Blessed are the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on.
Paul Simon
Blessed are the spiritually deprived, for they too find the kingdom of the heavens.
Matt. 5:3
But many who are the first will be last, and many who are last will be first.
Matt. 19:30 NIV
What we have come to call the Sermon on the Mount is a concise statement of Jesus’ teachings on how to actually live in the reality of God’s present kingdom available to us from the very space surrounding our bodies. It concludes with a statement that all who hear and do what he there says will have a life that can stand up to everything—that is, a life for eternity because it is already eternal (Matt. 7:24-25).
As outstanding thinkers before and after him have done, Jesus deals with the two major questions humanity always faces.
First there is the question of which life is the good life. What is genuinely in my interest, and how may I enter true well-being? Of course we already know that life in the life of God will be the good life, and Jesus’ continual reassertion of the direct availability of the kingdom always kept that basic truth before his students and his hearers.
But exactly who is and who is not assured of such a life was a subject of much confusion in his day, as it is today. What came to be called the Beatitudes were given by him to help clarify this matter. They and the vital epilogue that accompanies them occupy Matt. 5:3-20.
The second question Jesus deals with in the sermon concerns who is truly a good person. Who has the kind of goodness found in God himself, constituting the family likeness between God and his children? This is dealt with in the remainder of the sermon, from 5:20 to 7:27. We shall return to Jesus’ answer in the chapter immediately to follow.
It is for a very good reason that Jesus’ teachings here in response to these two great questions have proven to be the most influential such teachings ever to emerge on the face of this weary planet. That is by no means to say that all else produced in human history is worthless. Far from it. But his teachings on what is good for human beings are, taken as a whole, uniquely deep and powerful.
To come to a full understanding of their force and depth nothing would be more useful than the most candid and thorough comparison of them with all of the promising alternatives.1 But that requires a different kind of book than this one, and we simply cannot undertake such a comparison here. We shall concentrate directly on what Jesus himself taught. And the first question, Who is it, according to Jesus, that has the good life?
The Beatitudes of Jesus drive home his answer to this question. They are among the literary and religious treasures of the human race. Along with the Ten Commandments, the Twenty-third Psalm, the Lord’s Prayer, and a very few other passages from the Bible, they are acknowledged by almost everyone to be among the highest expressions of religious insight and moral inspiration. We can savor them, affirm them, meditate upon them, and engrave them on plaques to hang on our walls. But a major question remains: how are we to live in response to them?
This is not an idle question. Misunderstanding of the “blesseds” given by Jesus in Matthew 5 and Luke 6 have caused much pain and confusion down through the ages and continue to do so today. Strangely enough, his blesseds have not uniformly been a blessing. For many they have proved to be nothing less than a pretty poison.
Once after I had spoken on the Beatitudes, a lady approached me expressing great relief at what she had just heard. She told me her son had dropped his Christian identification and left the church because of the Beatitudes. He was a strong, intelligent man who had made the military his profession. As often happens, he had been told that the Beatitudes—with its list of the poor and the sad, the weak and the mild—were a picture of the ideal Christian. He explained to his mother very simply: “That is not me. I can never be like that.”
Certainly this man was not perfect as he stood and could have made several changes for the better. But is that what we’re supposed to do with the Beatitudes—“Be like that”? Frankly, most people think so. But they could hardly be more mistaken. More common than such outright rejection of Christianity so understood is a constant burden of guilt conscientiously borne for not being, or not wanting to be, on this list of the supposedly God-preferred. This kind of guilt also feeds a morbid streak that unfortunately persists in historical Christianity and has greatly weakened its force for good in history and in individual lives. On the other hand, pride often visibly swells in those who think of themselves as conforming to the “blesseds.”
It will help us know what to do—and what not to do—with the Beatitudes if we can discover what Jesus himself was doing with them. That should be the key to understanding them, for after all they are his Beatitudes, not ours to make of them what we will. And since great teachers and leaders always have a coherent message that they develop in an orderly way, we should assume that his teaching in the Beatitudes is a clarification or development of his primary theme in this talk and in his life: the availability of the kingdom of the heavens.2 How then, do they develop that theme?
In chapter 4 of Matthew we see Jesus proclaiming his basic message (v. 17) and demonstrating it by acting with God’s rule from the heavens, meeting the most desperate needs of the people around him. As a result, “Sick folk were soon coming to be healed from as far away as Syria. And whatever their illness or pain, or if they were possessed by demons, or were insane, or paralyzed—he healed them all. Enormous crowds followed him wherever he went” (4:23-25 LB).
Having ministered to the needs of the people crowding around him, he desired to teach them and moved to a higher position in the landscape—“up on the hill” (Matt. 5:1 BV)—where they could see and hear him well. But he does not, as is so often suggested, withdraw from the crowd to give an esoteric discourse of sublime irrelevance to the crying need of those pressing upon him. Rather, in the midst of this mass of raw humanity, and with them hanging on every word—note that it is they who respond at the end of the discourse—Jesus teaches his students or apprentices, along with all who hear, about the meaning of the availability of the heavens.
I believe he used the method of “show and tell” to make clear the extent to which the kingdom is “on hand” to us. There were directly before him those who had just received from the heavens through him. The context makes this clear. He could point out in the crowd now this individual who was “blessed” because The Kingdom Among Us had just reached out and touched them with Jesus’ heart and voice and hands. Perhaps this is why in the Gospels we only find him giving Beatitudes from the midst of a crowd of people he had touched.
And so he said, “Blessed are the spiritual zeros—the spiritually bankrupt, deprived and deficient, the spiritual beggars, those without a wisp of ‘religion’—when the kingdom comes upon them.”
Or, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens.” This, of course, is the more traditional and literally correct translation of Matt. 5:3. The poor in spirit are blessed as a result of the kingdom of God being available to them in their spiritual poverty. But 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. So, as a corrective, I have paraphrased the verse as above. No doubt Jesus had many exhibits from this category in the crowd around him. Most, if not all, of the Twelve Apostles were of this type, as are many now reading these words.
Standing around Jesus as he speaks are people with no spiritual qualities or abilities at all. You would never call on them when “spiritual work” is to be done. There is nothing about them to suggest that the breath of God might move through their lives. They have no charisma, no religious glitter or clout.
They “don’t know their Bible.” They “know not the law,” as a later critic of Jesus’ work said. They are “mere laypeople,” who at best can fill a pew or perhaps an offering plate. No one calls on them to lead a service or even to lead in prayer, and they might faint if anyone did.
