Sermon on the Mount 2

So we come to the Beatitudes in the series on the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:3-12).  These have sometimes been ignored (as impossible to live up to); sometimes seen as Jesus setting the demands of Holy Living so high that we are driven to Him to find grace; and occasionally as entrance requirements to the Kingdom (you must be like this to enter the Kingdom…).

Most commonly, though, they have been presented, as ideal or virtues that “good” Christians should aspire towards.  Hence they are sometimes called the “be-attitudes”!  To read them this way, does require some gymnastics with the mean of the words, which are invariably spiritualised.  So “blessed are those who mourn” is taken from it clear meaning of people who have suffered some kind of bereavement or loss, to people who mourn or grieve over their Sin.

To understand the Matthew passage, we must also keep in mind Luke’s version of the beatitudes (Lk 6:20-23), which invariably make the blessing more gritty and earthy:  blessed are the poor (instead of Matthew’s poor in spirit); blessed are the hungry (rather than those who hunger and thirst after righteousness).  Further insight in gleaned when we consider Isa 61, which has many echoes of the people that Jesus is referring to in the beatitudes, but Isa 61 it clear that the Holy Spirit is to break in the lives of these people to bring deliverance, to set them free, to comfort them, to bring hope instead of mourning.

All this pushes us to reconsider the beatitudes.  It seems to me that they speak, not so much as virtues to aspire for, but they say more about what God blesses.  He blesses people, that the world around us considers not worthy of being blessed.

You don’t have to be like these to people to be blessed.

But if you are like these people you can be blessed by God.

The “poor” being refereed to here, are the lowest of the low of society.  The unclean and the expendable.  The drop outs, the dregs, the failures, the won’t be missed, not noticed, irrelevant of society.  The ones that are hidden away, an embarrassment, shunned, pushed, trodden down.  And Jesus says that even they can be blessed by God.   The Kingdom is theirs.   The values of the Kingdom are turning everything upside down. 

We live in a world (and often a church) that blesses the successful, go getters, rich, powerful, attractive, those people who have got it together.  But Jesus blesses people in spite of their inadequacies.  Not because they are virtuous.  But in spite of their brokenness and failure.

And we are called to be like Jesus, and do the same.

I will write in a later post my view of the other blessings in Matthew 5.

Tags: Sermon on the Mount