The Sermon on the Plain Intro (Luke 6:17-19)

Luke next records some of the major teaching that Jesus gave His disciples. It is remarkably similar to the large portion of teaching that Matthew records in chapters 5-7 of his Gospel. That sermon is usually referred to as, “The Sermon on the Mount.” This is a problem for a lot of readers because Luke starts his record of this teaching by saying, “…and He came down with them and stood on a level place…” So, people have referred to this as the sermon on the plain.

What do we have here? Two separate events? The same one poorly recorded? Did Luke copy Matthew, cut a bunch of content and get the setting wrong? Did Matthew copy Luke and add a bunch of stuff? Did they both copy a common source? Did they both copy and edit two different sources?

The fact is that none of that likely matters. If you follow the career of any itinerate speaker, or any leader of any movement, you know that they repeat ideas and concepts—even whole speeches—all the time. It is likely that Jesus taught all of these ideas repeatedly. Here in Luke’s Gospel we see that Jesus is speaking to His apostles, His other followers and disciples, as well as crowds of people merely interested in healings. He is likely to teach in a lot of these settings. Also, many of the ideas from Matthew’s recording that are not present in Luke’s retelling will appear elsewhere in Luke.

All of that being the case, it is still a strong possibility that the two retellings in Luke and Matthew are the same event. What is translated as “plain” in Luke is really just “flat place” as seen above. In Matthew, Jesus goes up a mountain and teaches. In Luke Jesus comes down from the peak to a flat place, but He needn’t have completely left the mountainous region. Luke likely has merely edited out a lot more content than Matthew to suit his thesis. Matthew himself has likely summarized the content of Jesus’s sermon in chapters 5-7.