The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew chapters 5-7) was the first passage of Scripture that ever grabbed ahold of me in a way I couldn’t ignore. In this message, Jesus breathes the pure spirit of grace even as he applies the law with a strictness that only the author of the law could accomplish. In the first months after my conversion, I couldn’t get enough of these three chapters, and they became my constant companion as I memorized them, struggled with them, and learned to see the world through these words of Jesus.
I say all this partly to bear witness, and partly to explain how it came about that once upon a time I did a series of comic strips in which I explored the Sermon on the Mount by spoofing the most popular strips in the daily paper. The assignment I gave myself was to take the basic idea of one section of the sermon, and apply it satirically to a famous cartoon. And then work in a sheep, who was my main character in the Dr. Doctrine series. These Sermon the Mount Comix, though drawn in 1996, did not make it to publication back then, so they appear here on Scriptorium for the first time. I’ll put up one each day for the next couple of weeks. Read in sequence, they provide a running exposition of the Sermon on the Mount. It’s a bit disjointed, and it features talking sheep, and it’s a parody of the comics page … but it’s an exposition of the Sermon on the Mount anyway.
First up is a sheep who loves lasagna, hates Mondays, and misses the point of a metaphor.
