Preached at Silverton Friends Church
July 20, 2025
I have a lifetime of reading the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:1-12, as statements to me of how my interior life ought to be. Perhaps you also have heard the saying, “beatitudes are attitudes to be.” This (like many clichés) is only partly true. I’ve also argued with these pronouncements, particularly those that seem to promote spinelessness and subservience. Since Jesus was neither spineless nor subservient, I figure I have misunderstood something about what he taught in these massively important words. So I’ve gone looking for context to help me update my understanding, particularly in relation to the turbulent times in which we are living. I want us to look at the beatitudes for their prophetic content.
Luke’s gospel records the moment when Jesus announced to his hometown congregation what he had come to do (Luke 4:17-21): “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are downtrodden, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord” (Is. 61:1-2). This announcement sets context for Jesus’s mission here; Jesus places his calling in the line of prophets from ancient history. Therefore, we can expect to find precedent for his teaching in the Jewish Testament. We can also notice that Jesus stopped short of this word: “the favorable year of the Lord, the day of vengeance for our God.” All his hearers would have noticed that he omitted this phrase.
Luke includes a second version of the beatitudes, one less likely to be spiritualized and individualized (Luke 6:20-38). Luke also includes the “woes”—the day of vengeance for our God. I’m not implying one is accurate and one is inaccurate; I’d guess instead that Jesus said these things more than just one time on a hillside.
Today I want us to consider these three beatitudes from Matthew.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
These three beatitudes communicate the shocking idea that those who are beaten down are blessed, or happy. No one actually thinks this is true. In the Greek, “poor” connotes beggary, crouching in fear, helplessness; “mourn” connotes profound and irreparable loss; “meek” connotes downcast eyes, oppressed, depressed, lowly, tamed (though I have to include the meanings of gentle and humble).
It is hard to aspire to these conditions, even though Jesus announces that the law of the universe is that these conditions will be rewarded, or perhaps, if I understand the second part of the beatitudes more accurately, will be remedied far and above the harm.
Let’s look at the poor in spirit. In Luke, Jesus says, “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven.”
This is a common theme of the Jewish Testament. God is on the side of the poor, and will recompense their misery. Psalm 113 says, “Who is like the Lord our God, who is enthroned on high, who humbles himself to behold things in heaven and in the earth. He raises the poor from the dust, and lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with nobles, with the privileged of his people.” This is the tip of the iceberg of prophecies and psalms where God excoriates the rich for grinding the faces of the poor into the dirt and asserts that their wrongs will be redressed and those who wrong them will reap what they have sown.
Jesus, who grew up in a family with royal forbears and was part of the working class, may not himself have had this grinding down experience of poverty. But he gave up home and livelihood to obey the will of God—to preach the good news to the poor. The rich who came to him were confronted—Zacchaeus offered to pay back all he had defrauded at a rate of 4 to 1, and the rich young ruler went away sad because he couldn’t bear to part with the security of his wealth. Matthew himself gave up his lucrative tax practice in order to follow Jesus, and Mary poured a fortune in perfume onto him in worship. Detachment from wealth and increased generosity developed in Jesus's followers.
It’s tempting to think that Matthew, likely well-to-do, emphasized the “in spirit” version when Jesus said it, because those of us not impoverished also want to be eligible heirs of the kingdom of heaven. And Matthew also omits the “woes”: Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” The rich believe their needs have been met and will be met by the cushion of wealth. They are comforted and comfortable. Wealth is their comforter.
I’ll refer you to the parable of the rich man and Lazarus the beggar, in which Lazarus ends up being comforted in Abraham’s arms and the rich man ends up in flames, begging for a drop of water to drink. Abraham said to him, “Son, remember that in life you had all the good things and Lazarus had all the bad things, and so now he is comforted, and you are in torment” (Luke 16:19-31). This parable teaches us the same thing as the sheep and the goats—those who have must share to alleviate the suffering of those who have not, or there will be hell to pay.
The poor sit next door to those who mourn. Proverbs 29:2, “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people mourn.” Psalm 55 is a long and bitter lament mourning the loss of a friend who betrayed the psalmist, and crying out to God to set things right. And just after Jesus’s mission statement from Isaiah 61 is this: “to comfort those that mourn, … to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified.”
It is difficult to overstate how much of the Jewish testament is given over to mourning, to lament, often followed by entreaties for God to take action and execute judgment and even vengeance on those who have done the harm. The beautiful psalm that begins with “By the waters of Babylon, we lay down and wept for thee, Zion” ends with a bloodthirsty prayer that asks God to require an eye for an eye, an infant for an infant.
Even the Revelation of John includes the martyrs under the throne of God crying out for their blood to be avenged.