They are the first to tell you they “really can’t make heads nor tails of religion.” They walk by us in the hundreds or thousands every day. They would be the last to say they have any claim whatsoever on God. The pages of the Gospels are cluttered with such people. And yet: “He touched me.” The rule of the heavens comes down upon their lives through their contact with Jesus. And then they too are blessed—healed of body, mind, or spirit—in the hand of God.
A minister tells of trying to lead home Bible studies among the poor of northern Mexico. In such studies participation is, of course, always encouraged. He related that, at the beginning, he would read a passage from scripture and ask, “What do you think?” No response. Just silence. Over and over this happened. Finally he realized that no one ever asks the poor what they think. That is also a part of what it means to be poor “in spirit.” No one imagines you could have any thoughts worth sharing. Real poverty in the human order is almost automatically taken as a sign of failure in every respect.
It is deeply revealing of how we think about God to see the way translators struggle to make this condition of “spiritual poverty” something good in its own right and thus deserving of blessing. Those who do not give the literal meaning indicated most commonly put something like being “humble-minded” in its place.3
The first edition of the New English Bible, for example, said, “How blest are those who know they are poor.” That is a clear mistranslation, however, that the second edition has fortunately recognized by returning to “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
The generally excellent Berkeley version reads, “Blessed are they who know their spiritual poverty, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Once again, an obvious mistranslation when compared with the Greek. It is a mistranslation driven by the necessity to make sense of something one just does not understand. If the Greek language wishes to say something about knowing or realizing one has no spiritual goods, it certainly has adequate resources to do so. But it says nothing of all that.
This struggle with the translation reflects our intense need to find in the condition referred to something good, something God supposedly desires or even requires, that then can serve as a “reasonable” basis for the blessedness he bestows. But that precisely misses the point that the very formulation of the Beatitudes should bring to our attention.
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. It makes people worthy of the kingdom.” As we steal away the much more profound meaning of his teaching about the availability of the kingdom by replacing the state of spiritual impoverishment—in no way good in itself—with some supposedly praiseworthy state of mind or attitude that “qualifies” us for the kingdom.4
In so doing we merely substitute another banal legalism for the ecstatic pronouncement of the gospel. The poor in spirit are called “blessed” by Jesus, not because they are in a meritorious condition, but because, precisely in spite of and in the midst of their ever so deplorable condition, the rule of the heavens has moved redemptively upon and through them by the grace of Christ.
Alfred Edersheim is therefore exactly right in saying that
in the Sermon on the Mount. . . . the promises attaching, for example, the so-called “Beatitudes” must not be regarded as the reward of the spiritual states with which they are respectively connected, nor yet as their result. It is not because a man is poor in spirit that his is the Kingdom of Heaven, in the sense that the one state will grow into the other, or be its result; still less is the one the reward of the other. The connecting link is in each case Christ Himself: because He . . . , “has opened the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.”5
Those spiritually impoverished ones present before Jesus in the crowd are blessed only because the gracious touch of the heavens has freely fallen upon them. But the mistranslations noted remain attractive because they suit our human sense of propriety, which cries out against God’s blessing on people just because of their need and just because he chooses—or perhaps just because someone asked him to.
This same sense of propriety may even allow us to totally bypass contact with Jesus in his own Beatitudes. Indeed, most interpretations of his words manage to forget that he is even on the scene.
If all we need to be blessed in the kingdom of the heavens is to be humble-minded through recognizing our spiritual poverty, then let’s just do that and we’ve got bliss cornered. We escape the humiliation of spiritual incompetence because, strange to say, we have managed to turn it into spiritual attainment just by acknowledging it. And we escape the embarrassment of receiving pure mercy, for our humble recognition makes blessedness somehow appropriate.
We have egg on our face perhaps, but at least we know it—and then can wear it defiantly, even proudly, like a badge of virtue. We have salvaged an impressive bit of righteousness for ourselves. And anyway, aren’t all good people humble-minded? So all good people have the kingdom of the heavens! What necessary place does Jesus have in this—other than having the good sense to see it and say it?
And of course this also means that we can very neatly tell people how to engineer their way into the kingdom. Perhaps many will find that they are already there! “Just be humble-minded,” it is said. (Who doesn’t think that he or she is humble-minded? Perhaps there are some.) Such a solution will have great appeal to intellectual and scholarly types, who, in my experience, especially take pride in being humble about their minds.
But such a way of reading the Beatitudes also gives various other kinds of people automatic access to the kingdom of the heavens in terms suited nicely to them—especially if they have a distant God and not a present King. If they are not in a position to be humble-minded, they perhaps can manage to mourn, or be meek, or become persecuted, and then one of the other Beatitudes will, on the interpretation in question, take over to secure their blessedness.
Here we have full-blown, if not salvation by works, then possibly salvation by attitude. Or even by situation and chance, in case you happen to be persecuted, for example—meritorious attitude or circumstance guarantees acceptance with God! Can we really imagine that Jesus had anything like this in mind?
We round out this popular approach to the Beatitudes with its final, fatal step. Not only are the conditions cited—poverty of spirit, mourning, meekness, and so on—meritorious ones that somehow make it “only right” for God to match them with beatitude, and not only can you be sure of being in the kingdom if you appropriately flee or fall into these conditions, but if you are not in these conditions, you certainly cannot be blessed. If you are not on the list, you’re not in the kingdom. Perhaps you will not even make it into “heaven” when you die. I have heard this stated by numerous Christian teachers.
If Jesus’ aim here is to tell us how to qualify for kingdom life, must we not believe he have us a complete list? If that were his aim, would he have failed to mention other possible ways of attaining the kingdom?
That the list is complete and exclusive of other ways into the kingdom may seem proven by the “woes” or “miseries” pronounced alongside the “blesseds” in Saint Luke’s version:
Are not the wealthy those who fail to be poor, the laughers those who do not mourn, the popular those who are not persecuted?
What could be more plain? If the usual interpretation of Jesus’ Beatitudes as directions on how to attain blessedness is correct, you would have to be poor, have to mourn, be persecuted, and so forth, to be among the blessed. We would therefore expect anyone who seriously accepted this interpretation to seek to become poor, sad, persecuted, and so on, but very few people actually do this. Can it be enough just to feel guilty for not doing it?
