Matthew 5-7: The Sermon on the Mount (3)

The First Division of the Beatitudes (5:3-6; Recap)

In analogy with the Ten Commandments, which suits the New Moses persona of Jesus in these chapters, the Beatitudes fall into two divisions. The first four deal with Israel’s Godward relationship, with how Israel serves as the Abrahamic Israel God created it to be. In the conflict over the nation’s identity in the face of the coming war with Rome, it has one last chance to reclaim its destiny and duty. Failure to do so will be the end of ethnic Israel’s Abrahamic mandate.

Total dependence on God, clear-eyed honesty about the condition of the people, single-hearted commitment to God’s will and way, and a passion for a world set “rightwise” as God intended are the affections which set our hearts toward God and enable us to sustain such faithfulness amid the crisis and conflict in the midst of which they live.

As God decisively reasserts his rule in his world, this first stage of that kingdom coming which involves the judgment of his own people for failing their mandate also entails the regathering and reconstitution of Abrahamic Israel, the covenant, new creation, people. We learn from the Beatitudes the passions that drive this people, from the teaching on salt and light the identity and vocation of this people, their deepest convictions and priorities that direct the shape of their work and witness, and from the fourteen triads (see previous post on this theme) we learn the “righteousness (that) exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees” (5:20), the practices that mark their presence in the world. We see here some of the interconnections between our central themes I mentioned earlier.

As later readers of this material we do not share the specific situation of dynamics of its first hearers. And we must never forget that! Yet in our North American post-Christendom context there are sufficient concerns about the future, shape, and witness of the church to create significant points of contact with it for us (as I tried to show in the last post).  

The Second Division of the Beatitudes (5:7-12)

The Fifth Beatitude (5:7)

Jesus next turns outward to his people’s relationship to those with whom they are in conflict over the true identity and witness of God’s people. He begins with extolling the flourishing life of the merciful. Again, understanding the setting in the crisis 1^st century Israel was in helps us to keep from generalizing and spiritualizing this into little more than be nice or be kind. But in those turbulent, controversial, and angry times being merciful came at a cost, sometimes a great cost. Sharp and hurtful disagreements abounded among the Jews of that time. The mercy spoken of here is best exemplified by Jesus asking his father to forgive those who nailed him to the cross acknowledging that “they know not what they do.” Let’s call this “cruciform mercy.”

Also again, it is likely judgment stands right behind this call to be merciful. Hosea 6:6 in the Greek translation of the Old Testament reads “I desire mercy and not sacrifice” not the “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice” of the Hebrew text. The Greek version probably lies behind Jesus’ saying here. And that text in its context is put forward as a remedy for the judgment Israel so richly deserved. This assertion of costly mercy saves us from treating it as mere sentimentalizing niceness.

The Sixth Beatitude (5:8)

Psa.24 speaks of the pure in heart (v.4) in parallel with non-idolatrous hearts and deceitful swearing (first and third commandments). This makes good sense in the context we’ve been reading these sayings. It makes little sense to take this purity morally because of these poetic parallels and because no one would then qualify to ascend to the hill of the Lord (temple).

Sɸren Kierkegaard wrote a book titled Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing. That’s the sense I think we need to take the purity Jesus speaks of here. Not moral purity but the kind of single-hearted commitment that is loyal to God alone. Just the kind of commitment most of Israel most of the time did not practice and for which judgment was coming.

The context of Psa.24 is revealing. It’s refrain

“Lift up your heads, O gates!
    and be lifted up, O ancient doors!
    that the King of glory may come in” (vv,7,9)

Climaxes in the return to God his people and his temple. The key sign that the long exile of 

the people was over. And that’s just what is promised here. It is these “pure in heart” who live out trust and loyalty to God amid the rest of the people who do not that is the point here. Costly faith, to be sure. Again Jesus is our best interpretation and model in this regard. Consider him and the cost of his loyalty to God.

The “pure in heart” Jesus promises “will see God.” That’s just what we would expect if the return of God to the temple in Psa.24 is what’s in Jesus’ mind here.

The Seventh and Eighth Beatitude (5:9-12)

In Jesus’ context his “approval of peacemakers no doubt implies disapproval of the activity of the militants or zealots who sought to bring about the kingdom of heaven - to save Israel - by violent means.”[1] And as we see in the next beatitude such peacemaking mindset and practice is necessary not only to reflect God’s character (though it surely is that, which makes us his children) but also because living these beatitudes will provoke opposition, persecution (v.10), and slander (v.11). Even under these unhappy and conflicted circumstances life is flourishing because such folk participate now and in anticipation of the fullness of the kingdom of heaven. This repetition of the promise of present experience of the kingdom (v.10) forms a bookend with the same promise at the beginning in v.3. Within these bookends the promises are all future but because present and future cannot radically be separated as this mixing of present and future shows we can expect to experience all these features of flourishing in our lives today.

