The first in a series of three sermons given by Dr. Ralph Blair at the 2011 Preaching Festival held in Ocean Grove, N.J.
His fellow Jews despised Matthew. As the Roman occupation’s local tax collector, they viewed him as a traitor, taking whatever cash Rome required and keeping for himself whatever more than that he could squeeze out of them. The Jews hated him. Jesus chose him.
Not far into Matthew’s presentation of Jesus’ Good News, we find what’s called “The Sermon on the Mount”. Known as, “the supreme jewel in the crown of Jesus’ teaching” (Michael Green), it’s introduced with a literary alert to signal the weight of Jesus’ words. That formal phrasing is this: “Jesus opened his mouth and began to teach.” We read:
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a hillside and sat down. His disciples gathered around him and he opened his mouth and began to teach them.
The Sermon on the Mount begins with Beatitudes. Jesus, himself, had phrased these for easy memorization and Matthew’s street Greek alliterates them to the same end. Yet, familiarity doesn’t mean fathoming. Merely memorizing what’s misunderstood and misapplied can make things worse. Gandhi mistook them as blueprints to Utopia. Marx mistook them for drugs. Liberal Protestants and Fundamentalists distort them in their own ways. We need to know what Jesus meant, not what we may have been told he meant.
And we have, here, not so much one sermon as a thematic arrangement of a basic message that Jesus, no doubt, declared over and over again.
Though a crowd is on hand and can listen in to what he says, Jesus focuses on his followers. If we don’t see this, we’ll misinterpret his Beatitudes as but some sort of generalized “to do” list – mere moralist mantras of common sense for all, or, as Nietzsche mistook them, common nonsense for the enslavement of all. But these Beatitudes are nothing of the sort. Rather, they’re Jesus’ own descriptions of his disciples’ distinctiveness in being the fortunate citizens of the in-breaking realm of God.
Any astute axiom can make sense to Christians and non-Christians alike. This is true for even some of the aphorisms of Dr. Bob, Sr., displayed on the BJU classroom walls: “The greatest ability is dependability.” “You can’t move without producing friction.” “You can borrow brains, but you cannot borrow character.” And how’s this one for homespun wisdom? “The most important light in the house is not the chandelier in the parlor. It’s that little back hall light that keeps you from breaking your neck when you go into the bathroom in the middle of the night.” Anyone can make good use of these.
But Jesus’ Beatitudes are something else, though two of Dr. Bob’s sayings do prepare us to get at what the Beatitudes are all about. He said: “It is at the Cross that I get the power to live the Sermon on the Mount.” He also said: “The religions of the world say, ‘Do and live.’ The religion of the Bible says, ‘Live and do.’” And along this line, one from Oxford’s Michael Green: “Religion says, “Do!”; Christ says, “Done!”
We cannot understand the Beatitudes or any of the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, for that matter, until we see that the Sermon on the Mount is founded on Mount Calvary. And Mount Calvary is intelligible only from the perspective of the Mount of Christ’s Transfiguration (17:1) and the Mount of Christ’s Temptation (4:8) and from the summit at Mount Sinai.
God’s Good News is good because it tells of God’s own initiative in restoring humanity to Himself in His own realm’s arrival in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. But, as I said, even church people miss this – both liberal Protestants and Fundamentalists miss this. Liberals reject the Good News as what they disdain as an unnecessarily “bloody” fiction. They reduce their religion to irrational postmodernism, incoherent interfaith paradigms and an amalgam of politically correct social agendas. Fundamentalists reduce the Sermon on the Mount’s relevance for today by adhering to a 19th-century schema of “dispensations” wherein, what they call the “millennial age” is separated from what they call the “church age” for which the Sermon is taken to be all but irrelevant. Liberal and self-styled “progressives” mainly moralize the Sermon and, among Fundamentalists, the Sermon’s simply not something they much “do”. All are too busy propounding their prejudices into the text to bother expounding the pronouncements of the text.
