14th September 2008 Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5: 1-12

Sermon Series “The Sermon on the Mount” One

The Beatitudes Matt 5: 1-12

A young man told his mother he could no longer be a Christian and a churchgoer.  He was a strong, intelligent man whose faith had been important to him.  But he had been told that the Beatitudes with its list of the poor and the sad, the weak and the mild, are a picture of the ideal Christian.  He explained to his mother very simply, “That is not me.  I could never be like that.”

 I guess many people feel the same way.  Is it, perhaps, one of the reasons we have so few men in church?  Even if people don't reject the church, they may well go around carrying a burden of guilt because they don’t have the qualities described in the Beatitudes.  They aren’t poor, sad, weak and mild, and what's more, they don't want to be like that.

 The Beatitudes, these unique and powerful sayings, have caused much pain and confusion down the ages and continue to do so today because they have been misunderstood.  They don’t say that you are blessed if you are destitute.  They don’t say that you are happy if you are weak and wishy-washy: Jesus wasn't wishy-washy! Like many of Jesus’ sayings the original understanding has been lost or misinterpreted down the ages.

 So let's look again.  Let us ask ourselves what was Jesus actually trying to tell us?

Every good teacher always has a coherent message that they develop in an orderly way so that their students may eventually understand.  Jesus was a great teacher so what throughout his life was his main message?  Was it the love of God – yes.  Was it forgiveness – again, yes.  But he started with “Repent for the kingdom of heaven, or of God is upon you.”  The kingdom of God is here, NOW! 

 So how did Jesus develop this theme?

In chapter 4 v. 17 of Matthew's Gospel, we see Jesus, proclaiming his basic message, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is near.”  But Jesus doesn't just say it he demonstrates it by meeting the desperate needs of the people around him.  As a result, we learn in verses 24 and 25,

So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he cured them. ²⁵And great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan.

 Having ministered to the needs of the people crowding round him Jesus wanted to teach them.  He did not, as is sometimes suggested, withdraw from the crowd to teach a chosen few.  Rather in the midst of this raw mass of humanity, and with them hanging on every word, Jesus taught his apprentices, by that I mean his disciples, along with anyone who would listen, about the availability of the kingdom of heaven, and he used a method of teaching well known to teachers everywhere, “Show and tell.”

 Imagine the scene.  There directly in front of Jesus were those who had just received from God through him.  The context makes this clear.  Jesus could point out individuals in the crowd who were blessed because the kingdom already here had just reached out and touched them with Jesus' heart and voice and hands.

 And in a way each beatitude says the same thing so let us take one as an example: the first one in Ch 5: 3.

 Blessed are the spiritual zeros, the spiritually bankrupt, deprived and deficiant, the spiritual beggars, those without a whisper of religion.  Blessed are they when the kingdom of the heavens comes upon them.

You’re probably saying, “What version is she reading from?”  Well, this interpretation was given to us by a brilliant American writer, Dallas Willard.  Of course, the actual words say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  This is the more traditional and literally correct translation of Matthew 5:3.  But the meaning has changed.  Today the words, Poor in spirit, no longer convey the sense of spiritual destitution that they were originally meant to bear.  Amazingly, they have come to refer to a praiseworthy condition and it is deeply revealing of how we think about God to see the way translators have struggled to make this condition of spiritual poverty something good in its own right.  The first edition of the new English Bible for example,  said “How Blessed are those who know that they are poor.”  The second edition rectified this wrong interpretation by going back to Blessed are the poor in spirit.  Why am I making such a point about this?  Because if you interpret the first Beatitude as being something like How Blessed are the humble minded, or How Blessed are those who know their need of God, you are saying that someone has to have this disposition before they can receive God's blessing: they have to be halfway there, and, according to Dallas Willard, whose arguments I find very compelling, that is the opposite of what Jesus was saying and doing in this passage. 

 People had come to Jesus bringing their sick, their mad, their sad.  They came because they were poor, downtrodden and oppressed by a foreign power and hoped he might rescue them.  Jesus elsewhere describes these crowds as being like lost sheep.  They had come out of curiosity to see the wonder-worker.  They didn’t come because they were particularly spiritual, Godly or humble. 

 What Jesus had just demonstrated as he healed all sorts of people in the crowd, and what he now said to the crowd was this.  God's gift of his kingdom, God's gift of himself to us, is nothing, absolutely nothing to do with how good we are or whether we are in the right state to receive him.

 Standing around Jesus as he speaks are people with no spiritual qualifications or abilities at all.  The same types of people then as there are now.  They could be the people who see everyday on the train, at work, by the school gates.  There is nothing about them, to suggest that they are particularly spiritual.  They don't know their Bibles.  They are the first to tell you they really can't make head or tail of religion.  They don't “get” what we see in it.    And yet: he touched me.  Through their contact with Jesus, they are blessed, healed of body, mind or spirit, touched by the hand of God…here…now.

 Jesus did not say, Blessed are the poor in spirit, because they are poor in spirit.  He did not think, What a fine thing it is to be destitute of every spiritual attainment or quality.  Those poor in spirit are called blessed by Jesus, because ordinary as they are the rule of the heavens has moved redemptively upon and through them by the grace of Christ. 

 And what of the other Beatitudes which we don't have time to go into detail about today?  Each one can be unwrapped in the same way.  The same rule applies to them all.  Whatever condition a human being may be, however, in the words of the Simon and Garfunkel song, “sat upon, spat upon, ratted on”, they may feel,  the kingdom of the God is available to them.

 What then does Jesus say to us with his Beatitudes?  How are we to live in response to them?

 You may be a person who feels that your life is a mess or you may be deeply unhappy.  Hear the message, the kingdom of God is available to you just as you are now.  You don’t have to do anymore than those who turned to Jesus for healing 2000 years ago.  You don’t even have to know what it is you are really asking for, just ask.

You may know yourself already rescued by Christ so for you the invitation is to act as your Master does.  Do not judge people.  Do not divide people into the deserving and undeserving.  Who are you to judge anyway?  Let us in our care and attention try to show all people Jesus’ love and respect so that they may meet him, and also be drawn into his kingdom.