So one can easily see why many have decided that the Sermon on the Mount, which opens with the Beatitudes, cannot be meant for today—“this dispensation” or the present age—but should come into force in the Millennium, or possibly only in the afterlife. Ours is the age of grace, they say. Haven’t we suffered long to establish this? Because being in the kingdom of God is, on the usual interpretation of the Beatitudes, obviously not a matter of grace but of attaining to special conditions, the present age cannot be the age of the kingdom. That is the thinking of many.6
Such an interpretation readily accounts for the fact that among Evangelicals, up until about twenty years ago, one could not teach kingdom principles for present living without being regarded as preaching a mere “social” gospel. Such a gospel sought to realize the kingdom of God by emphasizing legal and social reforms in line with Christian imperatives. And it was indeed, for all its good intent, a form of “works salvation”—one that now lives on in the fully secularized “social ethics” movement. Of course the only salvation in question for it was one from deprivation and suffering in this life.
But to suppose that Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of the heavens is not for today is exactly like holding that the Twenty-third Psalm is not for today. It is true that Jesus’ call to the kingdom now, just like that psalm, is of such a radical nature, is so utterly subversive of “life as usual,” that anyone who takes it seriously will be under constant temptation to disconnect it from “normal” human existence. Thus it is that “The Lord is my Shepherd” is written on many more tombstones than lives.
On the other hand, the clear intent of the New Testament as a whole is that Jesus’ teachings are meant to be applied now. For if they are not, neither is the remainder of what the New Testament says about life. You cannot consistently say that the great passages such as Romans 8, I Corinthians 13, Colossians 3, and Galatians 5, for example, are for now—as everyone admits—while relegating the Sermon on the Mount and other Gospel passages to the next dispensation or life. This cannot be, simply because they actually say the same things.
They say, for example, “put on as God’s select people, holy and beloved, the inner qualities of mercy, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, patience” (Col. 3:12). Or again, “Love suffers long and is kind. Love does not envy. Love does not exalt itself, is not vain, does not do stupid things, is not acquisitive, is not easily irritated, does not dwell on what is bad. Love is not happy because of evil but rejoices in what is true. Love holds up under anything, has confidence in everything, hopes no matter what and puts up with everything imaginable” (I Cor. 13:4-7).
The opposition at this point so frequently hypothesized between the teaching of Paul “for the church age” and those of Jesus for “another time” simply will not stand scrutiny. If your mind and life really does conform to what is said in Paul’s letters, you will find little that is new when you turn to the Sermon on the Mount.
Instead of denying the relevance of Jesus’ teaching teachings to the present, we must simply acknowledge that he has been wrongly interpreted. The Beatitudes, in particular, are not teachings on how to be blessed. They are not instructions to do anything. They do not indicate conditions that are especially pleasing to God or good for human beings.
No one is actually being told that they are better off for being poor, for mourning, for being persecuted, and so on, or that the conditions listed are recommended ways to well-being before God or man. Nor are the Beatitudes indications of who will be on top “after the revolution.” They are explanations and illustrations, drawn from the immediate setting, of the present availability of the kingdom through personal relationship to Jesus. They single out cases that provide proof that, in him, the rule of God from the heavens truly is available in life circumstances that are beyond all human hope.
Clues to how we have gone wrong in approaching them lie in what we have already said, but now we must look more closely at how Jesus taught, at the strategy of his approach to teaching and learning. Doing this will enable us to return to the Beatitudes with the joy and insight they brought to his first hearers.
The Beatitudes simply cannot be “good news” if they are understood as a set of “how-tos” for achieving blessedness. They would then only amount to a new legalism. They would not serve to throw open the kingdom—anything but. They would impose a new brand of Phariseeism, a new way of closing the door—as well as some very gratifying new possibilities for the human engineering of righteousness.
As already suggested by our reference to “show and tell,” Jesus teaches contextually and concretely, from the immediate surroundings, if possible, or at least from events of ordinary life. This is seen in his well-known use of the parable—which, from its origin in the Greek word paraballein, literally means to throw one thing down alongside another. Parables are not just pretty stories that are easy to remember; rather, they help us understand something difficult by comparing it to, placing it beside, something with which we are very familiar, and always something concrete, specific.
Jesus’ “concrete” method of teaching goes far beyond use of parables, however. You see it also in the way in which he capitalizes upon events that happen around him as he goes about his work. On one occasion as he teaches, for example, a man calls out from the crowd, asking him to make his brother divide their inheritance and give him his part so he can start living. Jesus responds with a story about a person who has all the wealth he desires—and yet has nothing (Luke 12).
Another time, his mother and brothers send word through the crowds swarming him that they want to speak to him. He takes the occasion to call attention to the new family under the heavens, pointing out that those who do the will of his Father in the heavens are all brothers and sisters and mothers to him in the kingdom family (Matt. 12).
Still another time, the Passover meal is eaten with his closest disciples. Around the simple elements of bread and wine Jesus conveys the deepest meanings of his death for our new life “from above”: “This is my body;” “This is my blood” (Matt. 26).
Nothing is more concretely powerful than body and blood.
But his use of concreteness in teaching takes yet another form, one absolutely necessary for our understanding of the Beatitudes. This use is found when he corrects a general assumption or practice thought to govern the situation at hand. He does this by pointing out that the case before him provides an exception and shows the general assumption or practice to be an unreliable guide to life under God.
Mark, chapter 10, gives us the familiar story of the “rich young ruler,” which turns out to have interesting implications for the first beatitude in Luke: “Blessed are the poor.” The common assumption of the time, as in many times since, was that the prosperity of the rich indicated God’s special favor. How else could they be rich, since it is, supposedly, God himself who controls the wealth of the earth? But this young man loved his wealth more than he loved God. When faced with the option of continuing to run his business or to serve God, he chose his riches—though with great reluctance.
Jesus then commented to his students on how hard it was for the rich to put themselves under the rule of God, to enter the kingdom. Because of the common assumption that wealth meant God’s favor, they were stunned. In response to their amazement he went on to explain, “How hard it is for those who trust wealth to enter the kingdom! A camel can pass through the eye of a needle easier than a rich man can enter the kingdom of God.” But this “explanation” totally lost them. They were “astonished out of measure” and muttered to one another, “Who then can be saved?” (V. 26).
It is crucial to note here what Jesus did not say. He did not say that the rich cannot enter the kingdom. In fact he said they could—with God’s help, which is the only way anyone can do it. Nor did he say that the poor have, on the whole, any advantage over the rich so far as “being saved” is concerned. By using the case at hand, he simply upset the prevailing general assumption about God and riches. For how could God favor a person, however rich, who loves him less than wealth?
So being rich does not mean that one is in God’s favor—which further suggests that being poor does not automatically mean one is out of God’s favor. The case of the rich young ruler corrects the prevailing assumption, shocking the hearers but making it possible to think more appropriately of God’s relation to us.