English words associated with the Beatitudes are, “blessed” or “happy”. But these are rather unhappy renderings of the Greek term makarios. For us, “blessed” may connote religious bargaining, a quid pro quo ethics. “Happy” connotes emotion. But makarios denotes an enviable state of affairs. It’s a reassuring hoorah, an exultation: “How fortunate!”, “How well off!” At City Church, in 2004, I preached on the Beatitudes and I called the sermon, “ ‘Congratulations!’— Jesus”, as if the title were an IM from Jesus.
So, rather than its being an ethical code that the public should try to live on its own, the Beatitudes bespeak the encouraging truth of God’s realm, God’s reign, realized in the accomplished life, death and resurrection of Christ.
The Beatitudes are bestowed only after Jesus beckons repentance, a turning back to God. (Matt 4:17) In this Reformation month of October, it’s good to recall that the very first of Luther’s 95 Theses was this: “All of our life is repentance.” God’s realm is breaking through to them as Jesus breaks good news to them. The Beatitudes are for believers who’ve entered by way of “the narrow gate” (Matt 7:13), “seeking, first and foremost, God’s arriving realm of righteousness” (Matt 6:33) – a righteousness that’s not a matter of law keeping, but a magnanimous gift. (Matt 5:6) This is God’s own, real righteousness, not a pretended righteousness of ours. It is, as I quoted Michael Green: Not about what we’re to do, but what Jesus has already done.
Jesus rebuked the religionists who faulted him for dining with moral outcasts in a home built with a less than kosher practice of tax collecting. Citing Hosea (6:6), he said he’d not come for the self-styled righteous, but for self-confessed sinners. (Matt 9:13) And his theme throughout the Sermon is this: “Don’t be like the pagans!” (Matt 6:7f), not even like the “pagans” in kosher prayer shawls! Paul echoed his appeal when he wrote to the Romans that, on the basis of God’s grace given, they should, in gratitude, turn from conformity to this world’s standards. (Rom 12:1f)
The Beatitudes are in the tradition of the sacred street smarts of Proverbs and Psalms. What Jesus teaches here is to be taken as an objectively true description of his followers’ good fortune in following him.
And, of course, if intuited, this wisdom will turn into a deeply abiding affective experience – from sighs of grief to sighs of relief, from utter despair to the joy of God’s presence – even without any change in one’s daily observable circumstances for the unobservable circumstance has been changed unalterably, forever. That’s what Hannah Whitall Smith shared about her friend Nancy’s cheerful witness as well as her own.
It should be noted, too, that the Beatitudes are not descriptive of different types of Jesus’ followers. They all describe the good fortune of all his faithful followers – regardless of their outward circumstances.
So, in summary, before we take a closer look at each of these Beatitudes, we need to keep in mind that each promise is based in the premise that the recipients are already what they’re said to be in Christ – poor in spirit, mourning, meek, and so on. The Beatitudes are not God’s prescriptions for Christian living but God’s provisions for life in Christ. And life in Christ is Beatitude!
The Beatitudes begin with the most appropriately introductory Beatitude, for the first one notes the orientation of Jesus’ followers to all reality in the rising among them of God’s reign in and through their Creator, Redeemer and Friend. This is the Christian’s worldview and this is the Christian’s lifestyle because this is, itself, the life in Christ.
Jesus declares:
How fortunate are the poor in spirit, for God’s realm is theirs!
The poor in spirit are really so very fortunate! Counterintuitive? Of course it is. The Lord’s wisdom is counter to the wiseacre ways of this world.
When Jesus refers to “the poor in spirit”, he doesn’t mean those in mere material poverty, though, in Hebrew thought, there’s some connection between piety and poverty – as with Galilee’s “people of the land”, so disdained by the religious elite. The “poor” here, is the strongest word for social poverty, the stigma of outsiders and the marginalized.
Most of Jesus’ first followers – in fact, most early Christians – were, indeed, materially poor. Even those who were not materially poor, e.g., publicans and tax collectors, were every bit as marginalized as the lame, the blind beggars, the prostitutes and all others whom the religious authorities labeled as filthy “sinners”. They were oppressed under a minutia of rules and rituals that the ringleaders of religion reigned down on them but didn’t lift a finger to lighten. And the poor faired no better under the burdens of Roman occupation.
