Alison Morgan, Holy Trinity May 2001
Introduction
Good morning. A survey of British churchgoers discovered that some 42% of them admitted to falling asleep in church. More than a third looked at their watch in church every Sunday, and an amazing 10% owned up to putting it to their ear and shaking it, because they thought it must have stopped. Though only 4% wished they had stayed in bed on a Sunday morning, 67% said they often felt that way.
Well, that’s not very encouraging, is it. I’m sure the survey can’t have been conducted in Leicester, but obviously in at least some places out there the experience of church is less than riveting. So the question is, why? And even more, why do these profoundly bored people keep coming?
Well, I think the passage we are looking at today is as good a place as any to search for the answers to these questions. The words of the beatitudes are very familiar ones. But I bet if I asked you if your lives have been changed by them you’d say no. That is, if you were still awake. They go like a jangle, don’t they, bouncing off our ears like billiard balls off each other: click, click, contact made, but nothing really potted. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who are persecuted. Blessed are you when men revile you. Does that sound immediately helpful? I think it doesn’t. You know what it is to mourn, to feel upset, miserable, depressed, fed up. You know what it is to be badly treated, to have people say nasty things about you behind your back. And yet here Jesus seems to be saying it’s all a jolly good thing. Cheer up, God’s on your side.
Now it might sound as if I’m just being funny. But I’m not. I’m being deadly serious. Often the message of Jesus comes to us in words that do not chime with the words we are used to hearing. And so its impact is lost, and we run the risk of reducing the word of God to a meaningless jingle. And yet even the people who shake their watches keep coming to church. Why: because deep within us something stirs which tells us that should Jesus Christ stride through that door, march up here, and speak those words to us, they would have a lot more meaning than just ‘cheer up’. And so people keep coming, coming in the hope that somehow they will connect with the life and the meaning they know in some undefined way to be there.
So let’s pray. Lord we pray that as we think about these words this morning you will enable us somehow to come out of the dullness of our own superficiality and enter into the reality of a different way of thinking. Amen.
Beatitudes: overview
Before we look at the beatitudes in detail, I’d like to start by taking an overview. I must confess I did almost despair at one point. The problem with the passage is that it is very short and very dense; so dense that the more you look at each beatitude the less it seems to mean. Take one example. Blessed are the pure in heart. What does that mean? Well, it’s almost anybody’s guess really, isn’t it. If you go through church history you find that the early church thought the pure in heart were those who were free from the voice of the enemy and the lies of the world. The Eastern church Fathers thought it was about freedom from passions and impure thoughts. Luther said it was about thinking God’s thoughts not your own. Post-reformation critics said it was about simplicity and integrity. Kierkegaard said it meant to will one thing, which was to see God. Given that the only person who doesn’t seem to have an opinion about what Jesus meant is Matthew, it’s all up for grabs, isn’t it, really. Modern commentators produce whole paragraphs on each beatitude, most of which just seem to me to be sheer speculation. I don’t see the point of me standing up here speculating, and I have too profound a respect for scripture to think that that was what Jesus meant us to do. There must be another way.
I think the other way is this. It all depends what you think the beatitudes are for. If you think they are a list of entrance requirements for heaven, you will want to make sure you’ve got them clearly defined and understood, for your life will depend on your ability to follow them. If on the other hand you think they are a set of divine instructions for righteous living, you will want to do what the Pharisees did with the OT law and break them down into umpteen clear and manageable applications. So you will say blessed are the peacemakers, and then you will say OK, peace between who and who, and on what occasions, and how much of it do I have to do.
But I think that if this kind of detail is what Jesus had wanted, he’d have put it in himself. He didn’t, or at least as far as we know he didn’t. So my conclusion is that he wasn’t setting a series of conundrums to give centuries of biblical scholars something to do. He must have had some other aim. So what do we think it was?
Well, let’s go back to the thought that Jesus himself might stride in here. Wake up, stop looking at your watches, turn your heads. You’ll feel his presence as soon as he comes through the door. He walks up the aisle. He comes up here. He opens his mouth. And the beatitudes come out.
What’s he doing? He’s painting a picture, offering a vision of hope before he gets down to the nitty gritty of the practicalities.
He starts with the word blessed. What does that mean? It isn’t a religious word. It just means happy, fortunate. You’re looking for happiness? This is what it looks like.
Now here we’re on familiar ground, aren’t we. It isn’t about bless you my child, it’s about happiness and where it’s to be found. And happiness is something we have clear ideas about. Happiness is ... a full stomach... material prosperity... a sense of fulfilment... harmonious relationships... success in the world... having the respect of others.
