Matthew 5:1-12
“Blessed”
February 2, 2020 – Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
Every once in a while, at the back of a drawer, I used to come across an unused Christmas present. Years ago Beth’s grandmother knitted me slippers. She was a marvelous seamstress, but by the time I met her she was in her nineties, nearly blind in one eye. It showed in my gift. They were the most garish combination of colors one might imagine. They were also about six sizes too large, and I wear a size 13.
I wrote Grandma a polite thank you, but never wore the weird footwear. Because of sentiment I could not quite throw them away, so there they stayed, a message of love but not really usable. The Beatitudes may feel to us a little like that. They are certainly prettier than those slippers, but most of us find them a bit weird, ill-fitting, and guilt-producing. They are certainly not a practical, everyday part of our lives. As deeply as we cherish them, the Beatitudes usually stay in the drawer. When we pull them out, they leave us ashamed.
At the same time many of us might say these words of Jesus are some of the most beautiful and significant in all of Scripture. As Clarence Bauman wrote about all the Sermon on the Mount, “Many enlightened minds admire what it says without affirming what it means. They assume, albeit regretfully, that its message does not apply to contemporary life and that the ethic of Jesus is therefore irrelevant—a beautiful, irresistible impossibility, a conspiracy to ensure our failure.”[1]
In other words, the Beatitudes, along with the rest of what Jesus said there on the mountainside, have become the greatest “white elephant” in all of history. Everyone welcomes and praises the gift when it is received, then immediately shelves it out of sight where it will not bother us. We simply do not know what to make of these blessings.
In fact, the way we respond to the Beatitudes may be no better than ridiculous characters in Monty Python’s irreverent, “The Life of Brian.” The scene is the Sermon on the Mount. The Python bunch are in the crowd as Jesus speaks. But they talk among themselves so much they miss half of what He says. Jesus proclaims, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and one of them asks, “What was that?” Another man tells him, “I think it was ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers.’” A woman then complains, “Ahh, what’s so special about the cheesemakers?” And then someone else replies, “Well, obviously, this is not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.”
None of us are straining to catch the words of the Beatitudes. But do they make any more sense to us? Are we any closer to being peacemakers than we are to being cheesemakers? What connection do these lovely phrases have with impeachment and Medicare, with smart phones and Coronavirus? Do they say anything to us in 2020?
It’s odd we even have to ask such questions. How are we so out of touch with the spirit and intention of our Lord that we fail to appreciate His finest words? Why are we confused at all about this glorious passage which stands at the beginning of everything Jesus had to say? Why aren’t the Beatitudes printed on Christian T-shirts and used as Facebook memes, instead of our own trite platitudes espousing dubious theology?
Our neglect of the Beatitudes arises out of a long-standing misreading of them. In the words of Robert Guelich, Christians have come to regard them as “entrance requirements” to the kingdom of heaven. We see them as Jesus’ statement of expectations for His followers. In order to be blessed by God, one must embody these qualities. You and I must be meek or merciful or pure in heart or peaceful in order to have God’s blessing. We think the blessings of the Beatitudes are rewards for achieving a certain set of virtues.
Yet the Beatitudes as rewards for virtue are a frightening proposition. It feels as though we can no more do what they say than I could wear Grandma’s slippers. So whenever they appear, we put them away as soon as possible, feeling guilty as we do. We feel we should be working harder at these things, but just can’t.
One old way of solving our dilemma was to say the virtues of the Beatitudes are counsels rather than commands. They are directed not to all Christians, but to those who wish to pursue the highest and best form of Christian life. Ordinary believers need only attend to commands. Those seeking the deepest spiritual life must also obey the counsels. The Beatitudes are for the spiritual elite, the special forces of Christian living.
The Protestant Reformation rightly rejected that division of Christians into ordinary and extraordinary, arguing from Scripture that every follower of Jesus is equal before the Lord. There is no elite cadre of the spiritually gifted, who follow a set of rules beyond the capabilities of the rest. Everyone comes to God the same way, by the grace of Jesus.