So, who were these spiritually impoverished whom Jesus called fortunate?
They were and are the “have-nots” who nonetheless have God. They’re those who know they really are at the end of their rope, they really are on their last leg and at death’s door. They know they’re desperate. They know they’re undeserving. They know they’re dead in sin and have nothing with which to earn God’s favor. But, somehow, even in their moribund state, they’re aware that God is the living God and thus their only hope for life. And so they depend on God alone.
And this is exactly why they’re so fortunate. It’s why Jesus congratulates them. As a Bible scholar puts it: “For Jesus, the unconditional, categorical bestowal of grace on people who are in a desperate situation is decisive.” (Ulrich Luz) These folks know themselves. They know who they are and they know who they’re not. On their own they’re no gods but, in God, they’re God’s own. They look to the only living God in order to come alive. And what, to the non-comprehending, may seem to be “low self-esteem”, is, in truth, their very wisely informed self-estimation. And that is their good fortune. From that fortunate perspective, they can esteem others, too, and God above all Their advantage lies in their realistic realization that their real need runs far, far deeper than whatever they, on their own, could ever do for themselves and whatever anybody else could ever do for them.
They realize that none of the so-called solutions of this world’s systems would ever suffice to solve their problem. And they know better than to strut some self-mustered spiritual self-sufficiency. They know better than to be seduced into thinking that they can buy or finesse their way out of their dire straits. That’s why the poor in spirit are the truly well off, the really rich. They know that the deepest of all problems is spiritual. They know that their pervasive poverty is spiritual. And so, they so fortunately turn to God’s Spirit alone and find in Him their only answer.
Why do pagans think otherwise? Thinking otherwise, they never have enough. They never have enough money, enough celebrity, enough self-esteem, enough affirmation, enough peace of mind, enough time, enough sex, enough stuff? They do sense that something is missing. But they mistake some nothing for that something. They keep on going after the nothing, winding up with the nothing they get, and, so, go back out to get more of nothing more. Nothing’s never enough. They never have enough nothingness. Idols won’t do. Idols don’t deliver. But pagans refuse to admit that. They refuse to see their poverty of spirit.
The poor in spirit know what’s nothing. And they know that what’s missing is not nothingness but the God of all comfort. And so it’s to God that they turn around in repentance. It’s to God that they turn to solve their problem with God. And in God they find, as Hannah did, that God is enough!
Out of all the wasting aftermath of sin, the poor in spirit turn from deadly self-centeredness to be centered in the living God who re-centers them, reconciled to Himself. While other sin-sick souls seek their solutions in self-centeredness, trying to generate some sort of self-salvation by sinking down into all the surface of things, the fortunate few sink into the great depths of Love Almighty and find themselves at Home.
In his classic, Whatever Happened to Sin?, eminent psychiatrist Karl Menninger noted the distress of a “persistent sense of guilt” over sin. And he found that the attempt “to relieve it [by] project[ing] the blame on to others was pathetically counter productive when, instead, they could avail themselves of an honest repentance and a real atonement”. Whether or not Menninger realized it, this was a ringing “Amen!” for Jesus’ first beatitude: “How fortunate are the poor in spirit.”
Look at all the other revolving doors for spinning superficiality as a solution to this universal sense that there’s something quite wrong with us. There’s the seduction of science. But, as historian Arnold Toynbee concluded: “Science has shown no signs that it is going to be able to cope with man’s most serious problems. It has not been able to do anything to cure man of his sinfulness and his sense of insecurity, or to avert the painfulness of failure and the dread of death. Above all, it has not helped him to break out of the prison of his inborn self-centeredness.”
By now, salvation through a strictly secularist science was supposed to render religion obsolete. But secularists utterly failed to foresee the fact that a sense of the sacred persists and is spreading. CNN breathlessly reports the findings of a multimillion dollar Oxford University study: “Religion comes naturally, even instinctively, to human beings, a massive new study of cultures all around the world suggests.”
