There's a little girl in this painting who isn't listening to the sermon. Look at the bottom of the crowd. A girl in a gold robe, reaching up toward the white veil of the woman beside her. A butterfly has landed on the veil. She's trying to catch it. The Son of God is preaching the greatest sermon in human history a few feet away, and Carl Bloch painted a child playing. That's not a mistake. That's the point of the whole painting. Stay with me. Bloch painted this in 1877, one of twenty-three scenes of the life of Christ for the king's prayer chamber in a Danish castle chapel that had burned to the ground. It took him fourteen years to fill that chapel. Generations of artists have made pilgrimages to study these panels. This one might be his quietest sermon. Because look what's happening on this mountain. Jesus is seated on a rock. Seated, that matters. Rabbis sat down to teach with authority. Matthew 5:1. And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him. And the crowd has come up the mountain with Him. Old men. Mothers. Fishermen. The poor with their hands clasped. People who dropped their water jugs and baskets and staffs where they stood, work abandoned mid-task. A few skeptics at the edges with their arms crossed, listening anyway. And children. Close enough to chase butterflies. Now remember the last time God gave His law from a mountain. Exodus 19:12. And thou shalt set bounds unto the people round about, saying, Take heed to yourselves, that ye go not up into the mount, or touch the border of it: whosoever toucheth the mount shall be surely put to death. Sinai had a fence around it. Fire on the summit. Smoke like a furnace. A trumpet growing louder and louder until the people trembled. Touch the mountain, even if your animal wanders onto it, and you die. The people were so terrified they begged Moses: speak thou with us... but let not God speak with us, lest we die. That's the first mountain. God speaking law, and a death barrier between Him and everyone. Now this mountain. No fence. No fire. No trumpet. God is speaking law again: a law harder than Sinai's, one that goes after the heart and not just the hands, and the crowd is sitting at His feet. The sick pressed in close. The doubters allowed to stay. A little girl playing with a butterfly at the edge of His voice. The Bible itself makes this exact comparison, so you don't have to take my word for it. Hebrews 12:18. For ye are not come unto the mount that might be touched, and that burned with fire, nor unto blackness, and darkness, and tempest. Verse 22: But ye are come unto mount Sion... to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant. Same God. Same voice. Same authority. Matthew says when He finished, the people were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. Six times in this sermon He says: But I say unto you. The prophets said, thus saith the LORD. This man on the rock just says I. Everything is the same except one thing. The fence is gone. And look who got the front rows. Matthew tells you exactly who this congregation was, one chapter earlier. They brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatick, and those that had the palsy; and he healed them. Then came the multitudes. Then came the mountain. The audience for the greatest sermon ever preached was freshly healed epileptics, ex-demoniacs, and paralytics still getting used to their legs. Not one scribe in good standing. Not one clean résumé. The kingdom's constitution was announced to a crowd of the recently ruined. And His first word to them was Blessed. Not thou shalt not. Sinai opened with commands. This mountain opens with blessing and blessing aimed at the broken. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are they that mourn. The sermon starts by congratulating everyone the world had already written off. Now, the butterfly. Bloch chose that detail the way Michelangelo chose a half-inch of empty plaster. Because right in the middle of this sermon, Jesus does something no lawgiver had ever done. He points at nature. Behold the fowls of the air... Consider the lilies of the field... Take therefore no thought for the morrow. Look at the birds. Look at the flowers. Your Father runs all of it, so stop being afraid. And in Bloch's painting, one person on that mountain is already living it. She isn't anxious about the harvest. She isn't performing attention. She's delighting in a small created thing in the presence of its Creator, which is precisely what He's telling all the adults to do. The child chasing the butterfly isn't ignoring the sermon. She's the only one obeying it. Jesus would say it out loud later, when the disciples tried to shoo children away: Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. So find yourself in the crowd. Bloch painted every option. The adoring poor. The interested skeptic, arms folded, staying anyway. The worker who put down the jug. The one at the back, half-decided. Wherever you are in that crowd, you're on the mountain. That's already the miracle. Under the old fence, you'd be dead where you stand. The fence came down. The fire became a man in a red robe sitting on a rock, and His opening word to ruined people was: Blessed. You've been standing at the base of the mountain your whole life, waiting for the trumpet to stop. It stopped. Come up. Sit down. Bring the kids.