Yet those same Protestants, notably Martin Luther, so emphasized grace that they regarded the whole Sermon on the Mount not as words for a few elite Christians, but as words for no one at all. What Jesus said here, Luther said, applies only to Himself. No one else is meek enough or pure enough or peaceful enough to receive these blessings. Jesus teaches this only to convict us of our need for Him, to frighten us with the depth of our sin so we will turn in surrender to His grace. The idea is that the Beatitudes function like a mother’s willingness to let a toddler try to dress himself. She knows he can’t, but eventually, with his head trapped in the arm of his T-shirt, he will give up and accept the help he needs.
There is not the faintest suggestion from Jesus that He did not apply these words to everyone who heard. So later Protestants, following a scheme for interpreting the Bible called “dispensationalism,” decided the Beatitudes were indeed for all Christians, but only in the future. They describe what Jesus means us to become, but it won’t happen in the present era. You will only receive a life of this sort of blessedness at the end of time, when Jesus returns again. The Beatitudes are “pie in the sky.”
All three interpretations are meant to reduce the guilt we experience when we view the Beatitudes as God’s reward for accomplishment. They all miss the blessing in the blessings. They turn them into impossible standards which in effect curse us rather than bless us, unless we have a good reason to ignore them.
Jesus never meant any of the above. By blessing the poor in spirit, He never meant to condemn those who are rich in spiritual life. By blessing those who are grieving, He did not mean for you to feel guilty when you are cheerful. He did not intend to swamp you with a list of qualifications for the kingdom, leaving you to find some devious interpretive road around them or else bog down in an overwhelming sense of failure.
The Beatitudes are not a description of and impossible life you should have, but don’t. These blessings from the mouth of Jesus are a grand, gorgeous, gracious announcement that the life you have always wanted is really possible. Far from being entrance requirements for the kingdom, they are God’s proclamation that anyone may enter His kingdom and begin a new life blessed by Him.
Dallas Willard interprets the Beatitudes like this, “They are explanations and illustrations, drawn from the immediate setting, of the present availability of the kingdom through personal relationship with Jesus.”[2] Jesus sat there with a crowd of humanity before Him. He picked out a poor man, destitute financially and destitute spiritually. He was stealing food just to stay alive. He had no time and no interest for prayer or worship or any other part of spiritual life. He was lonely, selfish, and mean-spirited. Jesus looked at a man like that and pronounced him and all like him blessed, because the kingdom of heaven is a gift.
The Teacher looked around again and saw a couple weeping, grieving over the loss of their child. Then He blessed them and all who mourn, declaring that in God’s kingdom they would find comfort. His eye then fell upon a shy, quiet, scared woman standing outside the crowd. He announced to her, and to all the frightened meek like her, that they would not remain on the edge of things, that their inheritance was beyond imagining, encompassing the whole earth. And so it went, Jesus pointing toward particular individuals—men and women you would have thought least blessed—and blessing them in incredible ways.
In our Old Testament reading from Micah 6 this morning, the prophet said much the same thing. Does God want huge sacrifices, great spiritual achievement? No, He wants to bless humble people who want, who need what He wants, things like justice and mercy. Likewise in the reading from I Corinthians 1. As I shared with the children, God does not choose many wise or powerful or noble people. Instead, His kingdom is full of foolish and weak and ignoble people who are receiving the blessing of a new way of life.
These blessings are for real. They are meant for real people in really difficult circumstances. They are not an impossible dream or a promise for the future. They are an immediate offer of entrance into the kingdom for anyone who will. They are a way of saying that no situation in life bars you from God’s blessing.
Yet these Beatitudes, these blessings are virtues. They are both the signs of God welcoming anyone into His kingdom and qualities of heart and mind to which we ought to aspire. As my wife Beth taught the children in her Sunday School class this past fall, Peter Kreeft is right that the Beatitudes are Jesus’ antidote to Seven Deadly Sins.[3] Poverty of spirit drives out pride. Meekness and peacemaking get rid of anger. Purity of heart deals with our lust.