A striking illustration of this type of teaching is found in Luke 14. Here Jesus is at “Sunday dinner” in the house of a religious leader. Noting that the host had invited only his kinfolk and well-to-do neighbors, he remarks, “When you have people in for a meal, don’t invite your relatives, friends, and wealthy neighbors, who will only pay you back by having you over. Instead, when you have a feast invite the poor, the maimed, the lame and the blind, who cannot pay you back, and you will be paid back when the just are raised from the dead” (vv. 12-14).
Now this may immediately become your favorite verse in the Bible, depending on your relatives! You are plainly told not to have them over for dinner. But do we really need to say that Jesus is not forbidding you to have family members over for dinner—even though he explicitly says we are not to? Some of us might be glad if he did, but that isn’t what he is saying.
We are not, then, disobeying him if we have our mother or aunt and uncle or even some financially comfortable neighbor over for dinner. Everything depends on what is in our heart. He simply uses the particular occasion to correct the prevailing practice of neglecting those in real need while we feast with the full who will reciprocate by doing something for us.
He is, on the other hand, most certainly telling us to provide for more than our little circle of mutual appreciation, and thus to place ourselves in the larger context of heaven’s rule where we have a different kind of mind and heart regardless of who we do or do not have over for dinner.
Sometimes several “techniques of concreteness” come together in one of Jesus’ teachings. Thus the parable, the occasion, and the case contradicting the prevailing general assumption all come together in the illustration of “the good Samaritan” (Luke 10).
The occasion here is one in which an expert in the law is testing Jesus’ doctrinal correctness and gets caught in his own trap. Having agreed with Jesus that to “inherit eternal life” you must love your neighbor as you love yourself, he finds the requirement more stringent than he likes.
The “expert” then, in the manner of experts, tries to wiggle of the hook by raising a quibble-question: “Who is my neighbor?” That is just the sort of things “experts” pride themselves on—a general question that will leave us exactly where we began in practice. He was trying to justify himself because he surely knew that he had not loved his neighbors as he loved himself. But now Jesus has him in the palm of his hand. He will give him and everyone standing by a number of lessons that they will not have to write down or “capture on tape” to remember.
Of course the words good Samaritan do not occur in the story. For those listening to Jesus, that phrase would have been what we call an “oxymoron”: a combination of words that makes no sense. For the Jews generally, at that time, we could say that “the only good Samaritan was a dead Samaritan.”
Jesus masterfully develops the story in such a way that the Samaritan slips in toward the end, before the door of the mind can be shut. The Samaritan concretely embodies the answer to the quibble-question about who neighbors are, and he simultaneously blasts aside general assumptions about who “of course” inherits eternal life.
The story has a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, when bandits grab him, beat him half to death, strip him of everything, and leave him in the road. So here is a naked, bleeding man lying in a coma, or at least unable to move, and down the road comes a priest. The priest (a minister?) sees the messy situation and gives it as wide a berth as possible, moving on down the road. Then a Levite (a deacon or trustee?)—perhaps having observed the priest—does exactly the same thing. This fellow wasn’t their neighbor! They had no responsibility for him. They didn’t even know him. And probably they were hurrying to “do something religious.” Who could expect them to risk becoming ritually unclean just to help someone?
Such is often the life and thoughts of those who are not destitute of spiritual things—not “poor in spirit”—but instead are loaded with them.
Now along comes this despised half-breed, the Samaritan. Of the truly spiritual, as any Jew would know, he hasn’t a glimmer. Couldn’t have. But the key to this man—as indeed to the priest and the Levite—is his heart. The mere sight of the victim immediately “filled him with pity.” Of course that made him rush to the poor fellow and give him such immediate first aid as he could.
But he did not stop there and wish him well. Instead he put him on his own donkey, walked him along to a “motel,” and watched over him that day and night. The next day he got the manager to promise to take care of the victim until he recovered. He then left some money with him and assured him that he would cover any further expenses on his return trip.
Now Jesus is really rubbing it in. And yet the story is very true to life. This is one of those cases where, in what might very well be a mere parable, Jesus could easily be telling a story of something that had actually happened. It is the sort of thing that still happens today.
When Jesus then drives the point home with the question, “Which of the three was a neighbor to the victim of the crime?” there is only one way any decent person could answer. To quibble further would be to reveal a hopelessly godless heart. So the theological expert manages to reply, “The neighbor is the one who had mercy on him.” He cannot bring himself to say, “The Samaritan.”
But we must say it, and we must understand what it means. It means that the general assumptions of Jesus’ hearers about who has eternal life have to be revised in the light of the condition of people’s hearts. The story does not teach that we can have eternal life just by loving our neighbor. We cannot get away with that legalism either. The issue of our posture toward God still has to be taken into account. But in God’s order nothing can substitute for loving people. And we define who our neighbor is by our love. We make a neighbor of someone by caring for him or her.
So we don’t first define a class of people who will be our neighbors and then select only them as the objects of our love—leaving the rest to lie where they fall. Jesus deftly rejects the question “Who is my neighbor?” and substitutes the only question really relevant here: “To whom will I be a neighbor?” And he knows that we can only answer this question case by case as we go through our days. In the morning we cannot yet know who our neighbor will be that day. The condition of our hearts will determine who along our path turns out to be our neighbor, and our faith in God will largely determine whom we have strength enough to make our neighbor.
If Jesus were here today, the story would be told differently. The words good Samaritan now identify a person of an especially good sort in our society. We even have “good Samaritan” laws to protect them when they do “their good deeds.”
To make his point now, Jesus might have to put the “good Samaritan” in the place of the priest or Levite as he originally told the story. Or if he were in Israel now, he would probably tell a story about the “good Palestinian.” The Palestinians, on the other hand, would hear about the “good Israeli.”
In the United States, of course, he would tell up about the “good Iraqi,” “good Communist,” “good Muslim,” and so on. In some quarters it would have to be the good feminist or good homosexual. In yet another the good Christian or good church member would have the appropriate shock value. Indeed, given some current secular attitudes, to speak of the good priest or good deacon might be very effective. All of these break up pet generalizations concerning who most surely is or is not leading the eternal kind of life.
In the story of the good Samaritan, Jesus not only teaches us to help people in need; more deeply, he teaches us that we cannot identify who “has it,” who is “in” with God, who is “blessed,” by looking at exteriors of any sort. That is a matter of the heart. There alone the kingdom of the heavens and human kingdoms great and small are knit together. Draw any social or cultural line you wish, and God will find his way beyond it. “Human beings look at the outer appearance, but Jehovah looks upon the heart” (I Sam. 16:7). And “what humanity highly regards can be sickening to God” (Luke 16:15).
