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February 18, 2017
So whatever the point of the Beatitudes, it cannot be that they state conditions that guarantee God’s approval, salvation, or blessing.
We have already indicated the key to understanding the Beatitudes. They serve to clarify Jesus’ fundamental message: the free availability of God’s rule and righteousness to all of humanity through reliance upon Jesus himself, the person now loose in the world among us.
heavens. This fact of God’s care and provision proves to all that no human condition excludes blessedness, that God may come to any person with his care and deliverance.
The religious system of his day left the multitudes out, but Jesus welcomed them all into his kingdom.
Next are those who burn with desire for things to be made right.
Thus by proclaiming blessed those who in the human order are thought hopeless, and by pronouncing woes over those human beings regarded as well off, Jesus opens the kingdom of the heavens to everyone.
More important, however, note here the list of “hopeless cases” that are blessed through the sufficiency of God to meet them in their appalling need. The personal ministry of Jesus from his present kingdom brings them beatitude.
Indeed, such transformation of status for the lowly, the humanly hopeless, as they experience the hand of God reaching into their situation, is possibly the most pervasive theme of the biblical writings.
The reigning of God over life is the good news of the whole Bible: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings, who publishes peace, who brings good tidings of well-being, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’” (Isa. 52:7).
Jesus replied that they would be rewarded in this life many times over for all their sacrifices and given eternal life in the world to come. “But,” he added, “many who are first shall be last, and the last shall be first” (Mark 10:31). He knew that much of what Peter and the others thought to be important was not really so, and that what they thought to be of no importance was often of great significance before God. Their thinking would have to be rearranged before they could understand their “reward” for leaving all to follow him. So he adds his “reversal” formula to help them keep thinking.
The gospel of the kingdom is that no one is beyond beatitude, because the rule of God from the heavens is available to all. Everyone can reach it, and it can reach everyone. We respond appropriately to the Beatitudes of Jesus by living as if this were so, as it concerns others and as it concerns ourselves.
The condition of life sought for by human beings through the ages is attained in the quietly transforming friendship of Jesus.
If I, as a recovering sinner myself, accept Jesus’ good news, I can go to the mass murderer and say, “You can be blessed in the kingdom of the heavens. There is forgiveness that knows no limits.”
Speaking to these common people, “the multitudes,” who through him had found blessing in the kingdom, Jesus tells them it is they, not the “best and brightest” on the human scale, who are to make life on earth manageable as they live from the kingdom (Matt. 5:13–16). God gives them “light”—truth, love, and power—that they might be the light for their surroundings. He makes them “salt,” to cleanse, preserve, and flavor the times through which they live.
These “little” people, without any of the character or qualifications humans insist are necessary, are the only ones who can actually make the world work. It is how things are among them that determines the character of every age and place.
The Law and the Prophets had been twisted around to authorize an oppressive, though religious, social order that put glittering humans—the rich, the educated, the “well-born,” the popular, the powerful, and so on—in possession of God. Jesus’ proclamation clearly dumped them out of their privileged position and raised ordinary people with no human qualifications into the divine fellowship by faith in Jesus.
A contemporary historian, Michael Grant, comments, The most potent figure, not only in the history of religion, but in world history as a whole, is Jesus Christ: the maker of one of the few revolutions which have lasted. Millions of men and women for century after century have found his life and teaching overwhelmingly significant and moving. And there is ample reason…in this later twentieth century why this should still be so.
Friedrich Nietzsche
He also understood that the modern world had moved off of its foundations in the Christian traditions of moral goodness, and that cataclysmic changes were to come because of this. They have come and they are coming.
“The Sermon on the Mount is the most important and most controversial biblical text”. The implications of this statement are simply staggering, as Bauman himself recognizes. The most important text is an enigma? That this could be so is deeply revelatory of the condition of the church in the modern world. We are scattered, wandering, and have no clear and comprehensive message for life because our most important text is an enigma. It does not function as the clear guide to life that its author intended.
The aim of the sermon—forcefully indicated by its concluding verses—is to help people come to hopeful and realistic terms with their lives here on earth by clarifying, in concrete terms, the nature of the kingdom into which they are now invited by Jesus’ call: “Repent, for life in the kingdom of the heavens is now one of your options.” The separate parts of the discourse are to be interpreted in the light of this single purpose. They are not to be read as one disconnected statement after another. One must discern the overall plan of life within which the separate parts of the discourse make
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Here is a profoundly significant fact: In our culture, among Christians and non-Christians alike, Jesus Christ is automatically disassociated from brilliance or intellectual capacity.
The world has succeeded in opposing intelligence to goodness.
The brilliance and profundity of Jesus stand out in the overall structure and outline of The Discourse on the Hill, as he forcefully conveys an understanding of human life that actually works.
Finally, Jesus gives us urgent warnings about failing to actually do what he calls us to do in his teachings and mentions the specific things that are most likely to trip us up in this regard. Dietrich Bonhoeffer forcefully states, “The only proper response to this word which Jesus brings with him from eternity is simply to do it.”
Doing and not just hearing and talking about it is how we know the reality of the kingdom and integrate our life into it.
The simple but powerful structure of the Discourse on the Hill can therefore be represented as follows: Background assumption: life in the kingdom through reliance upon Jesus (Matt. 4:17–25; chapters 1 through 3 of this book are devoted to this topic). It is ordinary people who are the light and salt of the world as they live the blessed life in the kingdom (5:1–20, and chapter 4 of this book). The kingdom heart of goodness concretely portrayed as the kind of love that is in God (5:21–48, and the present chapter of this book). Warning: against false securities—reputation and wealth (Matt. 6,
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The various scenes and situations that Jesus discusses in his Discourse on the Hill are actually stages in a progression toward a life of agape love.
A similar point is to be made with reference to not performing to be seen, not relying on wealth, not using condemnation to straighten people out, and so forth. When these things are taken in the order Jesus presents them, but only then, they provide the foundation for a practical strategy for becoming the beings God created us to be. As we hear him teach, we must constantly review and remember them until they form a part of our conscious minds.
One must surpass humanly contrived religious respectability “if one is to mesh their life with the flow of the kingdom of the heavens” (5:20).
We would now say, and say correctly, “Trust Jesus Christ.” But we have already seen in previous chapters how the idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do what he said.
This leaves us caught in a strange inversion of the work of the Judaizing teachers who dogged the footsteps of Paul in New Testament days. As they wanted to add obedience to ritual law to faith in Christ, we want to subtract moral law from faith in Christ.
How to combine faith with obedience is surely the essential task of the church as it enters the twenty-first century.
God’s true law also possessed an inherent beauty in its own right, as an expression of the beautiful mind of God. It is profound truth and therefore precious in its own right. In Psalm 119 and elsewhere, we see how the devotee of the law, Jehovah’s precious gift, was ravished by its goodness and power, finding it to be the perfect guide into the blessed life in God. It was a constant delight to the mind and the heart.
To be sure, law is not the source of rightness, but it is forever the course of rightness.
The law of God marks the movements of God’s kingdom, of his own actions and of how that kingdom works.
When we keep the law, we step into his ways and drink in his power.
He knew that we cannot keep the law by trying to keep the law. To succeed in keeping the law one must aim at something other and something more.
One must aim to become the kind of person from whom the deeds of the law naturally flow. The apple tree naturally and easily produces apples because of its inner nature. This is the most crucial thing to remember if we would understand Jesus’ picture of the kingdom heart given in the Sermon on the Mount.
