Sermon on the Mount: The Beatitudes

¹When Jesus^£ saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. ²Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

⁶“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

¹⁰“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

¹¹“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely^£ on my account. ¹²Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

The date was sometime in the Fall of 1992. Class had just ended and I had a question about what my professor had been teaching that morning so I went to him after class. As we walked out of the building and out into the beautifully manicured landscape of the Princeton Seminary campus, this professor launched a zinger, that landed right between my eyes. "I often tell people, I consider Jesus to be a pervert," he said.

This was far before any hint of sexual impropriety or scandal had raised up out of any church as it has today, nonetheless, I was shocked. I looked at him, and I may have stuttered when I asked, "what do you mean by that?"

He said, "Think about it, what does it mean to pervert something." I was still a bit shocked and silentl so he jumped in, "It means to turn something inside out."

Then he just stood there looking at me with a blank look on his face, but with a mischievous smile hiding just behind his eyes. "Aha," I responded, finally understanding the point he had made in class.

I don't remember what passage of scripture he was teaching about but here was what he was trying to say. Jesus was not satisfied to simply teach in the conventional ways and methods of his time. He was not content to look at the world the same way everybody else had done. He was not conventional, not typical and not predictable. I had heard terms in seminary describing Jesus as someone counter-cultural, anti-establishment and a revolutionary. But to that point and probably since that moment, I had never heard anybody try to make the point that Jesus took ordinary, mundane reality and perverted it.

Each one of us here has spent significant enough time on this planet to be able to tell me that this is simply not the case!

If I made two lists for you, in one list I lined up the poor, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake.

And in the other I lined up the wealthy and boastful, those who have never known death or loss, the assertive, those who hunger and thirst for personal gain, the cruel, those cares nothing for purity in heart and soul, the warriors, and those who have never been persecuted or suffered for their beliefs, by the standards of our society and of this world, which group do you think would be ahead: more illustrious, stronger, more privileged, more powerful and all in all more blessed with the riches and by the rewards of this world?

I think we would almost be unanimous in asserting that the group that would be better off by society's standards would certainly not be Jesus' list.

Think about the world you know. Think about what you see on CNN, on Fox News, on ESPN and MTV. Think about what you see on the front page of the Globe or the Herald or the Eagle-Tribune.

Where do you see the merciful, the meek, the poor in spirit, the peacemakers, the persecuted? Are they in government? Are they the nationally recognized, mult-billionaire sports or entertainment stars? Are they the ones winning all the popularity contests out there in the world? I don't think so! Yet, Jesus said,

The reality he's describing is surely turned inside out, perverted if you will. That verb has two types of meanings in my dictionary. One that says to pervert something is "to debase it and reduce it in quality and value." The other type of meaning is "to turn it from the right course, to turn it astray, to misconstrue it and to distort it."

That verb has two types of meanings in my dictionary. One that says to pervert something is "to debase it and reduce it in quality and value." The other type of meaning is "to turn it from the right course, to turn it astray, to misconstrue it and to distort it."[1] To say that Jesus is attempting to pervert reality in this way is not to say that Jesus is trying to debase it or pull it lower into the muck or decrease its value, but to turn it inside out, to turn it away from the generally accepted, "right" way, to turn it astray.

Jesus' teaching works if you remember the reality and the pervasiveness of sin in the world.

If you think that the world is an OK place and that generally speaking, not much is wrong, then to pervert it, to turn it inside out and to tell people to move and change their direction from the generally accepted, "right" way of that world, is to pull people down, to debase them and mess them up further, using that other definition of the word "pervert."

However, if you think that the world we live in seems to be fundamentally broken and messed up, and the things we witness on the news, in the world around us and in the normal course of what seems "right" is actually quite a problem. If you think something's wrong out there, then you want to pervert it, to change it, to turn it away from the path it considers "right," to distort it and alter it and move it in a different direction.

When Jesus is telling his disciples and all those gathered on the mountainside there 2000 years ago,

He is working hard to shock them into considering a different alternative than the one their world presents them.

No, they did not have CNN, or Fox News, or ESPN and MTV. Those who heard Jesus speaking that day did not have the Boston Globe or the Herald or the Eagle-Tribune. But the world they saw was just as counter to what Jesus was describing as is ours today.

As a normal occurrence, they didn't see any blessed poor, mourners or meek people either. Jesus words were just as bizarre and weird and unorthodox then as they are to us now. That's why these people who heard him speak pushed and pulled and worked so hard to get him up on that cross, to crucify him!

