The most-quoted — and most half-quoted — verse in the Sermon. "Do not judge" (Geneva "Iudge not, that ye be not iudged") forbids the censor's chair: the appetite for verdicts, measured back "with the measure you measure" — the rabbis' own principle, middah keneged middah, measure for measure. But the chapter refuses to be quoted in half: verse 6 requires telling dogs from children, and verses 15–20 command fruit inspection. The Sermon bans the gavel, not the eyes. Then the workshop comedy: the splinter (karphos — a chip, a speck of straw; KJV's famous "mote") versus the beam (dokos — a roof-timber, the piece a builder lays across a house) — a joke drawn to scale by, tradition remembers, a builder's household (13:55 will call him "the carpenter's son"). "Hypocrite!" — the stage-actor word of 6:2, now aimed at the eye-surgeon playing to the gallery.

Pearls before swine. Verse 6 folds back on itself: dogs… swine… swine trample, dogs turn and tear — an A-B-B-A envelope, the sentence's own teeth arranged in a ring. "What is holy" is sacrificial language (consecrated meat, not for scavengers); the pearls are the Gospel's first — one more will come, a pearl worth everything (13:45-46). The instruction sits deliberately beside "do not judge": discernment about audiences is not the censoriousness verse 1 forbids.

Keep asking. The three imperatives are present tense — Greek's continuous aspect: keep on asking, keep on seeking, keep on knocking. For once the NWT's signature habit of spelling out verbal aspect ("Keep on asking… keep on seeking… keep on knocking") is exactly what the grammar says (KJV "Ask, and it shall be given you"). The two absurd gifts are lookalikes chosen by a Galilean eye: the round flat loaf that could pass for a stone (the tempter had already noticed the resemblance, 4:3), and the eel-bodied catfish of the lake — snake-shaped, and unclean besides — for a serpent. "If you, then, being evil" — the Sermon's bleakest line of anthropology, dropped in passing inside its warmest promise, in the rabbis' own argument-form (qal va-chomer, "how much more").

The Golden Rule — signed. "Everything that you want men to do for you — do the same for them as well." The negative form was already ancient wisdom: Hillel, one generation earlier — "what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; that is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary"; Tobit 4:15; Confucius, five centuries before. The Sermon states it positive — not a fence against harm but a commission to initiate — and then signs it with the Sermon's own bookend: "for this is the Law and the Prophets," the phrase that opened the body of the discourse at 5:17, now closing it. Everything between the bookends is what fulfillment looks like.

Two gates, two roads — and a squeezed one. The wide gate opens onto a roomy road (eurychōros — broad country, plenty of company); the narrow gate onto a road that is "pressed" — tethlimmenē, from thlibō, the root English meets as "tribulation": the way itself is squeezed. The KJV's "strait is the gate" has spent four centuries being misread as straight — strait as in straitjacket and the Bering Strait, narrow, not unbent (ASV keeps "straitened"; NIV "small is the gate"). The Two Ways is scripture's oldest fork — "I have set before you life and death" (Deuteronomy 30:19), Psalm 1's two paths — and it became the early church's first catechism form: the Didache (met two pages ago growing a doxology) opens with the words "There are two ways, one of life and one of death."

Fruit inspection, commanded. One page after "do not judge," a direct order to evaluate: the chapter polices its own balance. The false prophets arrive costumed — "in the clothing of sheep, but inside are ravenous wolves" (the shelf built this English idiom; Tyndale's coinage runs through KJV to every playground since) — and the test is agricultural, not cosmetic: "from their fruits you will recognize them," said twice, an envelope around the orchard (vv 16, 20). The counter-crop is this site's oldest pair: "thorns… thistles" — the exact two words the Greek Bible uses for the curse on the ground in Eden (Genesis 3:18): no grapes grow on the curse's own vegetation. And verse 19 is a quotation the first readers would have caught: "every tree not producing good fruit is cut down and thrown into fire" — the Baptist's sentence, word for word (3:10); the Sermon countersigns John.

The Sermon's most sobering sentence. "Not everyone who says to me 'Lord, Lord'" — the doubled address of urgent devotion — "but the one who does": the doing-verb (poieō) now takes over the chapter (vv 21, 24, 26). The rejected résumé is the startling part: prophecy, exorcism, works of power, all "in your name," and the verdict does not dispute a line of it. What it says instead is relational, and final: "I never knew you" — religious performance, even successful religious performance, without acquaintance. "Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness" (anomia — KJV "ye that work iniquity") is Psalm 6:8 with the psalmist's seat taken: Jesus quotes David's dismissal of his enemies as words he himself will say "on that day" — the calm assumption of the Judge's chair by the preacher of this sermon is the chapter's quietest, largest claim.

The two builders — and the fool-word comes home. The prudent man (phronimos — sense, foresight; the word will pick wise virgins and faithful stewards later in this book) built on the rock; the other man is a mōros — and the Sermon's own thread completes: the salt that "goes foolish" (5:13), the insult too costly to throw at a brother (5:22), and now, earned honestly at last: the man who hears and does not do. The scenery is Galilee's actual geology — in summer, a smooth sand flat IS a streambed; the wadi decides in winter, when "the rain came down, and the rivers came." The two storms are told in matching triplets (TLB enjoys itself: "the rains came in torrents"), differing by one verb — the storm fell upon the first house, struck against the second — while the hinge verb is the simplest in the story: it did not fall… it fell. "For it had been founded on the rock" — pluperfect: the decisive work was already done, invisibly, before the weather arrived. And the Sermon's last red words are a warning that lands like thunder: "and its fall was great." No altar call; a collapsing house.

The narrator returns — the first black ink in three chapters. "And it came to be, when Jesus finished these words" — this is a formula, and Matthew will lay it down five times (7:28; 11:1; 13:53; 19:1; 26:1), once at the end of each great discourse: the visible joints of the five-block architecture proposed back at 5:1, promissory note paid. The crowds were "astounded" (exeplēssonto — struck out of themselves; KJV "astonished"), and the reason is professional: "he was teaching them as one having authority (exousia), and not as their scribes." The scribal method was citation — rulings handed down in the name of earlier teachers; this preacher's only footnote, six times on this hillside, was "but I say to you." The word exousia is planted where the book can reach it: its very last sentence will claim "all authority, in heaven and on earth" (28:18). One small thing more: in all of chapter 7's sermon-text there is not a single proper name — the first name on the page belongs to the narrator, and it is Jesus, named here for the first time on this site's Matthew.