Summary: In some ways the Beatitudes have become so familiar to many Christians that they miss how counter-cultural they are. One way to see them in fresh ways is to read them in unfamiliar translations that can help uncover at least some of how Jesus' first hearers might have received them.
We humans sometimes make up phrases to reflect conventional wisdom. The author Kate Bowler wrote about some of those phrases in her book, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved.
The phrases can be reassuring. "God never gives you more than you can handle," for example. That one, however, raises the question of why our mental health institutions are so busy helping overwhelmed people. Or this phrase you sometimes hear spoken to grieving parents of a dead child: "God needed another angel." It's meant to be reassuring but Bowler calls the god it depicts "sadistic."1
This matter of making up sayings is not new. For instance, the point of the book of Job was to challenge the conventional wisdom that suffering is a sign that someone sinned.
So in the ministry of Jesus, we find that he, too, challenges conventional wisdom. And there's no better example of that than the Beatitudes, which we read from the book of Matthew today.
The Beatitudes are countercultural. They take what people think are true sayings and they turn them on their head. The Beatitudes, in other words, make people stop and say, "Wait. What?" And that response is a clue that maybe we haven't fully appreciated the way Jesus challenges the systems that rule our culture and our world.
Jesus asks us to stop and reimagine how the world would be different if we actually tried to live out the values of love, compassion, mercy and justice instead of the ideas our culture often values -such as the importance of power and wealth and consumerism and mindless entertainment.
The Jesus who spoke the Beatitudes isn't the meek-and-mild child we imagined when we first met him in the manger in Bethlehem. Rather, he's out to shake up our world in fundamental ways and to change us.
Over the years some people have tried to tame or domesticate the Beatitudes. The famous TV preacher Robert Schuller, for instance, even once wrote a book called The Be (Happy) Attitudes. Jesus' Beatitudes, however, weren't designed as a recipe for happiness but, rather, as a way of understanding what the reign of God is all about. That reign, of course, doesn't exclude happiness, but being reviled and persecuted and called evil things on account of our love of Jesus seems like an odd way to achieve happiness. And it's meant to sound odd.
The term Beatitude, by the way, comes to us through the Latin translation of the Bible called the Vulgate because each verse begins with the words beati sunt, meaning "blessed are." And although today we read the Beatitudes as they are found in what's commonly called the Sermon on the Mount from the book of Matthew, you also can find some Beatitudes in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Luke in what's sometimes called the Sermon on the Plain. There, however, four Beatitudes are followed by four Woes, such as "Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep."
So you may have heard the Beatitudes dozens of times in your life, but just for today, let's pretend that we are hearing them for the very first time. To help with that, we'll use several different translations.
A footnote in that translation says that its use of the word "hopeless" there instead of the traditional phrase "poor in spirit" does not "refer to 'humility' but to those who continue to look to God for help in the midst of their present, needy state."2
And let's also remember that when Jesus began his ministry among the very first words he said were that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, or has come near. He was telling people that God's reign is not limited to the afterlife in sweet heaven but, rather, can be experienced this very day if we live by God's values, which a few minutes ago we identified as of love, compassion, mercy and justice.
So what Jesus seems to be saying here is that people who have come to the end of their human resources for fixing the problems they face can be glad that they haven't really run completely out of resources because God is the God of possibilities and God can find a way even when we can't.
Notice that no timeline is promised here. That's because all of us who have ever mourned the death of someone we love know that grief really never ends. Rather, we eventually accommodate ourselves to the reality of the loss. And one way we do that is through the comfort given to us by others, sometimes merely by their presence. Beyond that, of course, we hold to the hope that one day we may be reunited with lost loved ones in God's presence.
This Beatitude is talking about people who seem powerless by earthly standards. But many such people know that earthly power is fleeting, unreliable, sometimes destructive. Recognizing that, they can accept the world as God's beautiful gift to everyone, and that is riches enough. And it's helpful here to think of "the land" in the way Native Americans often do -as something we don't own but, rather, something to which we belong and from which we can learn.
Righteousness can refer to individual piety, of course, and the world could use more of that. But Jesus seems more interested in critiquing and fixing systems that crush others than in whether someone prays three times a day or never says anything stronger than "darn." Righteousness calls for justice for all. Remember that Jesus called out the hypocrites who pretended to be pious but were simply whited sepulchers. He had little patience with people who prayed loudly in public but supported an economy that favored the wealthy.
Reputations get around. If you forgive someone for something, don't be surprised if that forgiven person lets others know of your kindness. Just as vengeance given results in vengeance received, in the end, mercy comes back to the merciful, and conflict in the world is thereby reduced.
Heart here, of course, is a metaphor for our center, our essence. How our hearts got that designation is a story for another day. But having a pure heart surely means that one has been forgiven, redeemed, rescued from evil. And when we remove evil, what's left to see? God, of course. Now, there are people who seem unable to see God anywhere and people who see God everywhere. Cast your lot with the latter group.
Peacemakers - male and female - can be thought of as direct descendants of God because God is the ultimate peacemaker, reconciling humanity to God through Christ. That means peace is not simply the absence of war but, rather, an atmosphere in which humanity can flourish. It's the task to which Christ, who is our peace, calls all of us.
Who gets persecuted or harassed for trying to be righteous? The goody-two-shoes people. That's the dismissive term they get called, anyway, even when they aren't virtue signaling by being ostentatiously righteous. Rather, they're the people trying to discern and do God's will. In fact, Jesus says that if you live by God's will, you can live in the kingdom of heaven today.
Being reviled and persecuted doesn't sound like the kind of job description for which most of us would sign up. But, look. Christianity is not an easy faith. It calls for sacrifice, for following someone who loved us enough to be executed for us. Jesus here is simply telling us what the author of Psalm 30 told us: Mourning may last through the night but joy comes in the morning.
Imagine a world in which people really tried to live by the Beatitudes. Well, we can do more than imagine it. We can help bring such a peaceful, loving world into existence by following the One who told us how we can be blessed. And we can begin today. May it be so.
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