Luther's Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount began as a series of weekday sermons on Matthew 5–7 preached in the Wittenberg parish church between 1530 and 1532, while Johannes Bugenhagen, the city pastor, was away organizing the Reformation in Lübeck. Hearers took the sermons down, the text was edited, and Luther supplied a preface for the printed edition of 1532. The work therefore carries the tone of the pulpit rather than the lecture hall: it addresses a congregation that had already heard the Gospel preached for a decade and now needed to know how that Gospel shaped ordinary life in a town, a household, and a trade.
The preface names the two errors the commentary is written against. The first is the medieval reading in which the hard sayings of the Sermon—turning the other cheek, giving to everyone who asks, refusing oaths—are counsels of perfection binding only on monks, so that the common Christian is excused from them. The second is the reading of the radical reformers, whom Luther calls Schwärmer, who took the same sayings as civil law for Christians and concluded that a believer may hold no office, own no property, swear no oath, and wield no sword. Against both, Luther develops the distinction that governs the whole exposition: the one Christian is at once a person before God and a person in office. Before God he stands under Christ's kingdom, where he suffers wrong, forgives, and claims nothing. In his office as father, magistrate, judge, or soldier he stands under God's ordering of the world, where he is bound to protect, punish, and resist evil. Christ, Luther insists, is not here telling princes how to govern or peasants how to farm; he is telling his disciples how to live as Christians in whatever station they already occupy.
From this follows a second insistence, that the Sermon does not teach how one becomes righteous before God. Its hearers are already disciples, already in grace, and its demands describe the fruit of faith rather than its ground. The Beatitudes are read not as a ladder of merit but as a portrait of the Christian under the cross: poor in spirit because God has stripped away confidence in self, meek because the world has nothing to offer. The chapter on anxiety and the Lord's Prayer becomes an extended treatment of trust, and the closing warnings about false prophets and houses built on sand are turned against teachers who preach works or dreams in place of the Word.
The commentary has endured because it is the fullest working-out of Luther's two-kingdoms thinking applied directly to a text that seems to resist it, and because it refuses to let the Sermon be either domesticated or weaponized. Readers who find Luther's distinction between person and office too neat will still find here the most sustained pastoral reckoning with the Sermon that the Reformation produced.
Who should read this: pastors and lay readers wrestling with how the Sermon's absolute demands bear on daily vocation, and anyone who wants to see Luther's ethics in homiletic rather than polemical form. It is not for those seeking a verse-by-verse philological commentary, nor for readers who want the Sermon read as a program for nonviolent social order; Luther argues against precisely that.
Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount
by Martin Luther
For For readers of the Gospels: Luther preaching through Matthew 5–7 on the Christian in the world, the two kingdoms and daily life. Practical sermons, not lectures.
Should I read this?
Sermons through Matthew 5–7 on how a Christian lives in the world: the two kingdoms, office and person, and the Beatitudes as daily life.
How it proceeds
Independent intensities, 0–5 — what the work is made of, not how good it is.
Luther's Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount began as a series of weekday sermons on Matthew 5–7 preached in the Wittenberg parish church between 1530 and 1532, while Johannes Bugenhagen, the city pastor, was away organizing the Reformation in Lübeck. Hearers took the sermons down, the text was edited, and Luther supplied a preface for the printed edition of 1532. The work therefore carries the tone of the pulpit rather than the lecture hall: it addresses a congregation that had already heard the Gospel preached for a decade and now needed to know how that Gospel shaped ordinary life in a town, a household, and a trade.
The preface names the two errors the commentary is written against. The first is the medieval reading in which the hard sayings of the Sermon—turning the other cheek, giving to everyone who asks, refusing oaths—are counsels of perfection binding only on monks, so that the common Christian is excused from them. The second is the reading of the radical reformers, whom Luther calls Schwärmer, who took the same sayings as civil law for Christians and concluded that a believer may hold no office, own no property, swear no oath, and wield no sword. Against both, Luther develops the distinction that governs the whole exposition: the one Christian is at once a person before God and a person in office. Before God he stands under Christ's kingdom, where he suffers wrong, forgives, and claims nothing. In his office as father, magistrate, judge, or soldier he stands under God's ordering of the world, where he is bound to protect, punish, and resist evil. Christ, Luther insists, is not here telling princes how to govern or peasants how to farm; he is telling his disciples how to live as Christians in whatever station they already occupy.
From this follows a second insistence, that the Sermon does not teach how one becomes righteous before God. Its hearers are already disciples, already in grace, and its demands describe the fruit of faith rather than its ground. The Beatitudes are read not as a ladder of merit but as a portrait of the Christian under the cross: poor in spirit because God has stripped away confidence in self, meek because the world has nothing to offer. The chapter on anxiety and the Lord's Prayer becomes an extended treatment of trust, and the closing warnings about false prophets and houses built on sand are turned against teachers who preach works or dreams in place of the Word.
The commentary has endured because it is the fullest working-out of Luther's two-kingdoms thinking applied directly to a text that seems to resist it, and because it refuses to let the Sermon be either domesticated or weaponized. Readers who find Luther's distinction between person and office too neat will still find here the most sustained pastoral reckoning with the Sermon that the Reformation produced.
Who should read this: pastors and lay readers wrestling with how the Sermon's absolute demands bear on daily vocation, and anyone who wants to see Luther's ethics in homiletic rather than polemical form. It is not for those seeking a verse-by-verse philological commentary, nor for readers who want the Sermon read as a program for nonviolent social order; Luther argues against precisely that.
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