Are you poor? Are you sad or hungry or feeling unworthy? Are you persecuted? Well then, blessed are you. Enjoy all your blessings!
Do Matthew’s beatitudes leave you just a bit uncomfortable? Blessings might a great reward in heaven, but—let’s be honest here—these earthly attributes that apparently bring about heavenly blessing are kind of hard to bear in the moment. Someone recently asked me “couldn’t Jesus act like a pastor for once and just acknowledge that things like poverty and grief and humility and persecution can be hard?”
Curiously enough, in Luke’s beatitudes, Jesus does acknowledge that things can be hard. But in that version, he teaches that it will be hard for the people who enjoy currently enjoy earthly comforts: “woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.” Remember that part? These beatitudes only get more and more demanding as they pass from evangelist to evangelist! But that’s only one of several differences between Matthew and Luke.
In Matthew, Jesus is represented as teaching only to the disciples, all of whom actually are poor, meek, and persecuted. Or will be, as a result of following Jesus. So in a way, we could say that Matthew’s Jesus is offering a description of his hearers, and giving them courage to continue the costly journey they are on.
In contrast, Luke delivers Jesus’ beatitudes to multitudes, and from a level place; a sermon on the plain, so to speak. But in Matthew’s version—as we heard it today—notice that Jesus left the crowd behind to teach just a few from the mountain. Listen up, friends, whenever our New Testament mentions a mountain. It almost always hearkens back to the Hebrew Scriptures, where the great revelations of God happened on a mountaintop. And because Matthew’s Gospel goes to great literary pains to represent Jesus as a new kind of Moses, we should not be surprised to hear Jesus bringing down a new law, so to speak, from a mountaintop.
Like the original ten commandments that came down from Mt. Sinai, the beatitudes invert the values of the world. But not in order to disrupt for disruption’s sake—that’s not a Gospel value, as I mentioned last week—but rather in order to create a community that will be a light to the nations. A community—not just enlightened individuals white knuckling their way through suffering—but a community set apart to teach the world how to live into God’s dream. Which is a dream in which all will ultimately flourish. That’s the purpose of God’s law, in both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures: to create a kingdom in which there will be no more suffering at all.
And yet, suffering there is. Within us, and all around us. So what do we do with that present reality? Well, first we acknowledge it, as Jesus did in the beatitudes. Austrian Jewish psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who spent three years in German concentration camps, wrote honestly of his experiences of torture and terror under the Nazi regime. And yet he also wrote “if there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an eradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.”
In his 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl wrote “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts, comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Suffering is not something God ever wants for us, but when we live through it with hope of blessing, we are building the community in which suffering will be no more. And we become a light to others, as Frankl himself was.
Living the law and values of God was not easy for the people of Moses, any more than it was easy for the disciples of Jesus, or easy for us now. But Matthew’s beatitudes are more than a description of, or a prescription for, suffering for Christ’s sake. They are an invitation to insist upon God’s blessing in any circumstance, and act accordingly. Yes, we might be called to a ministry that involves suffering, as the disciples and generations of saints and martyrs were. But most of us don’t actually have a lot of choice about how and when we might suffer. It comes unbidden. And if we find ourselves in the midst of grief or hunger or persecution, we can always chose to be more merciful and pure in heart. We can choose to be peacemakers. We can live the kingdom values that Jesus describes right where we are and how we are. And—because the beatitudes are a call to be a light to the nations—we should be proud of it.
Last week a faithful parishioner texted me to ask for some advice on leading prayer for a diocesan gathering. Now that person was perfectly capable of leading prayer without my advice, as are all of you. But I love that kind of conversation, so I was rewarded by his return text that said “with the sin of pride, I’ll tell you that the Spirit was in the room during the prayer.” I laughed. I think he may have been worried that he wasn’t meek enough, in a beatitudes sense. But as Paul reminded the Corinthian community, it’s no sin when “the one who boasts, boasts in the Lord.”
There’s a southern way of speaking about pride and blessing that you’ve probably heard: “well bless their heart.” It functions as a kind of a counter-beatitude: a backhanded way of putting someone a bit self-important back in their place. Which is funny in a snarky way, but God’s blessing is never a scolding or a shaming. It is a promise. So whether your current circumstances find you suffering or satisfied, I say: don’t bless your heart, bless your world. With your mercy and peacemaking. Using whatever grief or purity of heart you have to bless with. And you’ll be building heaven.
Because there is really only one law—coming down from the mountains in both the Old and New Testaments, and that is to love God and our neighbor. When we find ourselves suffering or singing praises; whether we are rejected or rejoicing; let us never forget this—
He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
