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This struggle with the translation reflects our intense need to find in the condition referred to something good, something God supposedly desires or even requires, that then can serve as a “reasonable” basis for the blessedness he bestows. But that precisely misses the point that the very formulation of the Beatitudes should bring to our attention.
Those poor in spirit are called “blessed” by Jesus, not because they are in a meritorious condition, but because, precisely in spite of and in the midst of their ever so deplorable condition, the rule of the heavens has moved redemptively upon and through them by the grace of Christ.
“Beatitudes” must not be regarded as the reward of the spiritual states with which they are respectively connected, nor yet as their result. It is not because a man is poor in spirit that his is the Kingdom of Heaven, in the sense that the one state will grow into the other, or be its result; still less is the one the reward of the other. The connecting link is in each case Christ Himself: because He…“has opened the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.”
Those spiritually impoverished ones present before Jesus in the crowd are blessed only because the gracious touch of the heavens has freely fallen upon them. But the mistranslations noted remain attractive because they suit our human sense of propriety, which cries out against God’s blessing on people just because of their need and just because he chooses—or perhaps just because someone asked him to. This same sense of propriety may even allow us to totally bypass contact with Jesus in his own Beatitudes. Indeed, most interpretations of his words manage to forget that he is even on the scene.
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If you’re not on the list, you’re not in the kingdom. Perhaps you will not even make it into “heaven” when you die. I have heard this stated by numerous Christian teachers.
If the usual interpretation of Jesus’ Beatitudes as directions on how to attain blessedness is correct, you would have to be poor, have to mourn, be persecuted, and so forth, to be among the blessed.
The Beatitudes, in particular, are not teachings on how to be blessed. They are not instructions to do anything. They do not indicate conditions that are especially pleasing to God or good for human beings. No one is actually being told that they are better off for being poor, for mourning, for being persecuted, and so on, or that the conditions listed are recommended ways to well-being before God or man. Nor are the Beatitudes indications of who will be on top “after the revolution.” They are explanations and illustrations, drawn from the immediate setting, of the present availability of the
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This is seen in his well-known use of the parable—which, from its origin in the Greek word paraballein, literally means to throw one thing down alongside another. Parables are not just pretty stories that are easy to remember; rather, they help us understand something difficult by comparing it to, placing it beside, something with which we are very familiar, and always something concrete, specific.
understanding of the Beatitudes. This use is found where he corrects a general assumption or practice thought to govern the situation at hand. He does this by pointing out that the case before him provides an exception and shows the general assumption or practice to be an unreliable guide to life under God.
It is crucial to note here what Jesus did not say. He did not say that the rich cannot enter the kingdom. In fact he said they could—with God’s help, which is the only way anyone can do it. Nor did he say that the poor have, on the whole, any advantage over the rich so far as “being saved” is concerned. By using the case at hand, he simply upset the prevailing general assumption about God and riches. For how could God favor a person, however rich, who loves him less than wealth? So being rich does not mean that one is in God’s favor—which further suggests that being poor does not automatically
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Sometimes several “techniques of concreteness” come together in one of Jesus’ teachings. Thus the parable, the occasion, and the case contradicting the prevailing general assumption all come together in the illustration of “the good Samaritan” (Luke 10).
But we must say it, and we must understand what it means. It means that the general assumptions of Jesus’ hearers about who has eternal life have to be revised in the light of the condition of people’s hearts. The story does not teach that we can have eternal life just by loving our neighbor. We cannot get away with that nice legalism either. The issue of our posture toward God still has to be taken into account. But in God’s order nothing can substitute for loving people. And we define who our neighbor is by our love. We make a neighbor of someone by caring for him or her.
who is my neighbor? #divineconspiracy
“To whom will I be a neighbor?”
Jesus not only teaches us to help people in need; more deeply, he teaches us that we cannot identify who “has it,” who is “in” with God, who is “blessed,” by looking at exteriors of any sort. That is a matter of the heart.
the aim of the popular teacher in Jesus’ time was not to impart information, but to make a significant change in the lives of the hearers.
We automatically remember what makes a real difference in our life. The secret of the great teacher is to speak words, to foster experiences, that impact the active flow of the hearer’s life.
By showing to others the presence of the kingdom in the concrete details of our shared existence, we impact the lives and hearts of our hearers, not just their heads. And they won’t have to write it down to hold onto it.
