“Whenever we hear the beatitudes, we are struck with their poetic beauty and, at the same time, overwhelmed by their perceived impracticality for the world in which we live“.
I thought that this commentary I read this week about the Gospel we have just heard (called “The Beatitudes”) captures very well how we may feel about this text: It’s well known, it’s beautiful and even moving and yet, we don’t really know what to do with it. When reading the commentary I have just mentioned, I was actually reminded of a conversation I had with a friend many years ago when her son started attending school. My friend told me she really felt torn in the way she parented: She wanted her son to be a good person, to be kind and generous, and in the meantime she wanted him to be able to stand for himself, she wanted him to be respected, and she was afraid that the principles of gentleness she taught him at home would make him an easy target for bullies, and so she didn’t know what to do. And to me, that may be a feeling quite similar to ours when we experience “the impracticality of the Gospel for the world in which we live“.
So let’s talk about that a little bit.
Before that though, we have to acknowledge where we are in Matthew’s Gospel. We take a pause in the stories about Jesus, his infancy, his baptism, that call of the disciples. In this passage, Jesus, Matthew says, “sits down”, opens his mouth and starts to teach his disciples. The “beatitudes“, this is the opening of Jesus’s teaching, the beginning of his most famous Sermon, the “Sermon on the Mount”, that we will continue to listen to in the following weeks. As Moses taught on Mount Sinai, Jesus delivers the word of God to people. He does not bring a new Law, but he explains the heart of the Law, and so this is, for Matthew, the ultimate teaching from the ultimate teacher in Israel. So this is not something we could easily overlook, you see (not that there are many passages in the Gospel that we could overlook!), yet the temptation maybe there, as we acknowledge its beauty, to not take it seriously enough, to think it’s a kind of ideal that would not work, could not work for us, in the reality we live in. And so we need to understand better what Jesus is doing, and there are maybe a few things that we need to notice:
1. First of all, these are words of blessing. Jesus starts his ministry with blessing and it’s like he acknowledge something that is already there, and as God on the last day of creation, he looks at it and declares it good, and blessed. Jesus acknowledges that in our world, there are people who are indeed poor in spirit, meek, merciful and pure of heart. His disciples are gathered around him, and maybe that is what he sees in them, what he saw in some of them the day he called them. Well, it may look like a detail, but maybe we need to be reminded of that as well: That there is goodness in the world, goodness around us, and goodness in us. And that God sees it and blesses it. You know, we hear so much about the perversion of human nature, our culture feeds on this perversion (try to find a TV show that is not about violence, adultery or love of money), but we also hear that in many churches, right? Many believers keep on telling people that they are evil. Well, this is actually not the message of the Bible: people are created good, then, later, they have been corrupted. And so of course we all are stained with sin, but goodness is still there, goodness is our true nature and God sees it and blesses it. In the meantime, Jesus also acknowledge the suffering of those who try to live accordingly to their goodness and to be faithful to God’s word. But Jesus says: God sees this suffering and blesses this suffering, it is not a suffering that is vain. Jesus says that it will be rewarded.
2. Now, and that’s my second point, we have to understand what a blessing is. I think today we have an understanding of that word that is quite different than what it used to be when Jesus uttered the beatitudes. We say we are “blessed” when something good happens to us, and very often something material. We are blessed with money. It’s not always the case, we can also say we have been blessed with a child, for example. My best explanation of this use is that we use the word “blessed” to express that we have been lucky, but in a religious way. We “humbly” don’t take credit for our good fortune, since we are believers, we give credit to God. This sounds nice but of course it isn’t very helpful for those who haven’t been “blessed” with a good job, a nice house or a big family – and when we read the beatitudes, we see that it has nothing to do with what Jesus was talking about. Being blessed have several meanings in the Bible, but rather than “lucky in a religious sense”, it is closer to be indeed “seen and acknowledged by God”, “protected” or “honored” by God, there is also a meaning to “blessed” that is less known but would have been the Aramaic word Jesus used (and not the Greek in which Matthew translate Jesus’s words) that meant “ripe”, “ready for the picking”. Now if we re-read the Beatitudes having this understanding in mind, it will change a lot our understanding:
Jesus does not say that those who mourn are happy or lucky, he says that they are seen by God.
Jesus does not say that the persecuted are happy or lucky, he says that they are “ripe”, “ready for the picking for the Kingdom of God”. Jesus says that God honors the merciful and the meek, he does not say that things work out for them. And so on. And indeed, Jesus makes promises for the Kingdom of God, or the “Kingdom of heaven” as Matthew calls it.
3. Now we may have a better sense of why the Beatitudes are “unpractical for the world we live in”… because they are not meant for the world we live in, they are meant for the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus is not teaching hid disciples how to live in this world! As Paul mentions in his Epistle, the Gospel is not “another wisdom” for the ages, rather Jesus puts upside down the wisdom of the world! Jesus asks his disciples to live in this world as the citizens of heavens, to do God’s will “on earth as it is in heaven”. It does not mean that they will only be rewarded in heavens. As we have just said, the disciples may already experience God’s blessings in their life: spiritual comfort, joy of knowing God and of loving truly, assurance of fighting for what’s right and so on…Moreover, and that’s maybe another layer to Jesus’s teaching, the disciples won‘t only experience blessings but blessedness. In the Hebrew Bible, although God’s people may exchange blessings, it is mainly said God that is “blessed” (see the psalms for example). And so what Jesus might be saying too is that, in doing those things, being those kind of people (of the beatitudes), the disciples will come closer to be united with God, to demonstrate God’s own character in their lives. That’s the ultimate blessing! Actually, I think that Jesus opens his teachings with the beatitudes to show us how we should come to the Gospel. Bring an open heart, be poor in spirit…then you are able to hear God’s word that will, transform you and then you can hear some more and so on and so forth until you are made perfect. Weactually can see this progression towards perfection in the Beatitudes: from being poor in spirit and mourning our sins, Jesus tells his disciples that they will become merciful and pure in heart until they are ready for rejection and persecution – until the cross, which, again, according to Paul, is the ultimate teaching, the ultimate wisdom of God. Getting there is Jesus’s ultimate teaching, not only because he was the last teacher of Israel but also because he taught to the end, on the cross.
4. Now how are we to live with that, in this world? Well, I think that the fact that Jesus starts his teaching with this teaching of the Beatitudes gives us the beginning of an answer. We have to live according to Jesus’s teaching day by day and so little by little we will be transformed. We don’t have to stand on our own, this is the wisdom of the world. The wisdom of the cross is that we will be blessed, supported, encouraged and mainly that we will know his grace: “Christ Jesus became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption” Paul reminds us. As we decide to follow him, to walk with the disciples, we have to trust that He has the power to conform us to the Kingdom of Heaven, if only we let him bless us as he is so eager to bless the whole world.