When modern readers encounter the Sermon on the Mount, the reaction can often by one of discomfort. The Beatitudes sound beautiful, even poetic, but also impossibly demanding. Meekness, poverty of spirit, mercy, purity of heart, hunger for righteousness, joy in persecution — these do not sit easily within our contemporary culture. As a result, the Sermon on the Mount is frequently admired but rarely treated as practical, let alone normative.
St Augustine would have found this baffling. Writing at the end of the fourth century, in his work On the Sermon on the Mount, Augustine insists that Christ’s words here are not a set of unattainable ideals, nor a spiritual appendix for particularly devout souls. They are, he says, nothing less than “the perfect standard of the Christian life”.
