The Sermon on the Mount: A Mission Impossible
Michael Battle
Trinity Church Boston
February 8, 2026
Lectionary: Matthew 5:13-20
When Jesus says, “ . . . unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus is saying something seemingly impossible. A Pharisee enjoyed the imprimatur of righteousness. To exceed the righteousness of a Pharisee to enter heaven would be like saying, unless your TV viewership ratings exceed that of the Superbowl, you will never win an Emmy Award.
Jesus tells a parable in Luke to explain this impossibility:
Two people went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. (Keep in mind, a tax collector was one of the most despised people in the first century) The Pharisee, prays, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ Meanwhile, the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ Jesus concludes that the sinner was justified rather than the Pharisee, because all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.
In Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, Ethan Hunt’s impossible mission, should he choose to accept it, is to destroy an evil AI that wants to blow up the world. Hunt will do anything, including going to the bottom of the ocean, and soaring to the highest point in the sky, to achieve his goal.
One movie reviewer writes, “I want to start off by acknowledging how amazing Tom Cruise is. The dude is literally risking his life for our entertainment. That is not an exaggeration. He does these insane stunts that all bear the risk of death just so that we can sit in an air-conditioned theater and enjoy ourselves for 8 hours. I mean 3 hours.”1 https://scriptshadow.net/movie-review-mission-impossible-the-final-reckoning/
So, going back to the plot of the movie, a singular AI is taking over the world, getting access to the nuclear arsenals. The only way to stop this is to get the AI’s original source code, which will be used to turn off the entire internet. This source code, however, is at the bottom of the Antarctic, in a crashed submarine.
Hunt, hunts for the source code and finds it where his team miraculously finds him. But the villain also hunts Hunt to take this code. Ethan Hunt then defeats the villain and purges the world of an omniscient AI.
Jesus doesn’t send a package with a self-destructing message to his disciples, but he does give them a mission impossible. The mission, if you choose to accept, is not addressed to individuals per se; instead the mission is addressed emphatically in the second-person plural: You are the salt of the earth. Salt does not exist for itself; rather it impacts, accelerates, and catalyzes others. The community of disciples does not exist for itself. The Jesus movement is meant to be for others and not necessarily for itself. Jesus’ community is by nature more than the sum of its parts.
The plot for Jesus is not cartoonish as it is for Ethan Hunt who has no problem distinguishing between hero and villain. They are neatly distinct in the movie. Jesus invites us, however, into something seemingly impossible to distinguish. The scribes (or religious scholars) and the Pharisees are seen as the guardians of the universe. They apparently guard complex and pregnant words like “righteousness”. It would be scandalous, perhaps even ridiculous to suggest that the Scribes and Pharisees would not enter the kingdom heaven; and yet Jesus states to his disciples, “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” These words are profoundly disruptive and insulting to these religious leaders and to others who were nicely situated in their insider status. Before the disciples can accept their mission, they have to deal with this conundrum of the Pharisees.
As Jesus’ followers today, what appears to be normal for us is that our sympathy is usually on the side of those who suffer and not with those causing or collaborating with the suffering. For any who feel excluded by the reigning social and moral order, it is important to discover that this feeling of being excluded has nothing to do with the movies we play on God; rather, our cycles of excluding others have more to do with our confusion between who is a hero and who is a villain. We naturally eat our popcorn and root for Tom Cruise not to accidentally fall to his death figuratively in the movie and literally on set. And so, in the same way, we believe that God wants to include us and carry us to a fullness of life even though following Jesus may probably cause scandal to the partisans of the reigning order. In other words, most of us identify with the victim in life and imagine our role as a superhero as we grab the rope to save the victim’s life. The problem is what happens when the movie is over—especially in those after production scenes when ‘being identified with the victim’ can come to be used as a weapon with which to harm others. In other words, we must constantly practice exceeding a false righteousness.
Martin Luther King, Jr., in a Birmingham jail, wrote this to clergy on April 16, 1963:
I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid. Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds. You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.2 MLK Jr., A Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
King, a follower of Jesus, reminds his smug clergy friends of hypocrisy. While clergy, like me, eat popcorn watching an imprisoned King on TV, such clergy find it easy to criticize King’s civil disturbance and would rather identify with their own comfortable “righteousness”. But King’s genius is in his reading of the Pharisee who could not understand the viewpoint of the villain as the Pharisee, prays, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.” King reminds us that we live in a world where almost no one identifies as a villain. And yet, Jesus seems to teach us that the way to heaven proceeds in the direction of the sinner, the villain, drawing closer to the Kingdom of heaven by confessing sin rather than righteousness.
The Impossible Mission is to come to God just as I am—an amazing grace. And to let others do the same.
[1] https://scriptshadow.net/movie-review-mission-impossible-the-final-reckoning/
[2] MLK Jr., A Letter from a Birmingham Jail.