said that to a small group of people who were locked in because they were afraid. Sound familiar? We’ll come back to that. After all, the programmatic statement of God’s kingdom in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7) isn’t simply about ‘ethics’, as people often imagine in our shrunken Western world. It’s about mission. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit … the meek … the mourners … the peacemakers … the hungry-for-justice people’ and so on. We all too easily assume that Jesus is saying ‘try hard to be