know about planes going through the sound barrier is that you hear a loud explosion. Many of Jesus’ contemporaries would have said that this was a good picture of the effect he had. Jesus wasn’t simply a great teacher, and if we try to describe him like that we will misunderstand him. This passage is the beginning of the famous ‘Sermon on the Mount’, which runs through chapters 5, 6 and 7 of Matthew’s gospel, and sets out, in Matthew’s presentation of it, the main themes of Jesus’ proclamation. People