This “concrete” or contextual method of teaching is obviously very different from how we attempt to teach and learn today, and the difference makes it difficult for us to grasp what precisely it is that Jesus is teaching. What he is saying cannot be understood unless we appreciate how he teaches, and we cannot appreciate how he teaches unless we take into account something of the world within which his teaching occurred.
We must recognize, first of all, that the aim of the popular teacher in Jesus’ time was not to impart information, but to make a significant change in the lives of the hearers. Of course that may require an information transfer, but it is a peculiarly modern notion that the aim of teaching is to bring people to know things that may have no effect at all on their lives.
In our day learners usually think of themselves as containers of some sort, with a purely passive space to be filled by the information the teacher possesses and wishes to transfer—the “from jug to mug” model. The teacher is to fill in empty parts of the receptacle with “truth” that may or may not later make some difference to the life of the one who has it. The teacher must get the information into them. We then “test” the patients to see if they “got it” by checking whether they can reproduce it in language rather than watching how they live.
Thus if we today were invited to hear the Sermon on the Mount—or more likely now, the “Seminar at the Sheraton”—we would show up with our notebooks, pens, and tape recorders. We would be astonished to find the disciples “just listening” to Jesus and would look around to see if someone was taping it to make sure that everyone could “get it all” if they wanted to.
Working our way through the crowd to the right-hand man, Peter, we might ask where the conference notebooks and other material were and be further astonished when he only says, “Just listen!” Perhaps we will push the “record” button as we sit down, thankful that we at least will have captured all the spiritual information—if the batteries aren’t dead or the tape doesn’t stick.
The situation of teacher/learner was really so different in Jesus’ day that we can hardly picture it to ourselves. Writing was not all that uncommon, but it was not really an option for someone trying to “get” what a teacher was saying. And then it is simply a fact that no value was placed on mere “information” as we know it today.
Of course information relevant to a real need has always been prized. But to want merely to “know stuff” such as we usually get today out of a high school and college education would have been thought laughable—if it could have been thought at all. Trivial Pursuit certainly never would have caught on as a game back then. (And a thoughtful person today might well wonder about a society in which it could catch on as the educational system is near a state of collapse. But that it another story!)
The teacher in Jesus’ time—and especially the religious teacher—taught in such a way that he would impact the life flow of the hearer, leaving a lasting impression without the benefit of notes, recorders, or even memorization. Whatever did not make a difference in that way just made no difference. Period. And, of course, this is true to the laws of mind and self.
I recall with perfect clarity where I was and what I was doing when I heard that John Kennedy had been shot. My brother Duane and I were playing basketball with other students in the old gymnasium at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. We had just a game and were walking off the court. I remember exactly which corner of the gym and which way I was facing the instant I heard. I never wrote it down, and I never memorized it. Millions of people today can make a similar report on their own experience of this event.
We automatically remember what makes a real difference in our life. The secret of the great teacher is to speak words, to foster experiences, that impact the active flow of the hearer’s life. That is what Jesus did by the way he taught. He tied his teachings to concrete events that make up the hearers’ lives. He aimed his sayings at their hearts and habits as these were revealed in their daily lives.
He still takes us today in the fullness of our flight, moving right along, assuming our assumptions, and he gently but firmly lets the air out of our balloon. And as he does so, we don’t have to try to “get it” and remember it. It has stuck in our life, whether we want it or agree with it or not. We will eventually have to come to terms with it somehow. The parables, the incidents, the cases where our guiding generalization about “how things are” just won’t fit, sit in our minds and go off like the “tiny time capsules” of popular medications. The master teacher has done his work—or rather, keeps on doing his work.
Now Jesus not only taught in this manner; he also taught us, his students in the kingdom, to teach in the same way. He taught about teaching in the kingdom of the heavens—using, of course, a parable. “So every bible scholar who is trained in the kingdom of the heavens is like someone over a household that shows from his treasures things new and things old” (Matt. 13:52 REV). By showing to others the presence of the kingdom in the concrete details of our shared existence, we impact the lives and hearts of our hearers, not just their heads. And they won’t have to write it down to hold onto it.
Armed, now, with this understanding of the manner in which Jesus teaches, let us return to the Beatitudes—and this time to Luke’s version, which seems more relentless and harder to “pretty up” than Matthew’s, and where “blesseds” are also accompanied by the very uncompromising “woes” referred to earlier.
The setting here is somewhat different from that recorded in Matthew. It seems to me we are not dealing with a different record of the same sermon, though many of the same topics are treated.7 Here Jesus has just spent all night out in the hills in prayer, preparing to appoint twelve of his students to be his special emissaries, or “apostles,” to world history.
Early in the morning he calls the disciples to him and names the twelve “winners.” Then they go together down to a plain where “great numbers of people” from all quarters had gathered “to listen to him, and to be cured of their diseases. . . . and everyone in the crowd was trying to touch him, because power went out from him and cured them all” (Luke 6:17-19 REV).
In this familiar context he turns to his students and lists four groups of people who are blessed as God’s provisions from the heavens come upon them.
These are, once again, precisely people from the crowd surrounding him. Truly it would be difficult to make these kinds of people look good. I have yet to find anyone attempting to translate the first beatitude of Luke as “Blessed are those who think they are poor.” Yet of course, as church history shows, there have been many who have taught that poverty, misery, and martyrdom are meritorious conditions that somehow make you holy and justify blessedness from God.
Just as plainly, however, there have been multitudes who have been poor, hungry, and grief-stricken, and who have remained as ungodly as sin itself—appropriate compassion for them notwithstanding. There have also been many who because of reproach for Jesus’ sake have rejected him and have filled their lives with bitterness against God and man. They are anything but blessed.
These are things that we all know to be true. “Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor,” Paul points out, “and though I give my body to be burned, and fail to love as God does, it is of no gain to me.” So whatever the point of the Beatitudes, it cannot be that they state conditions that guarantee God’s approval, salvation, or blessing.
Similarly, unless we suffer from a remarkably restricted range of acquaintances, we all know that there are people who please God and have his blessing without being poor, hungry, grief-stricken, or persecuted. They trust Jesus with all their heart, and they love and serve their neighbors and others in his name. Their hearts are full of peace and joy in believing, and they “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God.” Only those blinded by their prior commitments can continue to insist that it is necessary to be on this list of “blesseds” in order to live under the blessing of God.
What then does Jesus say to us with his Beatitudes? How are we to live in response to them? That is the question we asked at the outset of this chapter, and it is now time to answer it.