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. They do this simply by taking those who, from the human point of view, are regarded as most hopeless, most beyond all possibility of God’s blessing or even interest, and exhibiting them as enjoying God’s touch and abundant provision from the heavens. This fact of God’s care and provision proves to all that no human condition
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Just look at the list of the “written off,” of the “sat upon, spat upon, ratted on.” It is interesting that Simon and Garfunkel got Jesus’ point in their old song, even though many of us “scribes” miss it. We have already considered the spiritually bankrupt or deprived. Now we pass on to those who mourn. Luke refers to them as “the weeping ones” (6:21): men or women whose mates have just deserted them, leaving them paralyzed by rejection, for example; a parent in gut-wrenching grief and depression over the death of a little daughter; people in the sunset of their employable years who have lost
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Yet the kingdom of the heavens has a chemistry that can transform even the past and make the terrible, irretrievable losses that human beings experience seem insignificant in the greatness of God. He restores our soul and fills us with the goodness of rightness.
But under God’s rule there is recognition that in bringing good to people who are in the wrong (as both sides usually are) you show the divine family resemblance, “because God himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked” (Luke 6:35 REB).
Most of what is wrong in human affairs simply can’t be dealt with by law.
The word here translated “blessed,” makarios, is the same as that used in Matthew 5 and Luke 6. It refers to the highest type of well-being possible for human beings, but it is also the term the Greeks used for the kind of blissful existence characteristic of the gods. 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 reigning of God over life is the good news of the whole Bible:
No doubt the initial response of most of us when we hear about God’s care for us is that he is going to secure the various projects that we have our hearts set upon.
“Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal?”8
The complete obliteration of social and cultural distinctions as a basis for life under God was clearly understood by Paul as essential to the presence of Jesus in his people. It means nothing less than a new type of humanity, “Abraham’s seed.”
(Col. 3:10–11). Inclusion of the Scythian here is instructive and should be understood to refer to the very lowest possibility of humanity. The Scythian was the barbarian’s barbarian, thought of as an utterly brutal savage—largely because he was. Yet, “Blessed are the Scythians.”
“A lie is an abomination to God and a very present help in time of trouble.”
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.
We all know that action must be based on knowledge, and we grant the right to lead and teach only to those we believe to know what is real and what is best.
“Smart” means good at managing how life “really” is.
Discourse on the Hill, as he forcefully conveys an understanding of human life that actually works.
Law as God intended it remains forever essential to the kingdom, and Jesus made it clear to his hearers that his aim is to bring those who follow him into fulfillment of the true law.
The fulfillment he had in mind was not for the purpose of making them humanly acceptable. That is quite another matter. But fulfillment of God’s law is important because the law is good. It is right for human life. And the presence of the kingdom brings us all that is right for human life.
In Matt. 5:20–48, then, we find out precisely what fulfillment of the law would ...
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer forcefully states, “The only proper response to this word which Jesus brings with him from eternity is simply to do it.”6 Remarkably, almost one sixth of the entire Discourse (fifteen of ninety-two verses) is devoted to emphasizing the importance of actually doing what it says. Doing and not just hearing and talking about it is how we know the reality of the kingdom and integrate our life into it.
As we hear him teach, we must constantly review and remember them until they form a part of our conscious minds.
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. We must understand that Jesus, the faithful Son, does not deviate at all from this understanding of the law that is truly God’s law. He could easily have written Psalm 119
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But this does not in the least detract from the fact that God’s law is an unspeakably good and precious thing, and that to live within it is to live the life that is eternal. To be sure, law is not the source of rightness, but it is forever the course of rightness.
But the question is, How can one keep the law?
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.
Actions do not emerge from nothing. They faithfully reveal what is in the heart, and we can know what is in the heart that they depend upon.
It is the inner life of the soul that we must aim to transform, and then behavior will naturally and easily follow.
dikaiosune would be a paraphrase: something like “what that is about a person that makes him or her really right or good.” For short, we might say “true inner goodness.”
It is the elimination of anger and contempt that he presents as the first and fundamental step toward the rightness of the kingdom heart.
The primary function of anger in life is to alert me to an obstruction to my will, and immediately raise alarm and resistance, before I even have time to think about it.
It spontaneously arises in us, as just noted, when our will is obstructed. That is what occasions it. But as a response toward those who have interfered with us, it includes a will to harm them, or the beginnings thereof. Some degree of malice is contained in every degree of anger.9
The explosion of anger never simply comes from the incident. Most people carry a supply of anger around with them.
Anger indulged, instead of simply waved off, always has in it an element of self-righteousness and vanity. Find a person who has embraced anger, and you find a person with a wounded ego.
