29 May 2005                                                                           Matthew 5: 1-12

Some of you may have looked ahead and realized that Lent is going to be late this year—Ash Wednesday is March 9.  That gives us an interesting opportunity.  Today our lectionary has begun the Sermon on the Mount.  Unfortunately, it does not finish it before or after Lent.  This is, I think, a serious mistake.  The Sermon on the Mount is not a random collection of Jesus’ teaching, put together by Matthew.  Matthew has collected the teachings, of course—the way Jesus delivers this discourse reminds us of Moses on the mountain.  Jesus undoubtedly said the same and similar things many times in his ministry.  But there is a logic here—the essence of life in the Kingdom of God distilled into three succinct chapters.  So with the Bishop’s permission, I am following the lectionary until Lent and then going on in order to finish the Sermon on the Mount by Palm Sunday.  I encourage you to read as many different translations of Matthew 5, 6, and 7 as you can, thinking and praying deeply over what you read.  (You might slip a commentary in as well, or re-read Dallas Willard’s treatment in The Divine Conspiracy.) I am coming to believe that we are to read everything else in the Bible in the light of these sayings—interpreting Paul and John and Revelation and all the rest through them, rather than the other way around.

This is the essence of Jesus’ explanation of what Kingdom life looks like in this world.  You might say that the whole point of Jesus’ living and dying and his sending of the Spirit was to produce a people who could live like he taught in these several chapters.  To be a Christian is not merely to believe something or to have undergone certain rites or to have had certain experiences.  The Kingdom of God is a matter of a life that is lived—a life that looks like Jesus’ own life and is described for us here. 

Today we begin with the Beatitudes.  They are peculiar sayings.  In the world in which Jesus first pronounced them, they had social and political as well as religious implications.  Makarioi is the Greek word, for which we have been given words like “Blessed” and “Happy.”   Perhaps, as Dallas Willard said, our modern version should be something like, “well-off.”  People who live in the Kingdom are the really well-off, they have the good life—at least they have a taste of it now: the full experience—being perfectly well-off—is for a future time—nobody has that yet, not even, nor especially, those in this world who think they do.    Still, I am not happy with these other translations.  “Happy” seems too much like the “pursuit of happiness” and “well-off” sounds too much like a consumer word.  Neither gets at the deep meaning of “blessed.”  So maybe we should use this word, remembering that it is not purely religious but has social and political implications.  If I could figure out how to make an adjective out of shalom, perhaps that would do.  Shalom is the state of peace and well-being that comes in the end, at the renewal of all things, which a person may be able to get a taste of yet in this life.  It is what life in the Kingdom will be like, and so is like to some degree now for those on the inside.  This is what we pray for each other when we exchange the “peace” at Mass.

The very first Beatitude underlies the whole sermon: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”  It doesn’t really make any difference whether we read Matthew’s “poor in spirit” or Luke’s simple “poor.”  They mean the same thing.  Jesus looked around at the people who had followed Him.  Many, if not most, of them were poor and powerless.  He pronounced them “blessed.”  What did he mean?  Their poverty did not keep them from the blessings of the Kingdom of God.  Now this did not mean that their poverty was a good thing—although there may be something to the idea that identifying with the poor is a sign of the presence of the Kingdom—maybe that is the meaning of “poor in spirit.”  Jesus’ meaning is a little more complex, I think.  The Kingdom of God is what God is up to in this world.  He is re-creating this present world so that it will come to be his ideal social order of love and justice: the peaceable Kingdom Isaiah foretold.  Our world tends to believe that if anything important is done it will be the rich and powerful who will have to do it.  (By the way, they are all meeting at Davos, Switzerland, this week—and they might even do some good, who knows.) 

God’s Kingdom is not going to come, said Jesus, through the manipulation of the wealth and power of this world.  The Kingdom belongs to the poor—either those who have no wealth or power, or those who realize that the wealth and power they have cannot be used to leverage God’s new world.  Those who are left out of all the important councils of the world—the poor—are the very ones who will possess the Kingdom.  To be poor is to recognize your vulnerability—the fact that there is little you can do to save yourself.  The Kingdom is God’s work.  The amazing thing is that He will take you into it—rich or poor—to work for Him, unless you don’t think you need his help and want to work for yourself.  In the Kingdom, things work differently than they do in the world of wealth and power.  Eugene Peterson, in a recent book, makes the claim that most Christians want to take advantage of what Jesus has done for them in the Cross and Resurrection but they don’t want to do it in His own way. “Learning how to live as the community of Christ is largely a matter of becoming familiar with and disciplined to the means by which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit work formationally among us: namely, by hospitably including the unwanted outsiders of the world into the community, and by cultivating a detachment from the world’s insiders and their ways, especially as these ways are exemplified in the leaders and celebrities.”  In other words, Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Jesus next looked out over the mourners in His crowd and pronounced them blessed, because they would receive comfort.  What did He mean by this?  There are many things to grieve about in our world—many sins and wickednesses and the evils, diseases, natural disasters, and untimely deaths.  We think of those who are happy as the ones who have insulated themselves from grief—whose lives are peaceful and prosperous and exciting.  Jesus, of course, did not pronounce all the causes of grief a good thing, but He said that being “blessed” was not dependent on how happy your circumstances were—or how happy you felt.  Perhaps he also meant that we should grieve for the way things are.  That grief can keep us from accommodating ourselves to the way the world is.  We are not to despair as people without hope; but we are not to simply accept current conditions as normal.  Sometimes all we can do is grieve.  But we can be blessed even in our grief, we can have the down payment on our ultimate comfort by belonging to the Kingdom now and anticipating the world’s healing in the end.  

