Peter Berger, writing in The American Interest, here:
The British writer Ferdinand Mount described the Sermon of the Mount as perhaps the greatest sermon ever, but that it was written for bachelors—that is, for individuals with no responsibility for the future. Probably Jesus’ message about the Kingdom of God was apocalyptic—a message about a radical shift in the nature of reality (which means that Paul was not far off). We know that many of his followers, and perhaps Jesus himself, expected that the apocalyptic event would happen in their own lifetime. Thus, as some scholars have put it, the moral teachings of Jesus (and possibly Paul’s as well) were an “interim ethic”—how to live in the short time before the coming of the Kingdom. If you expect the world to end next week, you won’t bother to change the oil, though you still want the windshield wipers to work. In that interpretation, the Sermon on the Mount was meant to describe the world after the coming of the Kingdom (though some of Jesus’ followers may want to anticipate this blessed condition in their present lives). Be this as it may, it is very doubtful indeed that Jesus intended these teachings to be a behavioral code for the next two millennia. In any case, any society larger than an Amish village would not survive for very long if it tried to live by such a code.
This is good as far as it goes, and God knows we don't read enough people talking about these issues, but it does seem to miss two things.
One, the Sermon on the Mount isn't just for bachelors. It's also for spinsters.
Apocalyptic ethics overthrow all human conventions because true repentance is impossible without them. There are no more husbands, fathers, wives, mothers and children per se in the kingdom of God, which is coming suddenly with the appearance of the Son of Man in the clouds of heaven. There is no time for funerals, for working at a job, for building bigger barns in your retirement to hold all your increase. "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother" (Mk.3:34f.).
Two, the world after the coming of the kingdom is not really describable because it is transformed by divine action.
What is remarkable about it is how few, however, take seriously what this means in terms of justice in the teaching of Jesus. The assumption is usually that there are many human players left in a too-worldly kingdom of God populated by shiny happy people who have received the grace of God, whereas Jesus is at pains to describe God's coming judgment in which evil and evil-doers are swept away. The angels first come at the harvest not to rapture the few into the air to ever be with the Lord, but to gather the many tares and hurl them into the fire. As interim ethics, Jesus' teaching is survival ethics, and temporary because terrestrial, designed to help his hearers escape the wrath that is coming. Beyond that, the future is not really ours to see.
Perhaps more than anything else, it is the failure of this vision to materialize historically which has been lurking in the background in the mind of modernity and fueling the conviction that God is dead.
