1 THE BEATITUDES A ROAD LESS TRAVELED Sermon on the Mount, Pt. 1; Matthew 5:1-16 July 20, 2014 Any author or speaker will tell you the first sentence of a novel, a short story or a public address is the most important. It is what will either cause a reader or a hearer to pay attention or turn away. The old image of a disheveled writer staring at a typewriter with wadded up pieces of paper all around her is not far from the truth. Most authors think long and hard about the all-important first sentence. Mark records the first words of Jesus as he begins his public ministry: The time has come; the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news! People took notice. It was a tense time. Change was in the air and they were used to hearing radical speeches. This was certainly one of them. What Jesus was saying, and what they understood perfectly, was: All the preliminaries have been taken care of. The presence of God and the rule of God are now freely available to everyone. Review your plans for living and base your life around this astounding new opportunity! What we have come to call the Sermon on the Mount, as recorded by Matthew, is the constitution which spells out this life in a kingdom we can enter now if we so choose. Sometimes we call this entering a conversion experience, at other times we may call it accepting Christ. We associate such an invitation with perhaps walking an aisle at a revival service, or a baptism, or confirmation, or joining a church and making a profession of faith. And this is all perfectly true. But sometimes we miss the larger picture of what is happening here, not seeing the forest because the trees are getting in the way. Jesus sermon makes no bones that this is nothing less than stepping out of one plane of existence and entering a hither-too unexplored territory. It is the reorienting the entirety of one s own life around his teachings and his worldview of how things really are. Jesus sermon concludes with the image of either building your house on a rock or on sand and says that all who HEAR and DO what he says will have a firm foundation, a life that can stand up to everything including, a life fitted for eternity because that life is already dwelling in eternal values.
2 The Sermon on the Mount is at once inspiring and baffling. Jesus ethics can seem to be on one hand beautiful and wonderful but on the other hand narrow and impossible. It almost seems he is setting us up for endless frustration. After all, if God holds us accountable even for what goes on in our private thoughts what chance do we have of ever making it? And if the standard is absolute perfection then how are we expected to ever reach it? But let s back up a bit and make an effort to understand what Jesus means. We need to begin at the beginning. Like all great thinkers, Jesus begins by addressing the universal question: What is the good life? We all want to know don t we? We all want to know what is genuinely in our best interests and what will lead to the most satisfaction and worth. The only trouble is there are a myriad of different answers out there to the question: What is the good life? Of course the answer that shouts the loudest today and comes at us from all directions is as simple as it is insidious: The good life is defined by money, sex and power. The constant message we are bombarded with is that you gauge the success of your life by how much you have of these three items in comparison to other people around you. From Las Vegas, which much of the rest of the world with a perhaps a fair degree of accuracy, judges to be the true capital of the United States, to most of what is in popular media and culture, this message is propagated. Probably by Middle School most young people have set the course of their lives by these values. The Beatitudes are Jesus countercultural answer to the question: What is the good life? The Beatitudes are among the literary and religious treasures of the human race. Along with the Ten Commandments, the 23 rd Psalm and the Lord s Prayer, they are acknowledged by almost everyone to be among the highest expressions of religious insight and moral inspiration. We savor them, affirm them, meditate upon them, and even engrave them on wall plagues. But a major questions remains: How are we to live in response to them? This is not an idle question. Misunderstanding the Beatitudes has caused much pain, confusion, and guilt down through the ages and continues to do so today. The common interpretation is that we should strive to be mild, poor, and weak and derive some sort of perverse pleasure out of getting beat up. Or as I listened to one
3 young soldier, proud and strong after having completed advanced training at Fort Know where I was doing student chaplaincy work: If this is what being a Christian is all about then I m not interested, I could never be like that. Maybe this is why the church has trouble attracting and retaining men. The implicit message is that men are to play the role of Clark Kent when most of us yearn to be Superman. But the Beatitudes become crystal clear and wonderfully useful when we keep them within the context of the Sermon on the Mount and what Jesus constantly said during his entire ministry. They all have to do with the availability of the Kingdom of the Heavens. Therefore the proper question is now: How do the Beatitudes define living in God s, alternative reality, God s kingdom? Imagine the setting of this sermon. Jesus is surrounded, not only by his disciples, but also by a whole host of people, rich folks, poor folks, curious folks and desperate folks. Most of them would be the working class people of their day; people who bore the bunt of a very highly developed and oppressive religious system, not to mention the high taxes imposed upon them by the foreign occupation authorities from Rome. All their lives they have been told to shut up and do as they were told by their betters. Their opinions, their lives, their hopes and dreams mattered for little. Many of them were seething with resentment. Talk of violent revolution was very much in the air. But