We have already indicated the key to understanding the Beatitudes. They serve to clarify Jesus’ fundamental message: the free availability of God’s rule and righteousness to all of humanity through reliance upon Jesus himself, the person now loose in the world among us. They do this simply by taking those who, from the human point of view, are regarded as most hopeless, most beyond all possibility of God’s blessing or even interest, and exhibiting them as enjoying God’s touch and abundant provisions from the heavens.
This fact of God’s care and provision proves to all that no human condition excludes blessedness, that God may come to any person with his care and deliverance. God does sometimes help those who cannot, or perhaps just do not, help themselves. (So much for another well-known generalization!) The religious system of his day left the multitudes out, but Jesus welcomed them all into his kingdom. Anyone could come as well as any other. They still can. That is the gospel of the Beatitudes.
Just look at the list of the “written off,” of the “sat upon, spat upon, ratted on.” It is interesting that Simon and Garfunkel got Jesus’ point in their old song, even though many of us “scribes” miss it. We have already considered the spiritually bankrupt or deprived. Now we pass on to those who mourn. Luke refers to them as “the weeping ones” (6:21): men or women whose mates have just deserted them, leaving them paralyzed by rejection, for example; a parent in gut-wrenching grief and depression over the death of a little daughter; people in the sunset of their employable years who have lost their careers or businesses or life savings because of an “economic downturn” or takeover of the company in which they had invested themselves. So many things to break the heart! But as they see the kingdom in Jesus, enter it, and learn to live in it, they find comfort, and their tears turn to laughter. Yes, they are even better off than they were before their peculiar disaster.
Then there are the meek. (“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”) These are the shy ones, the intimidated, the mild, the unassertive. They step off the sidewalk to let others pass as if it were only right, and if something goes wrong around them, they automatically feel it must have something to do with them. When others step forward and speak up, they shrink back, their vocal chords perhaps moving but producing no sound. They do not assert their legitimate claims unless driven into a corner and then usually with ineffectual rage. But as the kingdom of the heavens enfolds them, the whole earth is their Father’s—and theirs as they need it. The Lord is their shepherd, they shall not want.
Next are those who burn with desire for things to be made right. (“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.”) It may be that the wrong is in themselves. Perhaps they have failed so badly that night and day they cringe before their own sin and inwardly scream to be made pure. Or it may be that they have been severely wronged, suffered some terrible injustice, and they are consumed with longing to see the injury set right—like parents who learn that the murderer of their child has been quickly released from prison and is laughing at them. Yet the kingdom of the heavens has a chemistry that can transform even the past and make the terrible, irretrievable losses that human beings experience seem insignificant in the greatness of God. He restores our soul and fills us with the goodness of righteousness.
The merciful are here also. (“Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.”) The worldly wise will, of course, say, “Woe to the merciful, for they shall be taken advantage of.” And outside heaven’s rule there is nothing more true. My mother and father went bankrupt and lost their clothing business in the early 1930s, just before I was born. Those were depression years, and they simply could not make people pay for what they needed. Clothing was given “on credit” when it was clear there would be no payment.
A familiar story, no doubt. The merciful are always despised by those who know how to “take care of business.” Yet outside the human order, under the great profusion of heaven’s goodness, they themselves find mercy to meet their needs, far beyond any “claim” they might have on God.
And then there are the pure in heart, the ones for whom nothing is good enough, not even themselves. (“Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.”) These are the perfectionists. They are a pain to everyone, themselves most of all. In religion they will certainly find errors in your doctrine, your practice, and probably your heart and your attitude. They may be even harder on themselves. They endlessly pick over their own motivations. They wanted Jesus to wash his hands even though they were not dirty and called him a glutton and a winebiber.
Their food is never cooked right; their clothes and hair are always unsatisfactory; they can tell you what is wrong with everything. How miserable they are! And yet the kingdom is even open to them, and there at last they will find something that satisfies their pure heart. They will see God. And when they do they will find what they have been looking for, someone who is truly good enough.
The peacemakers are here too. (“Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.”) They make the list because outside the kingdom they are, as is often said, “called everything but a child of God.” That is because they are always in the middle. Ask the policeman called in to smooth out a domestic dispute. There is no situation more dangerous. Neither side trusts you. Because they know that you are looking at both sides, you can’t possibly be on their side.
But under God’s rule there is recognition that in bringing good to people who are in the wrong (as both sides usually are) you show the divine family resemblance, “because God himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked” (Luke 6:35 REB). The peacemaker deals precisely with the ungrateful and the wicked, as anyone who has tried it well knows.
And then we have those who are attacked because of their stand for what is right. (“Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”) These often not only suffer momentary harassment, but see their lives ruined or are killed simply for refusing to be compliant with what is wrong.
Laws are sometimes passed to protect “whistle-blowers” in certain cases, but what the law can protect you from falls far short of the damage that is often done. Most of what is wrong in human affairs simply can’t be dealt with by law. It is a terrible position to be in. Yet these, too, can be possessed by the kingdom of the heavens, and when they are, that is enough to allow them to enjoy a blessed life. They experience unshakable security in which they cannot be harmed.
Finally we see those insulted, persecuted, and lied about because they have “gone off their rocker and taken up with that Jesus.” That is certainly how his disciples were viewed at the time. “They actually think this carpenter from Hicksville is the one sent to save the world!” It is almost impossible for anyone who has not received this sort of treatment to understand how degrading it is.
From the human point of view, this may be the position most removed from God’s blessing, because you are, in the eyes of surrounding society, precisely offending against God. Thus, when they kill you they think they are doing God a favor (John 16:2). Yet, Jesus says, jump for joy when this happens, from the knowledge that even now you have a great and imperishable reward in God’s world, in the heavens. Your reputation stands high before God the Father and his eternal family, whose companionship and love and resources are now and forever your inheritance.
Sometimes I am told that the reading of the Beatitudes given here works well for all except the ones about hungering and thirsting for righteousness and being pure of heart. But if the old “engineering” or legalistic interpretation is wrong, it is wrong for these as well. It is unlikely in the extreme that Jesus would have been doing one thing with the remainder of his Beatitudes and then switch back for these two alone. Moreover, I believe the reading I have given of these two is inherently credible once you consider the various permissible translations of terms like dikaiosunen (v. 6) and hoi katharoi te kardia (v. 8).
Thus by proclaiming blessed those who in the human order are thought hopeless, and by pronouncing woes over those human beings regarded as well off, Jesus opens the kingdom of heaven to everyone.
Two other well-known scenes from Jesus’ life emphasize the connection of the Beatitudes to the life and ministry of Jesus.
