Blessed: The Beatitudes
by James Lincoln on March 12, 2006
Jesus' most famous sermon begins with one of my favorite words in the entire Bible. He began the sermon with the word "Blessed". Originally the word meant to be favored or approved and therefore as a result then to be glad. But Jesus is not primarily speaking about the subjective way a person feels. Instead, He's making an objective statement about what God thinks about you and your relationship with Him. By definition it is a word that puts you into relationship. You cannot bless yourself. It is something that you must receive. Now, this, of course, should make you feel good but you can be blessed and at the same time have deep emotional feelings of sadness or sorrow as Jesus mentions in the second beatitude. So, to be blessed isn't necessarily an emotional state; instead, to be blessed is the declaration of God about what Christians actually are and what a blessed person's life will actually look like. To be blessed is such a good description of what a Christian is and is like that Jesus repeats it nine times.
Jesus wants us to know what makes for a life of blessedness or a life that is under God's favor. So, he describes the blessed life in eight ways. However this isn't a list of mere ethical principles. It isn't a charter for political or governmental policies. It's not a list of positive self help principles for good living. Instead it's wisdom from God about what it means to live in harmony with His purposes, character and His grace. It's an invitation to experience and know the blessing of God in this world right now.
JESUS REVERSES EXPECTATIONS
Now, Jesus turns everything upside down here, by challenging and reversing all expectations about the kingdom of God. Israel's desire for God's kingdom was fine but instead of belonging to the powerful and capable Jesus taught that it belongs to those who are poor in spirit. Their desire for God's rule was fine but it doesn't come to the happy go lucky and those who advocated the power of positive thinking; instead, only to those who know something about mourning, sorrow and grief. Jesus is described as a "man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." Nowhere is it recorded that Jesus was happy and full of laughter. Their desire to inherit the earth was fine but it doesn't come to those who have the advantage, money and opportunities to buy real estate. Instead, He said the meek inherit the earth. How many people believed that? Their desire for satisfaction and fulfillment was good but He said that that only comes when you hunger and thirst for righteousness. What do you think is going to make your life full, sweet, abundant, overflowing with satisfaction? Jesus said, it comes to those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Their yearning for some national consolation after hundreds of years of abuse by the Persians, Greeks and Romans was understandable. But Jesus said that mercy comes to those who are merciful. Israel's desire to see God was good. Like many today they would say, "Come on, show us God. Where is God?" They wanted a powerful demonstration of the presence of God. And many still do. Jesus says,
"OK, you want to see God? That's good. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. If You're looking for God to show Himself and prove Himself... well, live a pure life and you will see God."
Israel wanted to be known as God's chosen children. Jesus says, "OK, blessed are the peacemakers. They shall be called the children of God." Jesus says, those who tell others about how to have peace with God are blessed and those who go about the hard work of brokering peace between enemies, conflicts and fights between parents and children, husbands and wives and church members and neighbors. These are the ones who prove to be the children of God. My guess is they had other things in mind like the privileges of being God's children. And if you are blessed of God and live under His favor here's what you can expect. You can expect to be kicked in the face for all your efforts.
"Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when men cast insults at you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you falsely on account of Me. Rejoice!..."
My guess is this is not the way they imagined enjoying the kingdom of God.
THREE QUESTIONS
I want to ask three questions about these people who came from all over to hear Jesus. I want to ask, "What would they have known? What were these people like and what would they have expected to hear, wanted to hear and were willing to hear from Him?"
1. What would they have known?
Well, this was a Jewish audience. They would have known their Scriptures. They would have known that God is the Creator of all things including us. They knew they were contingent beings, created by our maker and consequently immediately responsible to God as the one who created us. That's Genesis one and two.
They would have known that what God created had fallen under a dark shadow of sin and selfishness and that humanity is by nature dead to a blessed relationship with God. Death or separation from God was exactly what God said would happen to Adam and Eve if they went chose their own way over His way. They did and humanity has been living under a dark cloud of God's judgment ever since. That's Genesis three.
But they would have also known that God has come to us with a promise of grace or unmerited favor. God said that He would provide grace and a way of escape through His Messiah, therefore there was hope. God didn't leave them hopeless. That's Genesis 3:16.
They would have also known that God came to man in his fallen condition, that He came to Noah and Abraham with a word of promise and said, "I want you to follow me." And that He called out an entire people and entered into a covenant with them, gave them His law and the grace of the sacrificial system so that they would be in a position to receive His blessings even though they were sinful beings. That's Genesis nine through Deuteronomy.
