Blessing

Day 2

Blessing

 

On this Galilean mountainside, under vaulting skies, Jesus begins to unfold His battle strategy for His Kingdom on earth: A people. An unlikely community of people who live their lives belonging to a different Kingdom.

Jesus is inviting his hearers into a lived expression of His Kingdom on earth as it is in Heaven participating with Him in bringing the reality of this Kingdom of Heaven to earth.

Jesus is calling a new kind of community together who are prepared to navigate their lives by God’s compass, rather than the broken compass of the world. He’s saying…Let me tell you about the right way up Kingdom. Take your compass and the directions you thought you knew and now turn it upside down as my words turn everything on their head! 

The Beatitudes describe people who live life from the compass of God’s love and loving presence in His world, despite the challenges this disorientating human existence brings. 

These Beatitudes and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount were radical when Jesus firsts spoke them into Galilean hillside air, and they are radical still today, because this world has spun so far off course from God’s original plan.

The Beatitudes reveal some of the core values that lie beneath the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, but Jesus doesn’t frame these by saying “if you behave this way God will bless you”. Rather, He points out that people who are already living this way are already blessed… their lives are already recognisably a part of the new life of the Kingdom breaking in. 

This turns our human understanding of blessing upside down. 

In the beginning we were blessed by God (Genesis 1:28) and God blessed Abraham to be a blessing in the world (Genesis 12:2-3), but now we don’t even know what God’s blessing looks like or feels like. When we humans use this word we so often think in terms taught by this world where blessedness equates with ideas of success, wealth, stability, health, opportunity and talent. 

Now Jesus sits on this hillside and He redefines our human understanding of blessing and blessedness altogether. His message is that no matter how challenging our circumstances may be, true blessing is living in the reality that bends towards God. 

This strange new Kingdom reality that declares…

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,

  for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’

Matthew 5:3

Blessed are those who are so destitute that they have nothing but their prayers, no strength but God, no hope but His Kingdom. When you reach the end of yourself, you find the beginning of Him. Sometimes its only when we have no other options that we wholly turn to God. Emptied out of all our own self sufficiency we can receive the fully-filling love of God and fulfilling life of His Kingdom. 

This Kingdom that is present now. Here. Today.

‘Blessed are those who mourn,

    for they will be comforted.’

Matthew 5:4

Blessed are you when your heart still feels, still beats with sensitivity to darkness, grief and loss, like King David, like the patriarch Joseph and like Jesus. Blessed are those whose hearts are torn to shreds by the things that tear God’s heart, whose hearts still pump with human feeling, empathy and compassion; when little children suffer, when rejection cuts deep, when violence destroys life, when sickness, pain and suffering sits heavy on human souls. Blessed are you because you feel it: Fully alive, fully human with a heart not numbed by darkness.

Weeping is not a sign of weakness but is a sign that your heart lives, that your heart loves. And mourning is the sharp edge of love. The depth of our love is fathomed by the depth of grief on the losing. 

Like the first sounds of a newborn baby, crying can be a sign of life, and research indicates that crying assists in balancing both our physical and emotional health. 

The Jewish tradition of Lament gives permission for healthy tears. Tears sometimes speak depths to God that no human words can name. Mourning is part of human existence this side of the second coming when in the new heaven and new earth,  God will “wipe every tear from their eyes’ and ‘There will be no more death” or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’ (Revelation 21:4).

‘Blessed are the meek, 

for they will inherit the earth.’

Matthew 5:5

The new Earth (the new promised land as mentioned in Revelation 21:1) will not be bought by wealth or fought for by might, but will be inherited. By the humble and meek. No longer will this earth be owned by the powerful, strong, or wealthy who have sometimes gained ownership through corrupt and violent means. It will be entrusted to the people who can be trusted to steward it for God as He created us to steward it in that first garden long ago. Those trusted people are the gentle, the humble and the meek ones. 

Jesus declaration here is a quote from Psalm 37 verse 11, and if you read the whole psalm you will discover elements of most of the Sermon on the Mount present. This Psalmist tells the story of God’s people who trust Him and live His way finally inheriting the promised land, after God brings the wicked to justice.

‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,

for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.’

Matthew 5:6-7 

Blessed are those who long deeply for this world to be a place for all to flourish equally without fear, poverty or oppression. Blessed are those who live mercifully- reflecting God’s lovingkindness into the world all around them.

The word translated as righteousness here is (in the New Testament Greek) clearly interchangeable for justice* and describes both a personal righteousness and an active concern for justice in the world for the oppressed. Biblical justice is less above vengeance and much more about the restoration of what is right with a particular emphasis on caring for the poor and oppressed.