But that isn’t what Jesus says it is. Jesus gives us 2 pictures.
1. Firstly, a picture of the happy person...
There was a picture of an old woman in the paper recently. She lives in Chechnya, and was carrying what was left of her possessions on her back, including a single photo, all that remained to her of her husband. The things in Jesus’ list of the happy person are all true of her.
poverty
grief
powerlessness
thirsting for righteousness
mercy
purity
working for peace
persecution
being slandered and reviled
2. Secondly, a picture of what their happiness looks
like...
But if that is her material lot in life, this is what is promised to her in spiritual terms. This is the shape her good fortune will take.
the kingdom of heaven
comfort
inheriting the earth
being filled with righteousness
receiving mercy
seeing God
being children of God
receiving a reward
Well, it’s a bit hard to see how this makes sense, isn’t it. The first one is incomprehensible. I don’t know about you, but I have developed quite clear ideas about what makes me happy, and it doesn’t include feeling depressed, sorting out other people’s quarrels, and then having them bitch about me behind my back! As for the second, well, it all seems a bit remote, doesn’t it. People buy lottery tickets on the hope of happiness, but at least the draw is on Saturday.
I think there is only one possible way of reconciling this extraordinary discrepancy between what we expect Jesus to come up here and say about happiness and what he did actually say, and that is to assume that it is deliberate. More than that, I think we have to conclude that here we find the whole point. Jesus wanted to startle. The clash is intentional. So if for us the beatitudes seem initially meaningless, a jangle of familiar words which of course we agree with but which don’t somehow change anything, we need to think why that is. And the obvious explanation lies in the clash. These words run so counter to what we expect, immersed as we are in the values of our culture, that they just bounce off us. Simple observation of the world tells us that the rich, not the poor, are the fortunate ones; that those who laugh, and not those who mourn, are to be envied; and that the powerful, not the meek, are the lucky ones.
So what is Jesus doing. Not, at this stage anyway, telling us what to do. Rather, he is offering us a new world view, a new way of thinking about life. This isn’t a legal or ethical text, it’s a statement of vision. And so here Jesus is offering us a promise; come out of the assumptions of your world, come and live in my world, my topsey-turvey world, and you will receive blessing. It won’t look like the blessings you are used to; but it will connect you with God, and it will never leave you.
3. Context: who was he speaking to
So perhaps that provides us with a way in. But let’s check it out. When we’re trying to make sense of the Bible we shouldn’t really start with ourselves. The best practice is to go back to the original context and ask how it applied then. This may seem hard, because after all we have a much greater understanding of our own culture than we do of theirs. But it was to them that Jesus originally spoke, and so any attempt to understand what he said has first of all to fit the context in which he said it before it can be transplanted out into ours.
What kind of assumptions did the people listening to Jesus have about happiness? What kind of a world did they live in? Well, it was like ours only more so. There were essentially 2 social groupings, the haves and the have-nots; and happiness was perceived by many to lie in the opportunity to move out of the one into the other.
Many of those to whom Jesus was speaking were quite literally poor, mournful, hungry and persecuted. The annual output in agriculture is thought to have been insufficient to feed the population, and there must therefore have been large segments of the community living on the edge of starvation. Despite this, they were subject to heavy Roman taxation which they had no choice but to pay. There was a poll tax. There was a levy on all agricultural products, and there were additional tolls and dues of various kinds. And sophisticated though it was administratively, the Roman empire made no provision for social security.
But not everyone lived like this. There was another group of people determined to achieve happiness by the acquisition of worldly power and wealth. Those in political office, landowners and traders were rich. Tax collectors were unscrupulous in lining their own pockets. The chief priests were amongst the most powerful and wealthy of all segments of the community, which is why they weren’t too chuffed to hear Jesus saying this kind of thing. The Roman governors were the victors in an international and personal power struggle, and had neither understanding nor compassion for the people they ruled - while the people prayed for an adequate harvest and orphans and widows gathered discarded ears of wheat one by one, the civil authorities were building a gleaming new imperial city just down the road from Nazareth. It was called Sepphoris. Jesus never mentioned it, though half the population of his home town must have been employed in building it. A generation previously, Herod the Great had risen to power by a process of ruthless elimination of all his opponents, which included several of his advisors plus 3 of his sons and one of his wives; apparently the emperor Augustus remarked that he’d sooner be one of Herod’s pigs than one of his sons. A generation later things were to get so bad that there would be a national uprising against Roman rule, which would culminate in the destruction of the temple and the sack of Jerusalem.