Finally, they knew the history of Israel and that it was disastrous. It's the history of a people who persistently, over and over and over again said, "No!" to God's blessings. Instead, they chose to turn to their own way and to pursue after the ways which God had specifically condemned. That's Joshua through Malachi. All these things they would have know when they came to that hillside to hear Jesus.
What would they have known about Jesus?
They would have known that Jesus was a descendent of David and therefore a legitimate claimant to the throne. They would have heard the stories of His miraculous birth and how he was protected from Herod's murderous attacks (much like David was protected from Saul's murderous attempts on David's life.) All of this was in fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies. They knew that John the Baptist announced Jesus to be the Messiah and called people to repent for the kingdom of God was at hand.
When the religious leaders came out to him John called them a brood of vipers and snakes. John was not exactly a "seeker friendly" preacher. After Jesus is baptized He goes in the wilderness and prevails over the devil's best attempts to get Him to abandon His mission. After that, the devil and his demons were terrified of Jesus throughout His entire ministry. Everywhere He went Jesus healed the multitudes and cast out demons.
WHAT WERE THEY LIKE?
Matthew tells us that Jesus sat down to teach just like any rabbi would have. He was on the hillside with his closest friends tightly gathered around him. They served as a protective barrier from the large crowd about 7,000 strong.
They would have been predominantly poor. It's hard for us to imagine living in a place where poverty was the norm and not the exception. What do poor people think about? What do they hope for?
Many if not most of them would have been ill or sick in some way. Remember, this was a world that knew nothing about bacteria, where soap was yet to be invented, where there were no antibiotics, aspirin, vicodin, no penicillin, Tylenol, ibuprophen, vitamins, glucosomine, Prozac and no disinfectants. That world was rife with illness. The good news of Jesus' healing ministry had spread. Many were sick and came to Jesus to be healed.
Demon possession was common in a land of paganism, idolatry, ignorance and superstition. In addition to this everyone in Israel felt the heavy hand of the Roman occupation. They were politically oppressed. That crowd was not like it is portrayed in our Sunday school books; a clean, pretty, well dressed, peaceable, pleasant, healthy, nice, contented group of people interested in hearing a few nice things from Jesus. They were a gathering of angry, oppressed, frustrated, sick, poor, desperate people who were looking for the coming of the Messiah that would bring to them the time of justice, relief, peace and prosperity.
What did these people expect Jesus to say or do? They were waiting to hear some message about health, wealth and power for the Jews and about how this son of David was going to turn things around. They wanted to hear a message of hope that would reverse the miserable conditions of their lives.
Health, wealth and power are almost universally understood to be key components of the blessed life. And the only way they could enjoy that reality was if someone would overthrow the Roman rule and paganism and usher in such conditions.
In some ways Jesus accommodates the crowd. They are correct in wanting a kingdom of justice, consolation from their oppressors, to be considered the children of God, to see God, to be satisfied and fulfilled. He affirms all of these hopes in the beatitudes. He is inaugurating a kingdom. This is a bona fide offer of the kingdom of God. He mentions the kingdom twice here and nine times in the sermon. However, Jesus redefines all their expectation of how the kingdom of God or heaven is going to come about. They're ready for some action, for someone to do something about all of these miserable conditions and what does He do? He gives them a very long sermon. And one that is not what they expected to hear, wanted to hear, or, perhaps, willing to hear.
POOR IN SPIRIT
He starts off by saying, "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." What does that mean? The root word for "poor" ptochos, means "to cower and to cringe like a beggar." It denotes poverty so deep that the person must obtain his living by begging. A beggar is fully dependent on the giving of others. He can't survive without help from the outside. Jesus is saying that to be blessed is to recognize that you can't survive and live before God without this deep sense of your desperate need for God's grace and help. The person who is blessed recognizes that there is nothing in your life and record that can commend you to God. It's another way of describing humility.
It also means to let go of the world's goods and abandoned the race to accumulate stuff in order to make your life full, content and to insure your blessedness. Instead, you must shift your affections and appetites to serve God from whom all blessings flow and turn to Him to be satisfied, filled, secure, safe, blessed and full and seek first His kingdom.