The first is from his visit back to his hometown of Nazareth riding the wave of popularity that greeted his entrance into public life. His growing fame went before him, and at the Sabbath gathering he indicated his desire to read and comment on scripture, as was commonly done.
He read from the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. For he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to announce that captives are released, that the blind have their sight, that the oppressed are empowered, and that this is a time when the Lord’s favors are open to people” (Luke 4:18-19). He then let his townspeople know that he was the very one through whom these blessings would come to them.
Their response was violent. They tried to kill him because they understood clearly that he was claiming to be God’s anointed leader, whereas they knew him to be only “Joseph’s son,” the carpenter, who had worked for wages from many of those present.
But notice who is among those listed by Jesus using the words of the prophet: the poor, the captives, the blind, and the oppressed. Clearly this is the same type of list found in the Beatitudes of both Matthew and Luke. It is a list of people humanly regarded as lost causes, but who yet, at the hands of Jesus, come to know the blessing of the kingdom of the heavens.
The second scene come later in his ministry. John the Baptizer has been in prison for some time now but has been following Jesus’ work from his cell. John had all along been very limited in his understanding of Jesus. It was not his job to understand him. But he became increasingly concerned when Jesus did not do what any red-blooded Messiah would surely do: take the government in hand and set the world right. So he finally sends his own disciples to ask directly whether he, Jesus, is the one supposed to come, the one with the anointing, or whether they should expect someone else.
Jesus directed John’s students simply to report back to him what they had heard and seen around Jesus: “The blind see, the lame walk, lepers are made clean, the deaf hear, the dead are revived, and the poor hear some real good news.” Then he added, in beatitude language, “And blessed are those who are not disappointed with me” (Matt. 11:4-6).
The word here translated “blessed,” makarios, is the same as that used in Matthew 5 and Luke 6. It refers to the highest type of well-being possible for human beings, but it is also the term the Greeks used for the kind of blissful existence characteristic of the gods. More important, however, note here the list of “hopeless cases” that are blessed through the sufficiency of God to meet them in their appalling need. The personal ministry of Jesus from his present kingdom brings them beatitude.
Indeed, such transformation of status for the lowly, the humanly hopeless, as they experience the hand of God reaching into their situation, is possibly the most pervasive theme of the biblical writings. Certainly it is a major component of the great inversion discussed in our previous chapter.
Some of the more significant passages stressing the transformation of status under God are the “Song of Moses and Miriam” in Exodus 15, the prayer of Hannah in I Samuel 2, the story of David and Goliath in I Samuel 17, Jehoshaphat’s prayer and battle in II Chronicles 20, and the “magnificat” of the virgin Mary in Luke 1. Psalms 34, 37, 107, and others celebrate this theme of God’s hand lifting up those cast down and casting down those lifted up in the human scheme. The reining of God over life is the good news of the whole Bible: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings, who publishes peace, who brings good tidings of well-being, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’” (Isa. 52:7)
It is precisely this God-based inversion that Jesus expresses in his oft-repeated sayings about the reversal of “firsts” and “lasts.” No doubt the initial response of most of us when we hear about God’s care for us is that he is going to secure the various projects that we have our hearts set upon. In the setting of the “rich young ruler” story discussed earlier, Peter pointed out to Jesus that he and the other disciples had, unlike that wealthy young man, left everything to follow him. “What will we get for this?” he wanted to know.
Jesus replied that they would be rewarded in this life many times over for all their sacrifices and given eternal life in the world to come. “But,” he added, “many who are first shall be last, and the last shall be first” (Mark 10:31). He knew that much of what Peter and the others though to be important was not really so, and what they thought to be of no importance was often of great significance before God. Their thinking would have to be rearranged before they could understand their “reward” for leaving all to follow him. So he adds his “reversal” formula to help them keep thinking.
In general, many of those thought blessed or “first” in human terms are miserable or “last” in God’s terms, and many of those regarded as cursed or “last” in human terms may well be blessed or “first” in God’s terms, as they rely on the kingdom of Jesus. Many, but not necessarily all. The Beatitudes are lists of human “lasts” who at the individualized touch of the heavens become divine “firsts.” The gospel of the kingdom is that no one is beyond beatitude, because the rule of God from the heavens is available to all. Everyone can reach it, and it can reach everyone. We respond appropriately to the Beatitudes of Jesus by living as if this were so, as it concerns others and as it concerns ourselves.
You are really walking the good news of the kingdom if you can go with confidence to any of the hopeless people around you and effortlessly convey assurance that they can now enter a blessed life with God.
Who would be on your list of “hopeless blessables” as found in today’s world? Certainly all of those on Jesus’ lists, for though they are merely illustrative, they are also timeless. But can we, following his lead as a teacher, concretize the gospel even more for those around us? Who would you regard as the most unfortunate people around you?
There is, first of all, a silly side to this question—which turns suddenly somber. If you look at advertising and current events in the print and other media—for example, as you encounter them in supermarket checkouts, newsstands, and bookstores or on television and radio—you might think that the most unfortunate people in the world today are the fat, the misshapen, the bald, the ugly, the old, and those not relentlessly engaged in romance, sex, and fashionably equipped physical activities.
The sad truth is that many people around us, as especially people in their teens and young adulthood, drift into a life in which being thin and correctly shaped, having “glorious” hair, appearing youthful, and so forth, are the only terms of blessedness or woe for their existence. It is all they know. They have heard nothing else. Many people today really are in this position.
If you judge from what they devote time and effort to, you have the stark realization that to be fat, have thinning hair or a bad complexion, to be wrinkled or flabby, is experienced by them as unconditional condemnation. They find themselves beyond the limits of human acceptability. This is fact about them, regardless of how silly it may seem. To say, “How silly of you!” is not exactly to bring Jesus’ good news of the kingdom to them.
Instead, Jesus took time in his teaching to point out the natural beauty of every human being. He calls attention to how the most glamorous person you know (“Solomon in all his splendor”) is not as ravishingly beautiful as a simple field flower. Just place a daffodil side-by-side with anyone at the president’s inaugural ball or at the motion-picture Academy Awards, and you will see. But the abundant life of the kingdom flowing through us makes us of greater natural beauty of the plants. “God who makes the grass so beautiful—here today and tomorrow burned for fuel—will clothe you ‘mini-faiths’ even more beautifully” (Matt. 6:30).
This is a gospel for a silly world, all the more needed because the silly is made a matter of life and death for many. Sin, for that matter, is silly. If the kingdom did not reach us in our silliness who would be saved? Lostness does not have to wear a stuffed shirt to find redemption.