So when Jesus stood up and started talking about poverty, hunger, grief and persecution, his audience knew what he meant. They had indeed known it for centuries. And for centuries they had been waiting for this moment, the moment when God would send the messiah, the man who was going to end their suffering and inaugurate a new kingdom. They were waiting, in their daily lives of political, social, and religious oppression, for the man who was going to come and offer them an alternative world, for the man who would restore their fortunes and usher in a new age of peace and plenty. Here was the man; the crowds have gathered to hear him; and here it is, on this hillside, that he most definitively utters God’s manifesto for the new kingdom.
Now it doesn’t take much to see that that what he said isn’t what we want to hear him say. But it isn’t what they wanted to hear him say either. They, like us, knew what would make them happy. They knew what they wanted. They wanted justice. Prosperity. Freedom. And here he is saying their happiness lies precisely in their misery. Here he is overturning all their values and assumptions, speaking apparent nonsense; and yet they can’t just leave it there, for as Matthew says at the end, the crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority. Which indeed he has. So let’s imagine that he is here, that he is speaking the words of the beatitudes directly to us, and that we are hearing them for the first time. If this is where happiness is to be found, let’s strain and strain to filter out the voices which tell us it is to be found somewhere else, and let’s try and listen with fresh minds. And let’s listen to these words not as instructions, but as a vision. Not as details which have to be pinned down and analysed with theological hats on, but as a promise. Not as an ethical treatise, but as the sketch of a new world, an upside down world, a world of new possibility.
4. The beatitudes
The poor in spirit
The first lot of happy people are the poor in spirit. Spiritual and material poverty go together for these people who live in a society which taxes them, under priests who conduct their relationship with God for them. But the kingdom of heaven isn’t for the political and spiritual elite. It’s for the ordinary person who knows his or her need of God. It’s for children. It is for those who depend not on themselves but on God. Acknowledge your dependence, confess your inadequacy, and the kingdom of God will be yours.
Those who mourn
The second lot are those who mourn. They are happy not because their grief will cease, but because they will be comforted. Jesus doesn’t say why you might mourn; he just says it’s good to mourn, because you will be comforted. And this does make a certain kind of sense to me. Jesus came to bind up the broken-hearted, and this has been my experience of living through pain. We want pain to go away; Jesus says it is more important to receive comfort. And I think I agree with him. I have a friend who lost a baby, years ago now. She said the intensity of the love she received from God was far greater than the pain of her grief. I have often gone to bed, when times have been tough, praying the words of Psalm 131, O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvellous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a child quieted at its mother’s breast; like a child that is quieted is my soul. My children never cease to amaze me; they hurt themselves, I kiss it better and cuddle them, and they run off happier than they were before they did it in the first place. For it is in receiving comfort that we know we are loved; and to be loved is to know God.
The meek
Next come the meek. This is a quotation from psalm 37, where the meek are understood as those without status or power in an unjust world. I read in my Orange magazine recently that John Paul Getty, one of those with the most status and power in the world, has been thinking about this beatitude. This is his response. ‘The meek shall inherit the earth - but not the mineral rights’. Well, quite frankly he can keep the mineral rights; I’d rather have the earth, with its wonders of creation, and one day the even greater wonders of new creation. I am promised enough to meet my needs; he can have the dollar bills and the goldmines and the oil wells, and I’ll listen to the birds singing in the mist of the morning, and watch the flowers opening on their springtime stems. Listen to Thomas Traherne, writing in the 17th century: you never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world.. till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness
Now we come to those who hunger and thirst for righteousness - understood as personal holiness or as the bringing of justice upon the earth, it doesn’t say. Apparently protestants go for the first, catholics for the second, if that’s any help. But the point is that your unfulfilled longings will be met, and your desires fulfilled. So we are not to give up in the face of failure in oursevles or failure in the world. Keep going. God is with you.
The merciful and the pure in heart
At this point the focus seems to change a bit from focussing on our relationship with God to looking at our relationship with one another. We are to be merciful, as God is merciful to us - shades of the Lord’s prayer here. We are also to be pure in heart, whatever we take that to mean, and we will see God. Here the rewards seem to increase. Do you want to see God? I think I want it more than I want anything else. Not in the sense that I want to know how many arms and legs he’s got, or whather his teeth look like the ones in the toothpaste ads; but in the sense that I want to experience him, to see him with the eyes of my heart, and to know the love and the power that holds the universe together. And Jesus says here that if that is what I really want, that is what I can have. I may get it through powerlessness and insignificance; but each glimpse of it makes me happier than ever I have been before.
The peacemakers
Then we get the peacemakers; again, it isn’t spelt out where we bring peace. I’m sure all this would have been immensely frustrating to Pharisees, who liked to have things cut and dried so they could score 10 out of 10 on observance. But Jesus is talking about an attitude. God is love, and love brings peace. We are his children, and so we to are to bring peace; as of course Jesus did for us, at the cost of his own life.
