"Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you." (Matthew 4:25-5:12)
Jesus' Sermon on the Mount generally, and these "beatitudes" specifically, are a little like an Italian opera: everyone agrees that the words are beautiful, we just have no idea what he's saying.
What, for example, could he possibly have meant by such obvious contradictions as "blessed ["happy," or "lucky'] are the poor in spirit ["unhappy," or "unlucky"]"? There seem to be two answers, both related to the admittance policy of the kingdom of God.
"Everyone is welcome." This is Article 1 of the kingdom's admission policy. Fidel Castro, enraged by all the people escaping his Communist government in Cuba to take refuge in the United States, emptied his prisons and put them all on boats bound for Miami Beach. Did we send them back? No. On principle, everyone is welcome in the United states: give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and all that stuff.
"Did I say 'everyone'? Well, not really everyone." This is Article 2 of the admission policy. What Jesus was describing in the Beatitudes is the state of heart of a person who is best able to receive the message of the kingdom. And that clearly is not everybody. The entrance restriction lies not with the kingdom itself - all really are welcome - but with the heart of the person who rejects it.
To better understand this point, we'll need momentary use of a trite metaphor; let's go with a fireplace. Some hearts are like a fireplace stuffed with dry kindling and a Duraflame log: the slightest spart, and it will all go up like a Roman candle. Other hearts, however - mushy, moldy, magotty - wouldn't light if they were doused with prpane and wired to C-4 explosives. As a result, when people come in contact with the message of the kingdom, they react differently. Some immediately spark to it. Others take time to warm to it. Still others have slipped below the freezing point - tragically, there seems to be nothing within them for the message to ignite.
The reason why being poor in spirit, mourning, being lowly and thirsting for righteousness are blessed states is that they permit no delusions that life and happiness can be found in sex, wealth, drugs,status, travel, entertainment or anything that has a remote control. A desperate alcoholic and a repentant prostitute in such an economy are closer to finding God because they experience a real hunger for God - the awareness that only GOd can meet their hunger. The religiously numb, wealthy, self-sufficient and morally jaded are oblivious to the true state of their own hearth, mistakenly thinking that they are already in the kingdom, that there is no kingdom or that being in the kingdom is of no consequence. Such self-delusion i the opposite of being "blessed." Jesus distills the essence of our lives down to a simple question: What do you crave? Some hunger and thirst for the kingdom;some hunger and thirst for everything but. Some enter the kingdom; some do not.
Martin Luther, the German leader of the Protestant Reformation, was asked when exactly he entered God's kingdom and came to faith. His response was "in cloaca," which sounds spiritual until you translate it to English: it means "on the toilet." Now, Luther was unquestionably a man with "issues," so it's quite possible that this was the actual location. But many scholars believe that he was using a metaphor, popular in the Middle Ages, for "humility" and "humbling oneself." And if you think about it, it's a darn good metaphor for humility, for if there is ever a time or place where you are completely humble, it is here. There is no pretense, no facade, no pride, no image management - you are what you are. The toilet is ground zero for humanity. The key to the kingdom is in fact the key to the rest room.
Here, as with all of Jesus' lessons, we need to proceed carefully. The main point of his teaching was to shock the heart, stimulate a pulse and impart life. The picture Jesus paints of the kingdom of God is not some Disneyworld experience where everyone but Adolf Hitler gets a day pass. It's a description meant to jolt and shock, which might not be a bad idea for us - what do we hunger and thirst for?
Conduct in the Kingdom
The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "if any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there, Jesus straightened up and asked her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?
"No one, sir," she said.
"Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and leave your life of sin." (John 8:3-11)
In his book Les Miserables (it's like the play, only the characters don't sing), Victor Hugo sets up a conflict between his two main characters, Inspector Javert and Jean Valjean, representing the tension between justice and mercy, law and grace. Jean Valjean is an escaped parolee who is given grace, mercy and a small fortune by a kindly bishop: Javert is the legalistic police inspector who can find no rest until he brings Valjean to justice.