Hello? Secularists just can’t help getting caught off guard in matters of the Spirit. Hasn’t humanity always had glimmers and even dead giveaways of God’s undeniable presence, intimations that the Psalmist celebrated (Psalm 19:1) and Paul discerned as what leaves all people without excuse (Romans 1)? Rudolph Otto, in his tome, The Idea of the Holy, reckoned that this universal awareness is that “to which the entire religious development bears witness [and] for which [he said] there is only one appropriate expression” – he called it the mysterium tremendum. But, alas, for far too many today, the mysterium tremendum gets blocked out by obsessions with a myspaceium triviandum!
Still, as Otto recognized – as does scripture – this “inexpressible Mystery” combines “a strange harmony of contrasts”, producing both tranquility and trembling. But, of course, it can also be twisted into the demonic. Prophets and apostles proclaim God’s revulsion over all the self-righteous religion that seeks to manipulate the Divine to our own self-consumed indebtedness. Said Karl Barth: “No human demeanor is more open to criticism, more doubtful, or more dangerous, than religious demeanor. No undertaking subjects men to so severe a judgment as the undertaking of religion.” And as Christianity Today’s editors summed up so well in an editorial this summer: “In short, religion is our valiant attempt to get right with God while ignoring the fact and way that he has gotten right with us: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ. To continue to work for our justification instead of accepting our justification is the essence of religion.”
Look at all the revolving doors of salvation through the pagan religion: Hitler’s national socialism, the fascism of Mussolini, the Communism of Stalin, Mao and their many equally depraved imitators? They came and they were gone, but incomprehensible human misery was left in their wake, the slaughter of millions upon millions – all within one century of so-called progress. And people still hold out hope for these pagan dogmas.
What of the revolving doors of our own society’s quick fixes in fashions, fads and fantasies that get people going in circles, frantically coming into what’s “the latest” and then running on to what’s “the next”. Round and round in a non-stop whirl of dizzy and ditsy distraction we go. So, of course, disappointment, dissatisfaction, disillusionment and despair follows. But disappointment, dissatisfaction, disillusionment and even, in some cases, despair, can be blessings in disguise if, thereby, we’re awakened from our delusions so that we’re turned around toward the One who, alone, can fill the emptiness that’s so deep that only the very love of the living God in Christ can fill it. That’s when we know the good fortune of the poor in spirit.
When we’re fortunate enough to be humbled enough over even despairing with self and self-centered circumstances to wise up in the wisdom of the saints of all ages and turn away from looking to ourselves or even to some other people for fullest satisfaction. We get to turn to God. When we “get” it, we get to turn away from self-reliance, our self-righteousness and our self-pitying rationalization and turn completely around to the living God for reliance on Him and on His making us righteous in His own righteousness. At last, we’re turning to the only One who can deliver us from all evil. That’s what repentance is, you know. Repentance is grief over our sin. Said the Swiss theologian, Emil Brunner: “Repentance is despair of self, despairing of self-help in removing the guilt that we have brought upon us. Repentance means a radical turning away from self-reliance to trust in God alone. To repent means to recognize self-trust to be the heart of sin”.
Well then, no wonder Jesus taught that folks with an awareness of their deep emptiness and a recognition of their foolishness, their frailty and the futility of their own solutions are the truly well off. “It is the empty before God … to whom the promise is made.” (Gerhard Barth)
Do we know this powerful truth of spiritual poverty in our own lives? Do we see the life-changing insight of the poor in spirit for ourselves? Pray that we do. Take Jesus at his word.
Jesus said that the poor in spirit – those who already know who they are and already know whose they are – are already citizens of God’s kingdom. Jesus uses the present tense: “theirs is the kingdom of heaven”, i.e., they’re already living under the rule and in the realm of God. This isn’t “pie in the sky by and by”. The poor in spirit already – here and now – belong to the in-breaking reign of God in Christ. In turning to God, they’ve entered into God’s presence.
And didn’t Jesus urge all his disciples to pray for God’s rule to be realized here on Earth as it’s realized “in heaven”, that is, just as it’s real in God, Himself. (Matt 6:10) Jesus is speaking of our foretaste of that “already, yet not yet” fully realized reign of our Father in whose presence the poor in spirit rest and thrive!