"Poor in spirit" means more than poor in material things. People can be poor in material things and not poor in spirit. Lots of poor people spend their lives wishing and pining for more of what Jesus says they need to give up. It means to give up seeking to make yourself blessed by seeking riches, health and power.
Now, this was not what they wanted to hear. It's not what people want to hear today. It terrifies us to be dependent on God. By nature we are suspicious of His goodness. So, we live in the illusion that we aren't dependent on God and that our security and safety is of our own making. Beloved, this is foolishness. We know that it isn't true. If God were to hold His breath you and I would perish in a moment.
But, it was absolutely inconceivable to them that poor, unhealthy and powerless people were blessed by God. Instead, material poverty and illness was evidence of the curse of God and proof that he didn't love you and that you had fallen short. When Jesus said to the disciples that it was hard for the rich to enter heaven the disciples were overwhelmingly astonished (Mtt.19:25). "If the rich, the prosperous and influential—who were obviously blessed of God and favored by God—couldn't get into heaven how in the world can poor and powerless people get in who are obviously not blessed by God? In their minds it was a sheer impossibility that the poor or sick were blessed or could be blessed. They believed that poverty and sickness represented the judgment of God against you.
In John 9 the disciples asked, "Whose sin caused this man to be born blind, his own or his parents'?" Illness and poverty were certain signs that God had not blessed you and that God's favor was not upon you. These words, "Blessed are the poor in spirit" were the last thing they wanted or expected to hear. They didn't want to have a spirit of poverty, want and neediness. They were tired of being dependent on everyone else for stuff.
However, in Ps. 34:18, David says, "The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit." Poverty of spirit is an indispensable sign of grace. You can't know God without it. You can't be blessed without it no matter how rich in material stuff you are. In fact material wealth may even make it more difficult to be blessed. Jesus is referring to a blessed emptiness that says that there is nothing in me that commends me to God.
In essence Jesus is telling these oppressed, sick and poor people to repent. But they must have been thinking, "We're the victims. We're the down trodden ones and oppressed. We're the ones who have been dispossessed and suffering. Don't tell us to repent. Tell those with power and wealth to repent."
He's calling the poor, sick and oppressed to repent by shredding any thought of entitlement to God's blessings. Those who are blessed are those who know that they aren't entitled to His blessings. Those who think that there is something within them that will move God to accept them—are lost. No one is entitled to God's favor. Because by nature no one seeks God. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
David wrote, "If Thou O Lord should mark our iniquities who could stand?" No one! To be poor in spirit means to understand your true condition before God without Christ. To be poor in spirit means to come to the place where we say,
"My heart is not as it should be. My appetites and desires are not as they should be, my mind pursues things it should not; things are not in order, I'm not walking on the path, I have put myself in the wrong place, my heart is out of harmony with God. I'm in a place of need. I need to repent."
Jesus wants us to know that poverty of spirit is the door to blessedness in the kingdom of heaven. If I come to the place where my perception of the will of God is pure enough to understand that my life needs to change... at that point Jesus says, "You have just discovered the kingdom of heaven."
THEIRS IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
This means that the poor in spirit enjoy the security, safety, the wisdom, the irrevocable and imperishable covenant promises and sovereign power and tender mercies of God ruling and reigning over their lives. Our weakness is the occasion for his power, our inadequacy for his adequacy, our poverty for his riches. Their's IS the kingdom of heaven. Theirs is the immediate and joyful submission to the king and the enjoyment of His wisdom and the path of gladness. Without poverty of spirit no one enters the kingdom of heaven. There is nothing within any of us that will make God prefer or accept us. Self righteousness, moral pride, vain presumption will damn the soul.
Jesus made this clear in the account of the tax-collector and the Pharisee who went up to the Temple to pray.
"Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men - robbers, evildoers, adulterers - or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.' "But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' "I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted." Luke 18:10-14
What about you and me? Are we poor in spirit? Who do you identify with in the parable? Have you exchanged your poverty for the riches of His grace? Have you exchanged your sinful ways for the riches of His forgiveness and righteousness? Have you exchanged rebellion for immediate and joyful obedience? Have you exchanged the insecurities, foolishness, hopelessness and darkness of your own kingdom for the safety, security, wisdom, wonder and grace of His kingdom? Paul said, "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" and "The free gift of life is for those who believe in Jesus Christ." And if you do, he tells us that He transfers us from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of His beloved Son." Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Amen.
"You say, 'I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.' But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. 18 I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see." Rev 3:17-18