It is both/and. These blessings from Jesus clearly signal that the last, the least and the lost are blessed by God and welcome into His kingdom. At the same time they show us what life in that kingdom looks like, what kind of people Jesus begins making us into as we accept His grace and blessing and start to walk with Him.
You can see that a bit in the two halves of the Beatitudes. The first four, poverty, grief, meekness, and lack of righteousness are sad human conditions into which Jesus speaks blessing. Let us remember that as we look around at all the poor, mournful, weak and sinful people we meet or find ourselves in those conditions. Jesus blesses us all.
But the second half, starting in verse 7—mercy, purity of heart, peacemaking, and suffering persecution for doing right—does look like Jesus is blessing admirable qualities we might all want. That second half of the Beatitudes is a clear sign that they both bless what we are now and call us into a better way of living.
Dallas Willard tries to hold the halves together as blessings on unfortunate conditions. The perfect teacher that He is, our Lord would not simply switch the meaning of the blessing He was offering, making it a gracious gift for some, and a reward for others. So Willard reads the last Beatitudes as also blessing those who are deficient. The “merciful” are chumps, the sort of people who are so forgiving that others walk all over them. The “pure in heart” are perfectionists, the kind who are not happy with anyone, including themselves. The peacemakers are those who always get themselves caught in the middle of things. Those persecuted for righteousness are like whistleblowers, hated and despised because they tell the truth. Jesus picked these miserable folks out and blessed them too.[4]
I love Dallas Willard, but it’s not that easy. Mercy and purity of heart can be understood his way, but they also name qualities I know for a fact God wants us to have. These blessings are both the unmerited, undeserved grace of God’s love for poor sinners and signs of the new life He wants to give us by that same grace.
My first year in high school I went out for basketball. It was my one serious effort at participating in a sport. For four weeks, I and the rest of those turning out ran laps, ran the bleachers, ran lay-up drills and just generally ran ourselves silly trying to make the sophomore team. After two weeks the coaches announced our first cut. They sat us down in the bleachers and called off the names of those who were being kept on the team. I was surprised and thrilled to hear my name called. Those who weren’t called were cut.
I still remember the bitterness of one of my friends who was cut. He was short, about five foot six. In English class he leaned over and said, “Bilynskyj, you’re no good. The only reason they kept you is you’re tall.” For him I was one of the giants who made his life miserable. And he was absolutely right. In two weeks, in the second round of cuts, my name was not called. Height was really all I had. I wasn’t fast, couldn’t shoot, couldn’t dribble and had no sense of the court. Our coaches didn’t have time for a short guy with fair skills and they didn’t have time for a tall guy with lousy skills. It was all about winning.
The truth is I think both my friend and I might have learned to play some pretty good ball if we had the chance. We would never have been stars, but we could have become competent players if a coach had wanted to take time to train us. But as it generally is in a world that loves winners and despises losers, we never got the opportunity.
The Beatitudes are God’s word that anyone who wants to makes the team. They show us that both losers and winners enter His kingdom the same way. Anyone may come and train. God has time and grace and blessing for us all. These verses are neither the rule that you have to be a spiritual winner in order to be blessed, nor an excuse for being a loser. Jesus says later in the same sermon, “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.” The blessing is that all of us are invited to come and seek true and abundant life in the same place and in the same way.
As the crowd sat and listened to these blessings, they must have been amazed. No one had ever said anything like this before. Only one person could have said it, only God Himself could declare such blessings. So they would have looked up at the face of the man who was speaking and there seen the face of God. In Jesus Christ they discovered that God had come to them and was blessing them. May you look to Jesus and find for yourself the very same blessing. May you receive it and enter into His kingdom with all your heart.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2020 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] The Sermon on the Mount: The Modern Quest for Its Meaning (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985) p. xi.
[2] The Divine Conspiracy (San Francisco: Harper, 1998), p. 106.
[3] See Peter Kreeft, Back to Virtue (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), p. 92-96.
[4] See The Divine Conspiracy, pp. 118, 119.