And Jesus said further:
How fortunate are the mourners, for God, Himself, will comfort them!
As was Jesus’ custom, he used the Semitic “divine passive” when referring to God. It was a traditionally respectful precaution so as not to be careless in directly referring to God. That’s at odds with the blundering carelessness of both pagans and religionists who, today, are so quick to blab about Him.
But in order that we not miss the fact that Jesus has God in mind, I’ve put his passively voiced words into the active voice, thereby supplying his missing word, “God”. The literal rendering of this Beatitude preserves the passive voice: “Blessed are they who mourn for they will be comforted”. Comforted by whom? It’s understood: Comforted by God, of course.
The “divine passive” construction also indicates that the promise certainly will be fulfilled – for God’s fulfillment is sure. The awe in Jesus’ words on this deepest comfort was not lost on Oscar Wilde. He did know sorrow and he said: “Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.”
And yet again, as in the previous instance, Jesus is speaking mainly of what is spiritual. He spoke of spiritual poverty in the first Beatitude. He speaks here of spiritual mourning – a profoundly spiritual groaning that comes from knowing what a great gulf it is that lies between God’s pure righteousness and our putrid self-righteousness. Aware of this, we weep. But we do not weep alone. For God, seen in Jesus, wept too. (Luke 19:41, Matt 23:37)
And, again, within the grieving, is the beginning of a turning to the One who alone can comfort and support, will comfort and support and will wipe away all tears. Redemption takes root in such remorse, in such repentance, and it flourishes in God’s resolution for reconciliation and everlasting relief.
Of course, while grieving is a healthy process, the grieving, by itself, resolves nothing that’s really wrong. Mourning, by itself, reconciles nothing that’s deeply estranged. Sorrow, on its own, relieves nothing, renews nothing, regenerates nothing, and brings nothing back from the dead. In the words of Augustus Toplady: “Could my tears forever flow, all for sin could not atone; Thou must save, and Thou alone.”
And, it’s not only over our own sin that we mourn and need to be saved. It’s not hard to see that so very much of the world’s suffering is clearly the result of sin, not only ours in our own self-centered circle, but the sin of millions of perpetrators as well as their prey, the sin of vicious victimizers and revenging victims, too. And whatever theological explanations we may have for so-called “natural” disasters, there’s nonetheless, much to mourn. Indeed, as Paul wrote, all creation groans, awaiting liberation. (Rom 8:19ff) And what Paul termed our being the first fruits of this cosmic redemption is surely sustained in the promise of our Lord’s second Beatitude.
Mourning has a way of maturing us, of moving us where we’d never go but under duress. And tears don’t always blur our vision. As Ira Stanphill’s autobiographical lyric testifies: “He washed my eyes with tears, that I might see.”
Some of us here in EC remember that this was certainly the witness of Robert Hoppe and Robert Burger. That was in those wrenching days of horror in the mid ‘80s as the AIDS epidemic took over. It was so obviously only in and through that time of deepest anxiety, anticipatory grief and the aftermath of sorrow over a lover lost – a time Hoppe called “the worst and the best” time of his life – that he and Burger came to a profoundly personal relationship with Jesus Christ. A personal relationship with Jesus was something to which neither of these cool ‘70s and ‘80s upscale New Yorkers had ever thought they’d ever give a thought. But their newfound Savior, Lord and Friend became their Rock in the last months of their lives here on Earth. In their sorrow, they put childlike trust in the Man of Sorrows, and the comfort they received, they did what they could to pass on to others. Hoppe and Burger comforted others out of the deep comfort they received from their loving Heavenly Comforter. “How fortunate are the mourners, for God, Himself will comfort them!”
Those who know ourselves to be, in and of ourselves, poor in spirit, sing fervently, each Sunday morning in Redeemer Church, the Doxology – our glorifying word to the Lord: “Ye who long pain and sorrow bear, Praise God and on him cast your care! O, praise Him! O, praise Him! Alleluia! (Hail to YAHWEH) Allelu – YAH! Alleluia!” The Peace of the poor in spirit is God in Christ, himself.
Amen.
(The second sermon The Privilege of the Appropriately Prioritized is available here.)