Look at the next one: “Blessed are the meek.”  We know very well that the meek get nothing in this world of competition, that when you are not assertive, people will take advantage of you.  But the meek know something more important.  Instead of squabbling over their rights and their promotions and the prizes and preferments of this life, they have decided it is better to inherit the whole earth.  In Christ they understand that all things are theirs since all is His and He is God’s—as St Paul put it.  A person who is meek is gentle and courteous—not necessarily overly submissive and easily taken advantage of.  But the meek person does not keep score of how many times others have treated him unfairly.  Meekness is also a mission word—it is the way we allow Jesus to be in charge instead of ourselves so that He can get His work done.

In our world people hunger for many things—our desires are as endless as the sheer volume of consumer products we are offered for purchase.  Jesus may have had in mind the hunger for vengeance against the occupying Roman armies common in his day—the same hunger that drives many a terrorist in our world.  Such hungers are self-destructive—not to say, destructive of much else beside.  The only way to find true fulfillment is by hungering for what is right for everyone—even the enemy, as we shall see.  The blessed know a different longing in the Kingdom—for a world that is finally made right.

It is not difficult to understand why the merciful are blessed, nor why they shall obtain mercy.  The merciful understand their own failings and know their need of mercy and have found it in God.  Now they are willing to show others what God has shown them.  Jesus reserved some of his harshest criticism for those who did not get this point—those who thought they had prospered by their own cleverness and hard work and could despise the losers and the incompetent. 

Then Jesus tells us that the pure in heart are blessed for they shall see God.  Different cultures call it by different names, I suppose.  Ancient Jews were concerned with purity—who was in a state pure enough to engage in the worship of God—to secure which there were many rules, many of which Jesus ignored.  We don’t have so many rules—especially these days—but we still have our ways of demonstrating who belongs to which social order and what one has to do in order to be accepted.  It starts in junior high, I think, and continues through fraternities and sororities in college into the various social connections of adult life.  There are many ways of being made to feel that you do not belong.  Any of us could sit down and write a short list of those who do not.  The criteria are always things that pertain to the outer person: money, race, family, education, and so on.  Jesus said that it was the heart that made the difference—and that those whose hearts were right would see God—which is the only ultimate prize.  

Then there are the peacemakers—they are blessed because they are most like God—isn’t that what it means to say that they will be called the children of God?  God’s whole plan of salvation is to reconcile the world with himself.  We show that we are on the inside of that plan by reconciling others—to ourselves and to God—or at least working for reconciliation and not being part of the problem of enmity and strife.  This happens at many levels—personal, family, neighborhood, national, international. 

Finally, Jesus’ says that being “blessed” cannot be hindered by the persecution of the world’s powers.  The Kingdom of God is the decisive victory over all the world’s evil, so those who are within it already have a share in that victory, even if it brings present pain and grief and suffering.  And that is part of the key to understanding the whole Sermon on the Mount.  If we want what we want right now, then we are likely to take what we can get on whatever terms are available.  If we are willing to wait, to be patient, to allow God’s operations to happen at His own pace, to find a way of working with Him now and believing that He will take care of us in the end—then we can know present blessedness because we can experience the Kingdom right now, in the midst of our present conditions. 

We are still hungering and thirsting for righteousness, abandoning retaliation; we are still showing mercy because we need it; we are still trying to make peace in troubled circumstances; we are gentle with others when we would like to smash some heads together; we still mourn the world’s wounds even as we try to bind up as many as we can; and we identify with the poor, heartbroken at the conditions which produce so many of them, working to alleviate their poverty; and we endeavour to maintain a purity of heart which is open and obedient to God. 

All of this is quite breath-taking, it seems to me.  These words are so familiar, yet so challenging.  You can re-think them again and again and again, and they are never tame or uninteresting or without awesome demands upon us as individuals and as a community.  They set forth a new way of living in this world which the church has known for 2000 years but which it hasn’t done a remarkably good job of implementing.  Dallas Willard once said that many Christians simply don’t take Jesus seriously.  But what if He was a really smart guy?  What if He really knew what He was talking about?