The same tension stretches between Jesus and the religious legalists of his day. The Pharisees loved the Law of Moses and arrived at a formula for righteousness yielded by the sum of 238 commandments, 365 prohibitions and more than 1,500 hedge laws (peripheral laws created to keep from even approaching a breach of the real laws). In an administration where justice and observance of the law are the only values, mercy becomes the greatest evil, and transgressors become hunted fugitives. And so the Pharisees set a trap for Jesus.
The trap, as far as sinister and nefarious plots go, was ingenius. Roman-occupied Israel could not exercise capital punishment, so if Jesus said, "Stone her," as the Law of Moses demanded for this offense, he was likely to be seized by the Roman militia. If, on the other hand, he said, "let her go," then he was guilty of undermining the Mosaic Law, an action that could be used to turn Israel against him. As I said, quite ingenius. The unfortunate woman in this passage was nothing more than bait. Her life, her shame: inconsequential.
Jesus, clearly no stranger to martial arts, used his attackers' forward momentum against them, flipping the situation and placing them in an ethical dilemma: "If I throw the stone, I'll be saying I'm sinless , which could turn the people against me!" The religious leaders, having been caught in their own trap, dispersed, blank faced and dazed.
Two times during this exchange Jesus stooped to write on the ground with his finger. Theologians have speculated for a couple millennia about what Jesus might have been writing, but concentrating on what he wrote misses the point. The important detail is the fact that, as the experts in the Mosaic law interrogated him, he was writing with his finger, echoing this Old Testament verse: "When the Lord finished speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the Testimony, the tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God"(Exodus 31:18). The very finger that had written the Law was now writing on the ground - and being quizzed by the "experts" on the Law's contents. That's like asking Bill Gates if he knows what a web browser is.
Clearly, Jesus isn't disputing the moral content of the Law - that's not what this is about. Rather he's challenging a soulless application of it and a legalistic interpretation that misses the heart behind it. The impact of Jesus' behavior was perhaps intended more for the woman than for her accusers; she broke the law of God but was forgiven by the Lawgiver. And if the author of the law declares you innocent, then whatever your jury decrees is irrelevant.
The story also provides us with the kingdom's code of conduct: that which is expected of its citizens. The kingdom is about grace, first being its recipient and then, in turn, extending grace to others. "If [someone] sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, 'I repent,' forgive him" (Luke 17:4)
But while the economy of grace is about receiving and giving undeserved mercy for wrongs committed, never changing one's habits pillages grace - "Grandma's such a sweet and caring soul - let's empty her bank account." And so Jesus' direction to the woman is "Go now and leave your life of sin." It is called repentance (a change of heart, life, direction), and it is the way kingdom members honor the grace that has been given. They leave behind the habits that led them to the door of grace needing a handout.
(James, Rick. Jesus without religion.2007 pg 38-43)
Paul Washer:
There is so much that's in the world, but bless God I am a christian, why am I a Christian? I don't look any different than most of the other people in my church, Why am I a Christian? Because there was a time when I prayed and asked Jesus Christ into my heart... I want you to know that the greatest heresy in the American Evangelical and protestant church is that if you pray and ask Jesus Christ to come into your heart he will definitely come in. You will not find that in any place in scripture, you will not find that in anywhere in baptist history until about 50 years ago. What you need to know is that salvation is by faith and faith alone in Jesus Christ. And faith alone in Jesus christ is proceeded and followed by repentance. A turning away from sin, a hatred for the things that God hates and a love for the things that God loves. A growing in holiness and a desire, not to be like Britney Spears, not to be like the world, and not to be like the great majority of American Christians, but to be like Jesus Christ.
Bono:
"At the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics - in physical laws - every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It's clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the universe. I'm absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that "as you reap, so you will sow" stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I've done a lot of stupid stuff.... The point of the death of Christ is that Christ took on the sins of the world, so that what we put out did not come back to us, and that our sinful nature does not reap the obvious death. That's the point, it should keep us humbled.... It's not our own good works that get us through the gates of heaven/"
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