In v.11 Jesus shifts from the third person (“blessed are the poor in spirit”) to the second “blessed are you”). It’s like Jesus takes all that he’s said thus far in the third person, perhaps making them a bit easier to hear for the disciples and the crowds, and then, like the prophet Nathan did with King David (2 Sam.12:7), points to them and says this is about “you!” Your life is flourishing, Jesus says, when you are innocent sufferers of all manner of crap for my sake. No wonder he kept it the third person till the punch line! You are in good company, he proclaims, for this is just how a faithless people treated all the prophets God sent to turn them back to him (v.12).

Moses was a prophet and he told Israel to expect an even greater prophet to whom they were to listen (Dt.18:15). Jesus was that prophet. But still most of the people did not listen to him. Indeed, they killed him. That brought them into judgment.

“Rejoice and be glad,” Jesus says. Beatitude-inal faithfulness has its costs to be sure. Those costs may turn our joy in this life into what J. R. R. Tolkien called a “sorrowful joy.”[2] But they never trump that joy completely but it will finally be unalloyed with any sorrow at all.

In our times there is no less need for us to “listen” (hear and heed) to that prophet, crucified but risen and living now ruling this world and his people. He will grace us will the same “sorrowful joy” that marked his costly faithfulness to God and assure us that one day it will be simply joy. That “sorrowful joy” bears its own witness, though, as it testifies to the truth and the deep contentment of truth-telling.   

The Beatitudes and Us

As I have repeatedly stressed we do not stand in the same place as those first hearers of these words. We hear Jesus’ words not as ethnic Israel hearing the call to its final chance to faithfully bear it destiny. But we do overhear them as words that bear on us as interpreted through the long history of God’s people. In particular, we hear them as those who have passed through the long history of Christendom and the deforming dynamics it imposed upon the church’s understanding of itself. And still does even as Christendom dies off and those dynamics that animated it no longer function well (if at all). Our church needs to be called to as radical a repentance as those 1^st century Jews did. And that’s the analogy, the similarity among differences, between us and them. Four implications follow from this analogy:[3]

-First, we read the Beatitudes rightly is they retain their countercultural, counter-intuitive, shockingly subversive quality. We must resist the tendency of our cultural Christianity to turn them into comfortable pieties (“Happy-tudes”) or sentimental nostrums. The beatitudes will not make us nice, easy to get along with, or get to go along with the current consensus. Jesus’ teaching here is the sharp edge of Christian witness in our day.

-Second, we read them rightly if they prevent us from aligning ourselves them with a political ideology, especially one that promotes an individualistic way of life (which is nearly all of them in America). Rather, they describe a way of life of a community mandated by God to bear the blessing of God for and the hope of the world.

-Thirdly, we read them rightly if we find them uncomfortably costly, running against the grain of much that North American cultures deems and even valorizes as normal and good. That costliness will often locate us with the outcasts, needy, and poor in our world. “Sharing the sufferings of God in the world, as Bonhoeffer would say.[4]

-Finally, we read them rightly if in practicing them we discover a flourishing life, even in the costliness of their practice. The contentment and (“sorrowful”) joy of such a life contrast decisively with the workaholism, hedonism, virtual entertainments, and other surrogates for meaningful lives on offer in our culture.

Warren Carter summarizes the beatitudes nicely:

“Jesus has the disciples imagine a different world, a different identity for themselves, a different set of practices, a different relationship to the status quo. Why imagine? Not because it is impossible. Not because it is escapist. Not because it is fantasy. But because it begins to counter patterns imbibed from the culture of the imperial world.”[5]

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[1] Perriman, “The Beatitudes”

[2] Ralph C. Wood, “J.R.R. Tolkien's Vision of Sorrowful Joy,” https://www.abc.net.au/religion/jrr-tolkiens-vision-of-sorrowful-joy/10096472.

[3] See Perriman, “The Beatitudes” at https://www.postost.net/commentary/beatitudes.

[4] Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers: 13139.

[5] Warren A. Carter, What Are They Saying about Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount (Paulist, 1994), 21.