then expands on the revolutionary characteristics of those who become emissaries of God's love and living demonstrations of God's laws. Each of his amendments to the Law ("You have heard it said, but I say say to you...") take us deeper into God's intent. For example, Jesus states that God wants us not only to avoid committing murder, but to refuse to harbor the anger and hatred that lead to it. Also, that we not only avoid adultery, but that we avoid entertaining even fantasies of being promiscuous or unfaithful. 

In summary, Jesus envisions a worldwide community of believers in which there is unwavering fidelity rather than any form of sexual exploitation or abuse, where there is unconditional love for neighbor and stranger alike rather acts of violence against others, even enemies, where there is radical honesty and transparency instead of words being suspect unless spoken under oath, and where generous sharing replaces any hoarding of possessions out of anxiety about our financial security or our personal worth. In this way his sayings represent a consummation or 'fulfillment' of God's Torah, all signs of what it means to be citizens of a universal reign of heaven on earth.

At the conclusion of his address Jesus states, "Whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them" will be as those who build on a solid rock foundation, one the apostle Paul later says "no other can lay." Then at the end of Matthew's gospel (and from what was likely the same mount, known as the Mount of the Beatitudes), Jesus commissions his followers to go everywhere making disciples and "teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you," and gives his disciples the same "authority" with which he pronounced and practiced his original words.

What a difference it would have made if all professing Christians, now supposedly 2.4 billion of the 7.8 billion of the earth's inhabitants, had consistently taught and practiced sharing instead of hoarding, doing good for enemies instead of exacting revenge, living lives of sexual faithfulness instead of infidelity and promiscuity, and practicing consistent truth telling instead of defending and promoting falsehoods. Think of the kind of peaceful, safe and just world that would have created. And think of the difference it would have made in our environment if all so-called Christians would have followed the example of the one they laud as Lord. Our families and communities could--and should--have become demonstrations of what heaven on earth is intended to look like, a community of shalom where there is "not a needy person among them." 

So rather than our seeing Jesus's teachings as impractical and impossible, as far too many Christians do, we should see them as the heaven-sent version of Torah the whole world needs to live by if it is to survive and thrive.