Jer. 17.5-10, Ps 1, 1 Cor. 15.12-20, Luke 6.17-26
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O God, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Today, we continue to follow Jesus on the hills above Capernaum, as he delivers his sermon on the mount. This time, we are at the very beginning of the sermon, and the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry.
Jesus has come to Capernaum. He spends his first night there on the hills above the Sea of Galilee, and we are told he spends the night praying to God.
In the morning, he goes down from the quiet of the hills into the noisy and animated streets of the bustling port. There, he calls his disciples to him. We read that there is a great crowd of them. And among them, he chooses twelve whom he calls apostles. Apostles have even more responsibility than disciples, because they will be sent on a mission.
And Jesus equips them for this mission. He starts teaching them. He gives them four promises and four warnings. These are presented according to the codes of the Old Testament. In the book of Deuteronomy, there are long lists of blessings for those who obey the law, and curses for those who don’t. These form what is called the covenant, the binding agreement between God and Israel.
Now with his team of 12 apostles, symbolizing the 12 tribes of Israel, Jesus gives his own radical version of the new covenant.
‘Blessed are you who are poor,’ he says, ‘for yours is the kingdom of God.’
Thus start what we know as the Beatitudes.
Here, in Luke’s Gospel, the Beatitudes sound quite different from the famous passage that we read in Matthew. Matthew quotes the eight Beatitudes in perfect order so that they are easy to remember. That’s because Matthew presents Jesus as a sort of ‘new Moses’. So just as Moses taught the people of
Israel from the mountain after he had received the law, so Jesus begins his ministry by going up a mountain and teaching his disciples.
Christians of previous generations would have probably known the Beatitudes by heart. They were a key text for learning the Christian faith, much like the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. Today, the Beatitudes barely get a mention, and yet, they are a vital piece of teaching for the Christian life. The four that Jesus teaches his apostles and by extension the people around them are the foundations of his teaching.
In Luke’s Gospel, the Beatitudes have a slightly different flavour from those of Matthew’s. They feel very personal. We read: ‘Blessed are you who are poor.’ The announcement of God’s blessing is not vague, it is directed at each individual sat there on the hills.
‘Blessed are those among you who are poor,’ says Jesus. So if you thought yourself blessed because you are rich, think again. In fact, Luke adds a curse to the blessing: ‘Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.’ So if you were expecting a reward in heaven, think again!
There is a very strong social dimension to the teachings of Jesus in Luke. It is reminiscent of the mission statement from Jesus in Chapter 4 of Luke’s Gospel, when he is in the synagogue in Nazareth and he reads from the scroll of Isaiah: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, freedom to the oppressed and the prisoners, recovery of sight to the blind.’ Good news! God is fulfilling his promises at last.
There is also a vocational dimension to them. Each Beatitude begins with an announcement of God’s blessing. This is one of the main points of Christ’s teaching: God wishes to bless us. He pours his love and affirmation upon us. And we are particularly blessed when we live Christ-like lives. Having announced the blessing, Jesus then describes a characteristic such as poverty, hunger, weeping, or persecution. But this characteristic can also be understood as a vocation: poverty can be embracing poverty of spirit, which is humility, meekness of heart; persecution can be embracing a life that is countercultural and turned towards others and not oneself.
Then, there is a promise: this is what the person will receive. Those who are poor and those who are persecuted for following Christ receive nothing less than the kingdom of God, the great reward in heaven.
This pattern of blessing, vocation, and promise is lived out in Jesus’ own life and ministry. For example, Jesus says ‘blessed are you who weep now’. In his own life, Jesus cried out with sadness and anguish to God. Jesus modelled a whole attitude of lamentation and crying out to God when we see and experience the injustices and sorrows of the world. And before Jesus, the prophets lived out the same pattern of blessing, vocation, and promise. They were excluded, reviled, and defamed for speaking the truth of God. And they are held in the highest esteem, great is their reward.
Jesus seems to say if people hate you and exclude you because of the Son of Man, know that the prophets suffered in the same way, and they are greatly rewarded in heaven.
Are we called to have a prophetic voice in the world then?
Certainly, trying to live out the Beatitudes gives us a voice that sounds very countercultural in today’s world. Because trying to live them out is one of the best ways of loving God with all our heart and understanding the Christian vision for the world. It’s the world upside down, or rather the right way up, the way God wants it.
They describe what it means to live as a child of the kingdom of God.
To be poor, to deny oneself, and to live in humility and faith.
To be hungry, especially for spiritual food, to seek God and place God at the centre of our lives.
To lament about injustice, to cry out to God and to pray for fairness and equity.
To believe and persevere, always, despite the hatred, the exclusion, the rejection of the truth we speak.
The Beatitudes were only perfectly lived out by Jesus himself. They describe what it meant for the apostles to live by a set a standards, vocations, and attitudes that go way beyond the observation of rules or the keeping of the law. This what life looks like when you are truly Christ-like.
So perhaps in a few short sentences, the Beatitudes are some of the most important and revolutionary texts in the Bible, but they challenge us in the best way, in the way of truth.
Let us remember them as we prepare for our season of Lent. May they inspire us always, and may they bring us closer together as we follow Christ all the way to the cross.
M L-R