~ Chapter Four ~
Who is Really Well Off? – The Beatitudes
The Sermon on the Mount: an Introduction
“[The] Sermon on the Mount is a concise statement of Jesus’ teachings on how to actually live in the reality of God’s present kingdom available to us from the very space surrounding our bodies. It concludes with a statement that all who hear and do what he there says will have a life that can stand up to everything—that is, a life for eternity because it is already in the eternal (Matt. 7:24-25).” [111]
“[In the Sermon] Jesus deals with the two major questions humanity always faces. First there is the question of which life is the good life. What is genuinely in my interest, and how may I enter true well-being? Of course we already know that life in the life of God will be the good life, and Jesus’ continual reassertion of the direct availability of the kingdom always kept that basic truth before his students and his hearers. But exactly who is and who is not assured of such a life was a subject of much confusion in his day, as it is today. What came to be called the Beatitudes were given by him to help clarify this matter. They and the vital epilogue that accompanies them occupy Matt. 5:3-20. The second question Jesus deals with… concerns who is truly a good person. Who has the kind of goodness found in God himself, constituting the family likeness between God and his children? This is dealt with in the remainder of the sermon, from 5:20 to 7:27.” [111]
The Beatitudes
“The Beatitudes… are not teachings on how to be blessed [or how to live in the ultimate state of well-being]. They are not instructions to do anything. They do not indicate conditions that are especially pleasing to God or good for human beings. No one is actually being told that they are better off for being poor, for mourning, for being persecuted, and so on, or that the conditions listed are recommended ways to well-being before God or man. Nor are the Beatitudes indications of who will be on top ‘after the revolution.’ They are explanations and illustrations, drawn from the immediate setting, of the present availability of the kingdom through personal relationship to Jesus. They single out cases that provide proof that, in him, the rule of God from the heavens truly is available in life circumstances that are beyond all human hope.” [121]
“The Beatitudes simply cannot be ‘good news’ if they are understood as a set of ‘how-tos’ for achieving blessedness. They would then only amount to a new legalism. They would not serve to throw open the kingdom—anything but. They would impose a new brand of Phariseeism, a new way of closing the door—as well as some very gratifying new possibilities for the human engineering of righteousness.” [121]
“[The Beatitudes] serve to clarify Jesus’ fundamental message: the free availability of God’s rule and righteousness to all of humanity through reliance upon Jesus himself, the person now loose in the world among us. They do this simply by taking those who, from the human point of view, are regarded as most hopeless, most beyond all possibility of God’s blessing or even interest, and exhibiting them as enjoying God’s touch and abundant provision from the heavens.” [131]
“[Many] of those thought blessed or ‘first’ in human terms are miserable or ‘last’ in God’s terms, and many of those regarded as cursed or ‘last’ in human terms may well be blessed or ‘first’ in God’s terms, as they rely on the kingdom of Jesus. Many, but not necessarily all. The Beatitudes are lists of human ‘lasts’ who at the individualized touch of the heavens become divine ‘firsts.’ The gospel of the kingdom is that no one is beyond beatitude, because the rule of God from the heavens is available to all. Everyone can reach it, and it can reach everyone.” [138]
“[Jesus] said, ‘Blessed are the spiritual zeros—the spiritually bankrupt, deprived and deficient, the spiritual beggars, those without a wisp of ‘religion’—when the kingdom of the heavens comes upon them.’ Or, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens.’… [These people] ‘don’t know their Bible.’ They ‘know not the law,’ as a later critic of Jesus’ work said. They are ‘mere laypeople,’ who at best can fill a few or perhaps an offering plate. No one calls on them to lead a service or even to lead in prayer, and they might faint if anyone did. They are the first to tell you they ‘really can’t make heads nor tails of religion.’ They walk by us in the hundreds or thousands every day. They would be the last to say they have any claim whatsoever on God. The pages of the Gospels are cluttered with such people. And yet: ‘He touched me.’ The rule of the heavens comes down upon their lives through their contact with Jesus. And then they too are blessed—healed of body, mind, or spirit—in the hand of God.” [114-115]
“Those poor in spirit are called ‘blessed’ by Jesus, not because they are in a meritorious condition, but because, precisely in spite of and in the midst of their ever so deplorable condition, the rule of the heavens has moved redemptively upon and through them by the grace of Christ. Alfred Edersheim is therefore exactly right in saying that ‘in the Sermon on the Mount… the promises attaching, for example, to the so-called “Beatitudes” must not be regarded as the reward of the spiritual states with which they are respectively concerned, nor yet as their result. It is not because a man is poor in spirit that his is the Kingdom of Heaven, in the sense that the one state will grow into the other, or be its result; still less is the one the reward of the other. The connecting link is in each case Christ Himself: because He… “Has opened the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.”’” [116-117]
“[We might say] Blessed are the physically repulsive, Blessed are those who smell bad, The twisted, misshapen, deformed, The too big, too little, too loud, The bald, the fat, and the old—For they are all riotously celebrated in the party of Jesus.” [139-140]
“[Modern day Beatitudes would include] the ‘seriously’ crushed ones: The flunk-outs and drop-outs and burned-outs. The broke and the broken. The drug heads and the divorced. The HIV-positive and herpes-ridden. The brain-damaged, the incurably ill. The barren and the pregnant too-many-times or at the wrong time. The overemployed, the underemployed, the unemployed. The unemployable. The swindled, the shoved aside, the replaced. The parents with children living on the street, the children with parents not dying in the ‘rest’ home. The lonely, the incompetent, the stupid. The emotionally starved or emotionally dead. And on and on and on. Is it true that ‘Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal?’ It is true! That is precisely the gospel of heaven’s availability that comes to us through the Beatitudes. And you don’t have to wait until you’re dead. Jesus offers to all such people as these the present blessedness of the present kingdom—regardless of circumstances. The condition of life sought for by human beings through the ages is attained in the quietly transforming friendship of Jesus.” [140]
“Even the moral disasters will be received by God as they come to rely on Jesus, count on him, and make him their companion in his kingdom. Murderers and child-molesters. The brutal and the bigoted. Drug lords and pornographers. War criminals and sadists. Terrorists. The perverted and the filthy and the filthy rich. The David Berkowitzs (‘Son of Sam’), Jeffrey Dahmers, and Colonel Noriegas. Can’t we feel some sympathy for Jesus’ contemporaries, who huffed at him, ‘This man is cordial to sinners, and even eats with them!’ Sometimes I feel I don’t really want the kingdom to be open to such people. But it is. That is the heart of God.” [140]
“Among [the Blessed] are indeed [a] few of the humanly wise, the influential, and the socially elite. They belong here too. God is not disturbed by them. But the Beatitudes is not even a list of spiritual giants. Often you will discern a peculiar nobility and glory on and among these ‘blessed’ ones. But it is not from them. It is the effulgence of the kingdom among them.” [141]
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