I had read the Sermon on the Mount more times than I can count before I noticed it.
I was working on my last post about Jesus’ words, “You are the salt of the earth” and “You are the light of the world,” when I came to Matthew 5:16:
“Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”
“Your Father.“
This was the first time in Matthew that Jesus referred to God as Father. He hadn’t used the word when expressing the Beatitudes. But beginning here, he used Father seventeen times before the Sermon ended – ten of them in Matthew 6:1–18 alone.
Once I noticed it, I couldn’t unsee it. I began to wonder if Matthew was giving us another important lens through which to read the Sermon on the Mount. Maybe we haven’t paid enough attention to the Father.
Jesus Didn’t Invent the Idea
It is sometimes said that calling God “Father” would have been completely foreign – or even unthinkable – to Jesus’ Jewish audience. That’s overstating the case.
The Hebrew Scriptures occasionally described God as Father. Moses asked Israel, “Is he not your Father, your Creator?” (Deuteronomy 32:6). Isaiah prayed, “You, LORD, are our Father” (Isaiah 63:16). Other Jewish writings before Jesus also used Father-language for God.
Jesus didn’t introduce an entirely new idea. But the frequency and familiarity with which he used it in the Sermon were striking.
Jesus repeatedly talked with his disciples about “your Father.” Not just my Father, but your Father!
Your Father sees. Your Father knows. Your Father forgives. Your Father feeds. Your Father gives.
And right in the middle of the Sermon, Jesus taught them to pray to their Father: “Our Father in heaven…”
Father became part of the vocabulary through which they understood their life with God.
Children Look Like Their Father
We encountered this a couple of weeks ago in “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” I called it the Family Resemblance.
Jesus returned to that idea only a few verses after mentioning “your Father” for the first time. He told his disciples to love their enemies and pray for those who persecuted them “that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:44–45).
Then Jesus pointed to the Father. The Father caused the sun to rise on both the evil and the good. He sent rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
The point wasn’t simply that God had issued an extraordinarily difficult command to love enemies. Jesus grounded that kind of love in the character of the Father. And that children bear the family resemblance.
I won’t belabor the point, but it’s worth remembering as we continue. Maybe Jesus wasn’t merely telling his disciples what to do. He was showing them what their Father was like.
Who’s Watching?
Then we get to Matthew 6, and Father-language suddenly appears everywhere.
Jesus addressed three familiar Jewish practices: giving to those in need, prayer, and fasting. He assumed his disciples would practice them.
The problem was the audience. “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them,” Jesus said (Matthew 6:1).
That phrase may unlock the entire section: Who’s watching?
Jesus described people who gave, prayed, and fasted so others would notice. He repeatedly redirected their attention away from the crowd: Your Father sees what is done in secret.
That changes everything. Kingdom righteousness isn’t performance. It doesn’t require applause or even recognition. The Father’s attention is enough.
And that raises an uncomfortable question for those of us who have spent a lifetime around Christianity: How much of my spiritual life depends upon someone else noticing?
Our Father in Heaven
Right in the middle of this discussion, Jesus taught his disciples how to pray:
“Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done…”
Notice the tension.
Our Father.
There was intimacy there, but Jesus didn’t make God smaller to make him approachable.
He is our Father in heaven. His name is still holy. His Kingdom is still coming. His will is still to be done. Intimacy didn’t replace reverence. Jesus held the two together.
And given everything we’ve been exploring over the past year, something else jumps out: Father and Kingdom belong together.
The God whose Kingdom Jesus announced was the God he taught his disciples to call Father.
The King is Father.
That means living in the Kingdom isn’t merely submitting to a different set of moral teachings. It’s learning to live in relationship with the Father whose Kingdom has come near.
Your Father Knows
That became especially important when Jesus talked about worry. He didn’t simply say, stop worrying. He said, “Your heavenly Father knows what you need” (Matthew 6:32).
The birds are fed. The flowers are clothed. Your Father knows what you need.
Then, in Matthew 7, Jesus compared God with earthly parents who knew how to give their children good gifts: “How much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (7:11)
The Father Jesus described isn’t merely watching to see whether his children measure up. He sees, knows, provides, and gives.
And His children can learn to trust Him.
Maybe We’ve Been Reading the Sermon Wrong
This matters as we move into the rest of the Sermon on the Mount.
It’s remarkably easy to turn Jesus’ words into another version of what sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism1, the assumption that Christianity is largely about being a good person, with God somewhere in the background helping us when we need him.
Read that way, the Sermon becomes a particularly demanding collection of moral teachings: Don’t get angry. Don’t lust. Keep your promises. Love your enemies. Give. Pray. Forgive. Don’t worry. Don’t judge.
Try harder. Do better. Be good.
But what if we have missed the Father standing behind all of it? Jesus wasn’t simply describing how good religious people behaved. He was describing a people learning to live under God’s reign as children of their Father.
So as we continue through the Sermon, maybe we should keep asking two questions:
What does this tell us about the Father?
What does a people increasingly bearing his family resemblance look like?
Before we go any further into the Sermon on the Mount, maybe we need to notice who has been standing behind it all along.
Your Father in heaven.
1Smith, C., & Denton, M. L. (2005). Soul searching: The religious and spiritual lives of american teenagers. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Practical Theology Today 