realized/future kingdom character community...

so, since my main goal right now here in Portland is to focus on building relationships, learning about the city, my neighborhood, and getting a team together...I thought i'd try to stay focused on studying the word by working through some scriptures and posting them on here...just to keep me accountable, and i can always use feedback...

anyway, i thought i'd work through the sermon on the mount first because it is proving to be a passage of scripture i need to dwell on, live in, and let it speak to me...so you get to do it with me, sort of...

but before I got to far into reading, i wanted to read up on the book of Matthew and try to have a wholistic view of Matthew as I studied chs. 5-7.  And Richard B. Hays in his book Moral Vision for the New Testament has been a great resource for me, so I started there, and here is what I came away from it with:

Hays writes that basically Matthew's goals in forming this narrative is to 1. display Christ as the ultimate teacher for the Jewish people, that Jesus is to be their teacher, 2. the formation of an alternative community with ultimate character, 3. and a sort of expectant/realized/present/future eschatology (Jeremy, Jared...I read that right?)... or more rightly the character of the community flows from that eschatology...

It's like Matthew is saying...Jesus is our teacher, our Savior, in whom the Kingdom character existed fully and now we, as a community of His disciples can live out His Kingdom character because He is still, in some form, with us.  So while the Kingdom has not come in its full form...because of its presence in Jesus and Jesus presence with us, it is here, because we are here.

This is definitely evident in the sermon on the mount, even as I reflect on all that I remember that is within it...Jesus comes as a teacher in the rabbinic tradition and begins to open the law to his disciples in the people with an authority that is greater than the scribes or pharisees, as Matthew notes at the end of ch. 7.  

I really hope and pray that this time of study will produce a better/stronger understanding of what/who the church is to be in our world, especially as I attempt to 'start' a new extension of it...