Jesus kept saying to them: Blessed are the spiritual nobodies, the emotionally bankrupt, deprived and defiant, the outsiders and the losers blessed are they because now the kingdom of the heavens is here for them. Thus the first group mentioned the poor in spirit are not just those who are practicing a gentle spirituality but also people who do not know their Bibles. They are the lowly laity, who at best can fill a pew or perhaps an offering plate. No one calls on them to lead a service or even to lead a prayer; and just as well, because they might faint dead away if anyone did. These are the ones who can t make heads or tails of religion. The poor in spirit are called blessed by Jesus, not because they are deserving, but because in spite of and in the midst of their spiritual poverty, the heavens are now opened up for them through the grace of Christ. In other words, everyone is invited to come into Jesus presence and
4 enter the kingdom of the heavens. What a simple and wonderful message but how hard to grasp! The prostitutes, the thieves, the sinners and the messed up flocked to Jesus in droves because they understood perfectly well what he was saying. But these same people don t often feel welcome in the churches today. Why is Sunday morning the most segregated hour in America? Why are we so intimidated by people who look different, think different and have a different take on spirituality than we do? But look at whom Jesus is welcoming: Consider the second group those who mourn. These are the ones whose spouses have dumped them leaving them paralyzed by rejection, or parents who have lost a child, or those who have lost their jobs because of massive shifts in the economy. But as they see the kingdom in Jesus, enter it, and learn to live in it, they find comfort, and their tears turn to laughter. The next group the meek: They are the shy ones, the easily intimidated, the mild, the unassertive. They never press their own legitimate claims and are constantly saying, Pardon me, as if they don t have a right to take up space and have needs like other people. They are always stepping into the street so as to not chance hindering someone else on the sidewalk. But the Lord is their Shepherd and they shall not want. Next are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness those who desire for things to be made right. Perhaps they are painfully self-aware and know how much they fall short of their own ideals. Or they have been terribly wronged and yearn for justice such as the parents of a molested child who are told the molester will be set free by an uncaring judicial system. These are people who want fairness and compassion and have witnessed too much suffering. But God can restore their souls and fill them with a conviction that all things will be put to rights as the kingdom comes ever more upon the earth. The merciful and the pure in heart are here too. They may seem like people already blessed with virtue, but it is virtue that comes with a price. The merciful are the ones who are going to be taken advantage of. Panhandlers know how to wheedle a dollar out of them. Relatives know they can be hit up for a loan whose repayment can be easily forgotten. The pure in heart often have very high standards and are difficult to live with. They know this and this causes them pain. They are easily
5 disappointed by the fallen and imperfect world but they bottle it all in. It has been recently revealed that Mother Teresa considered in her day to be a living saint fought a life-long battle with doubt. At one point she wrote: I am told God loves me and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Most honest seekers after God will admit to the same thing at least at certain points in their lives. It is hard, very hard to believe in a powerful and loving God when we are faced with an everyday reality seemingly ruled by chance, randomness, unfairness, and where good people suffer and bad people prosper. And yet, and yet, Jesus says that eventually all these people will be able to put their disappointments aside. The peacemakers are here too. They make the list because outside of the Kingdom they are usually called anything but a child of God. Just ask the American soldier in the Middle East who gets blown up by a hate-filled Muslim because he is trying to keep the peace. Or ask a policeman or even a minister who is called to intervene in a domestic dispute. Those are moments most dangerous. And then we have those who are attacked because of their stand for what is right, those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness. They will call a spade a spade and will often infuriate the passive majority precisely because they do stand up for outdated morality or unpopular causes. Finally we see a place for those insulted, persecuted and lied about because they have become religious nuts. They actually take Jesus at his word and make an honest effort to be his followers. They won t compromise their standards and so they are constantly out of step with the times. This makes them distinctively different and the one thing the world cannot tolerate is a true nonconformist. Trouble will dog them every step of the way. It is almost impossible for anyone who has not received this sort of treatment to understand how degrading it is. Yet Jesus says these people can have great joy none-the-less because their reputation stands high before God the Father and his eternal family, whose companionship and love and resources are now and forever their inheritance. The Beatitudes dramatically demonstrate that the Kingdom of
6 God is open to everyone, including you and me. But to enter the kingdom requires we pay a price. Things will quite possibly happen to you that will change you forever. It is not an easy road to travel; as Jesus says it is an exceedingly narrow road. But it is also and exceedingly good road. What are we liable to encounter on this journey, where will the route take us, and what will we have to take great care to look out for? In the words of Robert Frost: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.