So we must see from our heart that:
For they are all riotously celebrated in the party of Jesus.
Then there are the “seriously” crushed ones: The flunk-outs and drop-outs and burned-outs. The broke and the broken. The drug heads and the divorced. The HIV-positive and herpes-ridden. The brain-damaged, the incurably ill. The barren and the pregnant too-many-times or at the wrong time. The overemployed, the underemployed. The unemployable. The swindled, the shoved aside, the replaced. The parents with children living on the street, the children with parents not dying in the “rest” home. The lonely, the incompetent, the stupid. The emotionally starved or emotionally dead. And on and on and on. Is it true that “Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal?”8 It is true! That is precisely the gospel of heaven’s availability that comes to us through the Beatitudes. And you don’t have to wait until you’re dead. Jesus offers to all such people as these the present blessedness of the present kingdom—regardless of circumstances. The condition of life sought for by human beings through the ages is attained in the quietly transforming friendship of Jesus.
Even the moral disasters will be received by God as they come to rely on Jesus, count on him, and make him their companion in his kingdom. Murderers and child-molesters. The brutal and the bigoted. Drug lords and pornographers. War criminals and sadists. Terrorists. The perverted and the filthy and the filthy rich. The David Berkowitzs (“Son of Sam”), Jeffrey Dahmers, and Colonel Noriegas.
Can’t we feel some sympathy for Jesus’ contemporaries, who huffed at him, “This man is cordial to sinners, and even eats with them!” Sometimes I feel I don’t really want the kingdom to be open to such people. But it is. That is the heart of God. And, as Jonah learned from his experience preaching to those wretched Ninevites, we can’t shrink him down to our size.
In Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, he gives an awesome list of those who, continuing in their evil, cannot “inherit the kingdom”: “fornicators, idolaters, drunkards, slanderers, and swindlers” (6:10). Then he adds, “And such were some of you, but you were cleansed, made holy and justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”
If I, as a recovering sinner myself, accept Jesus’ good news, I can go the mass murderer and say, “You can be blessed in the kingdom of the heavens. There is forgiveness that knows no limits.” To the pederast and the perpetrator of incest. To the worshiper of Satan. To those who rob the aged and weak. To the cheat and the liar, the bloodsucker and the vengeful: Blessed! Blessed! Blessed! As they flee into the arms of The Kingdom Among Us.
These are God’s grubby people. In their midst a Corrie Ten Boom takes the hand of the Nazi who killed her family members. The scene is strictly not of this earth. Any spiritually healthy congregation of believers in Jesus will more or less look like these “brands plucked from the burning.” If the group is totally nice, that is a sure sign something has gone wrong. For here are the foolish, weak, lowly, and despised of this world, whom God has chosen to cancel out the humanly great (I Cor. 1:26-31; 6).
Among them there are indeed a few of the humanly wise, the influential, and the socially elite. They belong here too. God is not disturbed by them. But the Beatitudes is not even a list of spiritual giants. Often you will discern a peculiar nobility and glory on and among these “blessed” ones. But it is not from them. It is the effulgence of the kingdom among them.
Speaking to these common people, “the multitudes,” who through him had found blessing in the kingdom, Jesus tells them it is they, not the “best and the brightest” on the human scale, who are to make life on earth manageable as they life from the kingdom (Matt. 5:13-16). God gives them “light”—truth, love and power—that they might be the light for their surroundings. He makes them “salt,” to cleanse, preserve, and flavor the times through which they live.
These “little” people, without any of the character or qualifications humans insist are necessary, are the only ones who can actually make the world work. It is how things are among them that determines the character of every age and place. And God gives them a certain radiance, as one lights a lamp to shed its brilliance over everyone in the house. Just so, Jesus says to those he has touched, “Let your light glow around people in such a way that, seeing your good works, they will exalt your Father in the heavens” (Matt. 5:16).
The complete obliteration of social and cultural distinctions as a basis for life under God was clearly understood by Paul as essential to the presence of Jesus in his people. It means nothing less than a new type of humanity, “Abraham’s seed.” Those who, in Paul’s language, have “put on Christ” make nothing of the distinctions between Jew and Greek, between slave and free, between male and female. If they “are Christ’s,” they inherit life in the kingdom, just as Abraham did through his faith (Gal. 3).
In a parallel statement to the disciples at Colossae, Paul says that in the new humanity, whose knowledge of reality conforms to the viewpoint of the Creator, no distinction is drawn between Greek and Jew, between those who are circumcised and those who are not, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, because Christ in each one is the only thing that matters (Col. 3:10-11).
Inclusion of the Scythian here is instructive and should be understood to refer to the very lowest possibility of humanity. The Scythian was the barbarian’s barbarian, thought of as an utterly brutal savage—largely because he was. Yet, “Blessed are the Scythians.” They are as blessable in the kingdom as the most proper Jew or Greek.
Paul’s policy with regard to the redemptive community simply followed the gospel of the Beatitudes. He refused to base anything on excellence of speech, understanding, and culture as attainments of human beings. Rather, in building the work of God he would disregard everything in the new humankind but what came from Jesus in his crucifixion and beyond: “I resolved to regard nothing in your midst except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (I Cor. 2:2). Or, as he says in II Corinthians 5:16-17, “From now on we disregard all common human distinctions between people, and even though we have known Christ in human terms, we no longer do so. So if anyone is ‘in Christ’ they are a new type of creation, where the old categories drop away and the individual emerges in a new order.”
Surely it is this radically revolutionary outlook that explains why Jesus, in completing his statement on the “blesseds” and God’s government in Matthew 5, finds it necessary to caution, “Don’t think that I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets”—that is, to abolish the entire established order as far as his hearers were concerned.
Obviously he had to say this because that is precisely what his hearers were thinking! They could think nothing else! They had not heard just another powerless list of legalisms, however pretty, and they knew it. They had heard an upside down world being set right-side up.
The Law and the Prophets had been twisted around to authorize an oppressive, though religious, social order that put glittering humans—the rich, the educated, the “well-born,” the popular, the powerful, and so on—in possession of God. Jesus’s proclamation clearly dumped them out of their privileged position and raised ordinary people with no human qualifications into the divine fellowship by faith in Jesus.
That is a powerful message, enough to thoroughly confuse a simple people who lived with their noses to the grindstone and knew no order other than the one imposed upon them by religious experts zealously defending their own privileges. So Jesus cautions them to respect the law—to fulfill it, not abolish it—as he then moves on, in Matthew 5:20 and following, to where he will explain what the law really means for human life under God. Exactly how they are to respect the law and move beyond the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees we shall see in the next chapter.