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
1st 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)
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 1st 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]
[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.
[4] Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers: 13139.
[5] Warren A. Carter, What Are They
Saying about Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount (Paulist, 1994), 21.
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