The persecuted
Then last of all we get the persecuted and the slandered. It isn’t supposed to be easy living as a child of God in the kingdom of the world. I can tell you I have known what it is to be persecuted and reviled, as have some of you. And I can also share with you that I don’t think, looking back on it, that I would have had it any other way; for through it I really have discovered that the kingdom of heaven is mine.
5. A new world view
Now all this must have come as a bit of a thunderbolt to these people whose lives were wrapped round in pain, and whose expectations of the messiah had for centuries been that he would bring an end to that pain in essentially material ways. That is not what he promises here. The whole meaning of Jesus’s life and above all death was that God is found not in the absence of pain but precisely through pain. The message of the cross is that death precedes resurrection, that pain precedes joy. There is no easy way. Even Jesus in his humanity cried out to have the pain taken away; but God knows that the joy of new life can be found only through the agony of childbirth. That is the way the world is. You don’t get kissed better until you’ve fallen over.
So let’s come back to our own culture for a moment. We aren’t looking for a messiah. But we do have strong and largely unquestioned assumptions about where happiness is to be found, and it isn’t through the experience of pain. Let me toss some phrases at you. What are the values of our society. We read books called things like How to win friends and influence people and I’m OK you’re OK. We watch shows on TV in which ordinary people compete to win a million. We buy lottery tickets, we spend our leisure time shopping. We follow the fortunes of the rich and famous, we strive for success and achievement, we accumulate possessions. And yet it doesn’t work. The rich and famous split up with their spouses, live in therapy, take drugs, suffer from eating disorders and commit suicide, as they find they have connected not with happiness but with an inner emptiness. But still we don’t learn. I am terrified by the spectre of the doomed and empty search for happiness which goes on in the town centre every Friday night. Bouncers on every doorway, a mind-numbing music pulsing out from clubs and bars, the streets deserted except for gangs of swaggering lads and skimpily clad girls, all dressed in black, all looking for something they won’t find, and the occasional huddle of a homeless man in a sleeping bag. What do we think we’re doing? And why do we insist so obstinately in sticking our heads in the sand, in insisting that this is the right way to do it? We don’t want to mourn, we’d rather take Prozac. And so we don’t rejoice either. In eliminating pain we eliminate joy.
It doesn’t have to be like this. It isn’t like this everywhere. Last summer when I went to Zambia [acetate] I found a people who do not pursue happiness in this illusory way. I stayed with people who have no money, and yet who shared their food with me. I listened to them as they came for prayer with untreated physical problems which we go to the doctor with one day and forget about the next. I shook hands with a leper and drank boiled water from an almost stagnant muddy puddle, and blew bubbles for children who had never had a toy. Then I came home, and learnt that some of them had already died. But there was more to it than that. These people acknowledge their pain. They know their country cannot educate its children because it is paying off every penny it earns to service its foreign debt. They know corruption and political instability lurks just round the corner. And yet in the midst of this acknowledged pain they sing. They cannot read, so they set the gospel stories to their own African music, and dance the gospel round the fire. They know ambition is futile, so they cling to one another in a community life whose depth puts our fragmented and individualistic world to shame. And I think that in the midst of their pain, in their acknowledged helplessness, there was happiness, glimmerings of the kind of happiness Jesus offered to the people of Israel whose lives were so similar to theirs and so different from ours.
So this is Jesus’ new blueprint for good fortune. He paints a portrait of an alternative world, in which hunger, poverty, grief, powerlessness and persecution seem to be the in values. These are the characteristics of the people who will inherit the earth and belong to the kingdom of heaven. These are the dead ends which lead to the oasis of personal and collective fulfilment. This is the way to follow the king who rode in to claim his kingdom on a donkey, and who created it by suffering persecution to the point of death.
It is harder for us than it was for them, perhaps, and harder for us than it is in Africa. For they had, and have, no alternative strategy except to hope that something will give. We do; our rich western world offers us a hundred and one alternative strategies. But Jesus is asking us to face up to the fact that the happiness of the world is ultimately an illusion. In giving it up we give up something which seems solid, and yet which slithers through our fingers as we stretch out to grasp it. He is asking us to embrace thse values instead, and asking us to believe that it is here, and in the eternal relationship with God which we will find, that true happiness lies. So which route will you take? The crazy route of the crucified king on a donkey, or the glittering path which leads to the elusive crock of gold at the end of the world’s rainbow? You’ll never get the gold. But you might just get on the donkey. Keep coming to find out how!