This
gospel lesson, often called The Beatitudes, is one of the best known and most
beloved passages of the Bible. I have heard it, and read it, and even preached
on it many times. So I was surprised to
be pondering it again recently and to find myself thinking about it in a way I
never had before.
Maybe
it’s the formal way that the narrator sets the scene, with Jesus going up the
mountain and sitting down and then calling his disciples to him and beginning
to teach. Maybe it’s because the
teaching itself is quite formal in structure, with its repetitive phrases. In any case, I had always thought of the
Beatitudes as like a kind of official pronouncement. Jesus is the
authoritative teacher for Christians, after all, and so, when you put that
together with this formality, I guess it’s only natural to assume that what is
being given here is a set of prescriptions—policies, rules. Biblical scholars will often make the
comparison between the depiction of Jesus in this scene and Moses, who went up
on a mountain and came down with a set of rules for his community to live by.
The
problem with this interpretation is that the Beatitudes aren’t rules. They don’t exactly tell you what to do. They aren’t even really promises of what will
happen in the future if you do these things.
The Beatitudes are statements about the present, about what God is doing
now. And what is God doing? God is blessing people. God is blessing you.
Now
when we say that someone is blessed what we usually mean is that they are
fortunate: “So-and-so is blessed with a large,
loving family,” we’ll say, or we’ll hear about a big blizzard slamming the
Midwest we will say, “Aren’t we blessed to live in California.” But the blessings that Jesus is talking about
here aren’t like that. For the most part
they don’t have anything to do with what life looks like from the outside. These are blessings that are experienced and
received inside, in the heart and in the mind.
And
it is this inner quality of the Beatitudes that recently struck me with a new forcefulness
and gave me the idea that they are not an impersonal teaching about objective
laws or principles—far from it. What they
really are is Jesus’ personal testimony to his own religious experience. This is the most detailed exposition we have
in Jesus’ own words of his own mind.
Because he experienced all these things for himself. Jesus was poor in spirit. Jesus was meek. He mourned, and he was merciful. He hungered and thirsted for righteousness,
and he made peace. He purified his heart,
and he was reviled and persecuted.
And
he was blessed. He entered the kingdom
of God. He was comforted, and his
emptiness was filled. He received mercy,
and heard that he was God’s beloved child.
He looked about him at the earth and saw that it all belonged to
him. He saw God. And on the basis of these experiences he
could sit down with his disciples and say to them with absolute conviction that
they could experience these things, too.
They also could know themselves as beloved children of this God whose
only desire is to bless them, to fill them with such love for one another and
for Himself that no sorrow, no misfortune or calamity, no hatred and oppression
by misguided human beings could remove that blessing from their lives.
I
like this way of thinking about the Beatitudes because it encourages us to take
our own religious experiences seriously.
We have all had them, those moments when we feel the touch of divine
grace. This week I’ve been remembering a
crisp fall morning almost thirty years ago.
I was living in an intentional spiritual community in the hills of
Western Massachusetts and some of us had gone into the forest that day to cut
firewood. The leaves had fallen from the
trees and made a yellow carpet on the ground that crunched under our feet, but
apart from that we were working silently, carrying logs out of the woods and
piling them by the road for sawing. And I
stopped what I was doing for a moment to stand in contemplation of the delicate
branching form of a wild hazel shrub, its lustrous silver bark reflecting the
pale morning sun, and in that moment I saw, and I knew.
We
have these experiences, and even if it is only once in a lifetime, they stand
out of the ordinary run of our days like mountains soaring up out of the plain. They occur without warning and last for a few
seconds, or a minute, or a day, but they change us forever. They give us only vanishing glimpses, but
while we are in them we know that the reality they show us is more real than
what we ordinarily take for granted as real life in the real world. That contrast, between the blessedness we are
shown in such moments, and the world of anxiety, meaninglessness, and pretense
that we usually inhabit, is like a wound.
It can make us feel like exiles, looking to all outside appearances as
if we belong here, but feeling inside that our true home is somewhere else.
This
is painful, and we human beings tend to do whatever we can to avoid pain. We anesthetize ourselves with drugs, and
distract ourselves with entertainments.
We go shopping, and fill our closets and garages storage lockers with
things we don’t need. We have built a
whole world system around numbing and denying the pain of knowing who we really
are and who we really belong to, but it is a system riddled with violence. It is fueled with poison. Its pillars are injustice and cruelty,
because it is founded on a lie.
But
what Jesus says in the Beatitudes is that it is time to come home. Because the shame of admitting that we are
poor in spirit, and have squandered the precious gifts of grace we have
received, is so much less than the suffering of keeping up the pretense that we
have no need for God. And the grief that
comes from acknowledging that we are lost is so much less than the sorrow of
plodding endlessly onward with a phony smile plastered across our teeth. The cost of opening our eyes to the hypocrisy
and injustice of the established order and of longing with burning hearts for
equity is far less than the life-sentence of walling ourselves off in ghettos
of privilege and imagining that we are free.
The
saints of God are those who have heard the summons of Jesus and are determined
to follow him home. Not by seeking to
fly away to a better place, but by committing themselves to finding the real
world, the world created and blessed by God, right here. I wish I could tell you that making that
commitment would guarantee you more and better religious experiences. Many of our contemporaries seem to think that
this is the whole purpose of the spiritual journey. And the tradition of Christian spirituality does
allow a place for such experiences—it calls them “consolations,” and it
consistently teaches not to pursue them.
God
gives them as she chooses, for her own purposes, and her ultimate purpose for
us is not emotional gratification, or even individual personal transformation. It is the perfect blessedness of uniting with
all earthly and heavenly creatures in a new creation, the paradise of God. This ultimate blessedness realizes the
potential all the religious experiences of humankind, but it comes about
through acts of faith in the truth of those experiences. This is a joint venture
of all Godly souls, past, present, and yet to come. What each one of us lacks in the gifts of
grace, God supplies in the others, and by “the others” I mean all the others, most of whom live on the
other side of the globe, in the distant past, or far in the future. And yet each of us present in this place
today has gifts, and the success of
the whole enterprise comes closer when we are faithful stewards and generous
donors of what we have been given.
That
is why it is such an occasion of joy when we baptize new members into this
communion of saints, as we are doing at this service for Megan Klarkowski and
her little girl, Elsa. We rejoice
because, in following Jesus’ voice, they are setting their feet on the way that
leads home. And we rejoice that they are
adding their unique and precious gifts to the treasures that Jesus takes and
blesses, and breaks and gives, for our nourishment along the road.
