However, this does not mean that there is universal agreement on how to read and interpret this sermon. In fact, there are nearly half a dozen opinions on the best way to understand the Lord’s assertions. (1) Martin Luther asserts that the discord surrounding the Sermon on the Mount is the devil’s masterstroke versus the gospel of the kingdom. He writes: “The infernal Satan has not found a single text in the Scriptures which he has more shamefully perverted, and made more error and false doctrine out of, than just this one which was by Christ himself ordered and appointed to neutralize false doctrine. This we may call a masterpiece of the devil . . . For, as long as the devil lives and the world abides, he will not cease to attack this chapter.” (2)

The moral and ethical tenor of the Lord’s words lends itself toward an overly formulaic perspective, as though Christ’s sermon was meant to clue everyone in on how to “make it.” “If heaven is what you seek, here’s what’s required,” Jesus seems to say; “you have to be meek and righteous and merciful and peaceable and ‘pure in heart.’” There is a tendency, I think, to see these words as how men and women can attain perfection (as if that were a human possibility). “Just follow these 10 steps.” “Just implement these 12 things.” This, I’d say, has beclouded the legacy of this sermon in a mire of conditional language in which we are determined to achieve entry into the heavenly domain, as if that is all that Christ said and all that he intended. Luther would refer to this as a “nasty and maggoty” interpretation of the words of Christ, (3) a conclusion with which I am in wholehearted agreement.

To understand the Sermon on the Mount, one must keep in mind its essential premise. At its core, this sermon amounts to an extended commentary on the Ten Commandments. You know: worship God; don’t curse; don’t skip church; don’t disobey your parents; don’t kill; don’t steal; don’t lie, and don’t be jealous or promiscuous (Ex 20:1–17). Perhaps you can recite these commandments from memory, hearkening back to your days in Sunday School. Perhaps, too, you were told something to the effect that every good little boy and girl does their best to keep these commandments. But, as is evinced by Christ himself, the stakes are much higher than merely “good vs. bad.” Rather, what’s in the balance is a matter of eternal life or eternal death.

After Jesus’s opening description of those who are most “blessed” in his Father’s kingdom (Matt 5:3–11), he embarks upon his examination of the law. This he does by suppressing the apparent misconceptions regarding the design of his ministry and message. “Don’t think,” Jesus says, “that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to abolish but to fulfill” (Matt 5:17). The public ministry of the Lord Jesus was still in its beginning stages and already misleading reports about what he was saying and doing were circulating throughout the regions of Judea, Samaria, Galilee, and beyond (Matt 4:25). Rumors were swirling about a “Man from Nazareth” who was going around healing the blind, raising the crippled, and liberating the oppressed.

Word on the street, though, was that this Galilean preacher was nothing but a troublemaker, one to be avoided at all costs. His talk of the kingdom did not mesh with his seemingly irreverent lifestyle. Jesus’s prevailing consideration of the immanence of the “kingdom of heaven” (Matt 4:17) did not seem to harmonize with his penchant for fraternizing with sinners, dining with lowlifes, and his audacious acceptance of a publican as a member of his entourage. From a certain point of view, Jesus’s body of work up to that point constituted an altogether different kingdom than what was being propagated by the religious bureaucracy of the day.

This, of course, was the predominant opinion of the Pharisees, that supremely devout group of Mosaic lawyers who had developed into the eminent authorities on all religious matters. We have a tendency, I think, to vilify and even demonize the Pharisees, as though they were some heretical group of biblical apostates. This simply is not the case. G. Campbell Morgan refers to them as “the Puritans of [the] Maccabean period in Jewish history.” (4) They rose to prominence during the four centuries of prophetic silence known as the “intertestamental period,” i.e., the historical divide between the Old and the New Testaments. Following in the footsteps of the prophetic scribe Ezra, the Pharisees took up the charge to uphold the precepts of Israel’s religious heritage during an age in which Israel herself was all but snuffed out. “The order of the Pharisees,” Morgan continues, “was an order of men who stood for purity in religion in an hour when Hebraism was threatened by contamination by Greek influence, which would have cut the nerve of the religion of Jehovah.”

From: https://www.1517.org/articles/the-gospel-of-a-fulfilled-law