It is hard to mourn without also blaming someone for the loss. And just after Jesus’s mission statement from Isaiah 61 is this: “the acceptable day of the Lord, the day of vengeance for our God, to comfort those that mourn.” But over and over, the Bible disapproves of taking personal revenge, even in the Law of an eye for an eye. At least that limits revenge, so that the wronged person doesn’t take more than was taken.
Paul reminds his readers, “ Don’t repay anyone evil for evil, because ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord” and Jesus pushes beyond that to require us to pray for those who misuse us, who cause us harm. In fact, Jesus wades into the deep waters of turning the other cheek, offering no resistance to evil, and loving the enemy, all of which are unnatural to human beings and require us to seek the intervention of the indwelling Spirit of God to teach us how to respond to loss, to undeserved harm, to intentional evil.
And finally, Blessed are the meek. Within this word is a picture of a tamed animal. For instance, the horse, while dangerous due to its size, is a prey animal, and lives in a state of readiness for alarm, even when tamed. A horse with a rope around its neck can be led by a small human. And anyone who has read Black Beauty knows how a horse can be abused by its owners, despite having the potential to trample said owner into the ground.
The negative side of meekness is this subservience, this loss of belief in one’s own power to effect change, the resignation of the hopeless. And yet, in a direct reference to Psalm 37, “The meek shall inherit the earth, and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.” Jesus says, “The meek shall inherit the earth." This psalm offers a picture of meekness: Trust in the Lord, do good, don’t fret because of evildoers, delight yourself in the Lord, commit your way to the Lord, rest in the Lord, wait patiently for him, cease from anger, believe that the Lord will set things right.
It’s pretty difficult not to fret because of evildoers, and anger seems unavoidable when we see evil prosper. The Psalms are full of this anger, and yet they provide us with a way to move toward meekness. Taking the harms and the evil we see being done to the vulnerable among us, and to us ourselves at times, taking those to God in passionate, angry, justice-seeking prayer is a positive action.
I’ve recently read Jacques Ellul’s book, Hope in Time of Abandonment (New York: Seabury Press, 1972).
Writing in the early 1970s, Ellul responded to the chaos of his times, expressing his observation that God has abandoned history. Ellul allowed for the perceived presence and activity of God in the lives of individuals, but he did not see God intervening in elections, in wars, in technological developments, in disasters natural and human-made. He did not see God setting things right on behalf of those who need everything, those who lament irretrievable losses, those who are beaten down to the point of no resistance. And, if I’m honest, these times are not better. Ellul set out to write about this abandonment, but instead, he wrote, “hope asserted itself” (Preface, viii). It was precisely in this recognition of abandonment, this awareness that no human initiative or institution or election will redress the miseries of the world, this realization of the childishness and impotence of the church to bring positive change, it was in this chaos that hope asserted itself.
Ellul says this, “There is little attraction in prayer. It is boring. And yet, … without prayer there is no hope, not the slightest” (272).“Prayer is the assurance of the possibility of God’s intervention, without which there is no hope” (271-2).
“Hope is based on God’s promise constantly fulfilled and renewed. But how can we forget that, throughout the Bible, this promise is linked with the ceaseless outcry of prayer? It is [our] prayer which demands the fulfillment and its ongoing. Without prayer, the promise and its fulfillment are forces just as indifferent and blind as fate and necessity” (273). Prayer is the only basis for hope, and at the same time it is the means of hope and the expression of hope. “Prayer is the referral to God’s decision, on which we are counting” (272).
Jesus pointed us in this direction with his parable in Luke 18 of the persistent widow and the unjust judge, “a parable to show that at all times [we] should pray and not lose heart.”
A widow, one of the poor, the mournful, the meek, petitioned a judge to avenge her on her adversary. He ignored her. She brought her case again, and then again, and then again. Finally, the unjust judge said, “Even though I do not fear God nor respect human beings, I will avenge her. She is wearing me out, bothering me beyond endurance.”
And Jesus said, “Now shall not God bring about justice for those he cares for, who cry to God night and day?”
What can we learn from these beatitudes and the Old Testament sources they derive from? We learn that centering our hearts on God’s character and God’s faithfulness is the place to start. (I’m trying contemplative prayer for this purpose.) It is always right to pray. It is not the last resort; it is the only resort in hopeless times. Prayer is the expression of hope when there is no basis for hope.
Prayer is modeled throughout the Bible, and recommended (!) by Jesus in the face of injustice and evil leadership. Prayer expresses the anger and despair we feel about the power evil wields in our world and channels our feelings towards God, who can absorb them, so that in our daily lives we can act and react with non-violence in word and deed, but still act in ways that make life more bearable for the poor, the mournful, the beaten down.
We pray because God told us to, and we then do what God tells us to.
No comments:
Post a Comment