JESUS WAS ONLY days away from his arrest and crucifixion. He had tried to tell this to his closest disciples, but they did not yet understand — perhaps could not. They were still giddy with anticipation from what happened earlier, when their master rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. That symbolic act evoked ancient prophecies of the Messiah, and the crowds cheered for what they took to be the coming of their King, a descendant of David and the one who might save them from the oppressive domination of Rome.

Later, as Jesus taught the crowds who gathered around him in the temple courts, his opponents came to challenge his authority and undermine his credibility. They tried to engage him in debate, but were constantly outmatched; Jesus kept them on their rhetorical heels as he asked them question after question that they couldn’t answer.

His final puzzle began with a deceptively simple question: “Whose son is the Messiah?” They took the bait. I imagine them scoffing to themselves, thinking, Humph, that’s an easy one. Everyone knows that, even these dull-minded sheep crowded around us! “The son of David,” they answered confidently.

But then Jesus sprang his trap. He quoted the first line of Psalm 110, a psalm of David referring to the Messiah, that is, to God’s anointed king: “The Lord said to my lord: ‘Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.’” The psalm portrays God as the ultimate ruler who makes the Davidic king his second-in-command, to sit at his right and rule with his authority. “So, then,” Jesus asked the Pharisees, “how is it that David calls the Messiah ‘My lord,’ if the Messiah is his son?”

Having nothing intelligent to say, having no snappy comeback, they fell silent. And as Matthew tells us, “from that day on no one dared to ask him any more questions” (Matt 22:46).

But there was a perfectly good answer to Jesus’ question, if the Pharisees or Jesus’ other opponents would only have opened their minds to the possibility: their long-awaited Messiah was not merely an earthly son of David, but the Son of God.

THE BLOCK OF teaching known as the Sermon on the Mount, in chapters five through seven of the gospel of Matthew, has some of the most beloved and best-known words of Jesus. The Sermon contains treasures that would repay a lifetime of study and prayerful reflection; I personally have written an entire book on just a handful of the opening verses alone, those counterintuitive words of blessing known as the Beatitudes. We’ll get there shortly. But I want you to know from the outset that this study of the Sermon — indeed, any study — can only introduce you to those riches. I hope you will read and meditate on these wise and sometimes surprising words of Jesus, and come back to them again and again.

Before we begin, however, we need some context. For that, I turn to Psalm 110, the psalm Jesus quoted that day in the Jerusalem temple to silence his critics. It’s one of the few so-called “royal” psalms in the Psalter, psalms about the Davidic king and his relationship to God. Again, it’s important to remember that in the context of the Old Testament, the word “messiah” refers to God’s anointed but earthly king. Psalm 110 portrays the messiah as God’s vice-regent or co-ruler — an exalted office indeed for a human being!

I encourage you to read the psalm for yourself; it’s only seven verses. Some believe that the psalm was probably spoken aloud by a court prophet as part of a coronation ritual whenever a new king was crowned. The words and images are a bit cryptic, but they paint a supremely triumphant picture: by divine decree, God’s anointed king will crush his enemies and reign supreme over all the nations.

Now imagine someone reading such a psalm as the nation descends into idolatry under the unholy rule of a whole series of corrupt kings. The northern kingdom of Israel falls to Assyria. The southern kingdom of Judah is defeated by Babylon; Jerusalem itself, the city of David, is laid waste and the people are carried off into exile.

What now? How must the psalm be read? The more things deteriorated in the present, the more the psalm was read as pointing toward the future. The thought would have been something like: Today’s messiahs have failed us, but one day the Messiah, with a capital M, will come. That Messiah, at last, will be a true son of David and everything God’s anointed king was meant to be.

That was the hope awakened in the crowd as they cheered Jesus on Palm Sunday. That was the hope that prompted the mother of James and John to ask Jesus a favor: that her boys would occupy positions of honor on Jesus’ right and left hands when he came into his throne. And that was the hope that burned in Peter’s heart as he declared his master to be the Christ, the Messiah.

But sadly, as Peter’s case demonstrates, no one truly understood what it meant for Jesus to be the prophesied King. What kind of king would he be? A warrior riding proudly into Jerusalem on the back of a mighty stallion? Or a humble healer bouncing along on the back of a donkey? In short, if Jesus was King, what kind of kingdom was he inaugurating in his ministry?

That, I think, is the question at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount.

Clearly, the Bible portrays Jesus as King. The repeated use of Psalm 110 in the New Testament is but one way of seeing this. Psalm 11o, for example, portrays the anointed king as a “priest in the order of Melchizedek” (vs. 4). The writer of the book of Hebrews takes off from there, using the same language and taking three whole chapters to show how this applies to Jesus: he is the Messiah or anointed king, the Son of God, and our High Priest in the order of Melchizedek.

But again, what kind of King would Jesus be, and what kind of kingdom was he inaugurating? This is the overall theme of the Sermon on the Mount. Even before we get to the Sermon, however, Matthew already points us thematically in that direction. As we’ll explore next, the first four chapters of his gospel put the theme of God’s kingdom before us again and again, preparing us for what Jesus will have to say on the subject.