It is not a coincidence that hungering and thirsting for Justice and righteousness is followed here directly by living mercifully. These attributes that we are to hunger and thirst for and live out are no less than the very heartbeat of God Himself as He disclosed on the mountainside to Moses in the book of Exodus.

‘Then Moses said, ‘Now show me your glory.’

And the Lord said, ‘I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.’

Exodus 33:18-19

‘Then the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the Lord. And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, ‘The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.’ 

Exodus 34:5-7

God’s heart holds within it both vast lovingkindness and zealous passion for justice. He created a good world without fear or oppression,- that’s what He wanted for His people- a world full of peace and goodness where all could thrive. His passion for the restoration of this world by judging all wickedness and darkness is fierce and unrelenting. And Yet, His passionate love for the people He created and breathed into life is fiercer still.

God’s mercy, lovingkindness and grace is a path available for us because the cross was the path walked by Him. Jesus death on the cross was the moment where God’s deep love and passionate justice finally collided. 

“We don’t understand God’s love and we don’t understand God’s justice until we understand the cross as the direct result of humankind’s forsaking both, and the direct result of God’s passionate unending commitment to the restoration of humankind. Jesus’ death on the Cross is God’s confrontation with all the darkness in this world that binds us. And His victory over it by taking in onto Himself.”**

A heart beating in time with God’s is a heart deeply concerned with justice and righteousness and a life pulsing with acts of mercy and loving kindness. 

‘Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.’

Matthew 5:8

Blessed are those who are clear sighted, whose ways of seeing don’t cloud out God’s face or their awareness of God’s presence with them. Blessed are those whose eyes are clear, not blinkered by selfish ambition, religious pride, mixed motivations or a mind that thinks it already sees all there is to see. 

God incarnate walked the dirty roads of ancient Israel, but those holding onto religious or political power simply could not see Him for who He was: The Lord of Heaven and Earth. They were so blinded by their notions of God and religion, they missed seeing God’s own face, hearing His own voice, calling them to a different way of seeing, being and living.

‘Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.’

Matthew 5:9

Blessed are those who stand in the hard places and advocate against retaliation and vengeance for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who put down weapons and take up love, who refuse revenge and offer forgiveness, for they are clearly part of God’s own family on earth.

Much of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount expounds what ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ looks like in practice: Love your enemy, turn the other cheek, forgive, be reconciled with others. Jesus insists that God’s family looks different. Peace making is our family business. Its how we roll in the Kingdom of God. God’s family works hard at the business of peacemaking. And it is hard work. Peace must be made before it can be kept and this has never been simple for the human race. Or popular. 

‘Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

‘Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

 Matthew 5:10-12

God is with those who, despite the personal cost, live the path of His Kingdom anyway. 

Following Jesus and living His Kingdom path will never bring the popularity, praise or admiration of the world. It didn’t for Jesus, so we shouldn’t expect that it might for we, His followers. It brought Jesus a cross. And will for us also, in a thousand different ways.

But this has always been how this Kingdom breaks in here today, a people daily picking up their cross and following Jesus by living His way, navigating life by the compass of His love. 

Most of the blessings in the Beatitudes are written as future tense “for theirs wIll be” but the one phrase that is present tense (appearing at the beginning and end of the beatitudes) is “for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven”. Life will have challenges, disappointments and struggle, and one day we will be comforted, inherit the earth, be filled, be shown mercy, see God and be called children of God. All these things are part of the now and not-yet life of the Kingdom. 

But in our desperate need, our poverty of spirit and persecution, the Kingdom of Heaven is present with us here and now today, in this very moment, for ours is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Every day we live by the compass of this Kingdom we participate with Jesus in the advancing of it on earth as it is in Heaven. 

The message Jesus was communicating to His first hearers on that hillside under spreading skies that day (and to all of us here today, wherever we are in this world) is this: This world will have it’s challenges and we will have battles in it… but the Kingdom of God is here. 

Blessed are you when you navigate life with God’s compass and live like you belong to a different Kingdom. 

Because you do. 

 

Journaling Journey

What does it mean to you that the Kingdom of heaven is a present reality now for the poor in spirit and the persecuted, while the other circumstances mentioned are future tense?

In what ways do these beatitudes reframe your attitudes about blessing, about your life, about the way the world works?

If you were to live life in the light of these scriptures how would your perspective change?

 

Todays hillside photograph is taken from Sugarloaf Mountain, Wales, UK.

 

References:

*Richard Rohr, ‘Jesus Plan For A New World: The Sermon on the Mount’ 1996, St Anthony Messenger Press, Ohio

** ‘Good Friday, The Long Walk’ Liz Campbell