Jesus taught a lesson that people in power, people who have control in this world, not only didn't want to hear, but which made them feel threatened. Thus such powerful folks felt that they must dispose of this troublemaking rabble-rouser.

So what was it that was so revolutionary, so controversial, so bent on perverting and leading astray the perversion of the world?

⁶“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

¹⁰“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus described a reality in which those who were beaten up, who were under the boots of the abusers, who were pushed to the edge by the powerful people who didn't care, who were battered by the haters, the killers and the destroyers of this world, would themselves be rewarded. Those who were in pain would be healed, those who mourned would be comforted, those who were pure in heart would see God, those who were poor and persecuted would inherit the kingdom of God and those who were on the bottom of the pile would not only come up for air, but be inheritors of a whole new world.

For generations, the Christians who read these words out of the bible, understood, taught and preached these words as descriptive of heaven.

The old negro spiritual says "Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home; I looked over Jordan, and what did I see, coming for to carry me home? A band of angels coming after me, coming for to carry me home."[2] For generations white Christians sang this song because for them it described how after the hardship and trouble and disappointment of living in this sinful world, the chariot of God, led by the Angels of God would swoop down after good Christians died to soar up and take them into their eternal home in heaven.

Perhaps many didn't even know that this song was not so much about heaven as it was about the underground railroad, whose symbolic chariot would come and steal the slave who first sang the song out of bondage into slavery.

The sermon on the mount is similar in that it too has often been thought of as describing the heavenly, eternal Kingdom of God in heaven. It may at that, yet there's so much more. In the sermon on the mount and in these beatitudes, Jesus not only lays out the way of life in God's eternal kingdom, where the ill-treated and battered are saved and nurtured, but he also describes a promise of what he will establish here in this world, turning it inside out and setting it right, in the pure and unfaltering righteousness of God in heaven.

A little boy came running to his mother and shouted, "Mom, I'm nine feet tall!" His mother responded, "Don't talk such nonsense." "But," he said, I really am nine feet tall. I measured myself." "How did you measure yourself!?" asked his mother. "I took off my shoe and measured myself with that. It is the same size as my foot and I really am nine feet high."

With a smile the mother replied, "Now I understand, my son, but I have to tell you that your measure was not the right one. We do not measure ourselves by the size of our own feet, but we must use a twelve inch ruler.[3]

Jesus in this Sermon on the Mount and particularly in the Beatitudes, is redefining and realigning the way we measure ourselves. He says that the world is measuring itself with its own shoe to its own detriment. In his teaching here, he reestablishes the twelve inch ruler as the norm.

Jesus says that this the righteousness of God, even if it is not the way of the world.

And Jesus is not just talking of rewards in heaven. He is speaking of the proper outlook for all Christians, all people and all the world. He lays out a way to be for all Christians, all people who are members of churches and all manner of people who claim Jesus as their Lord and Savior.

While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Tony Campolo became good friends with a young student who had become a Christian. Tony advised him to attend a particular church well known for its biblically based preaching.

Several weeks later the student said to Tony, "You know, if you put together a committee and asked them to take the Beatitudes and create a religion that contradicted every one of them, you would come pretty close to what I'm hearing down there at that church. Whereas Jesus said, 'Blessed are the poor,' down there they make it clear that it is the rich who are blessed."

"Jesus said, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' but the people at that church have a religion that promises happiness with no crucifixions."

"Whereas Jesus talked about the meek being blessed, they talk as if they took assertiveness-training courses. Jesus may have talked about the merciful and peacemakers, but those people are the most enthusiastic supporters of American militarism and capital punishment I have ever met.

"Jesus may have lifted up those who endured persecution because they dared to embrace a radical gospel, but that church declares a gospel that espouses middle-class success and affirms a lifestyle marked by social prestige." Campolo, we can only assume, was saddened by what he heard.[4]

The Sermon on the Mount like Christianity itself, has become a very popular and "in" cultural statement. One preacher writes,

"It is fashionable today to be spiritual. People wear diamond-studded necklace crosses. Businessmen pin gold plated emblems of fish on their lapels and silver bracelets stamped with the letters "WWJD" are commonly seen on wrists. A few years ago one fashion fad was 'monastic' clothing. An article appeared in the New York Times with a runway model in dark, flowing robes, a cross, slung across her hips. The story was full of statements by designers and retailers on the subject of the new 'spirituality' of fashion. One designer said that It's 'a calming of the clothes, the antithesis of power dressing.' Another designer inadvertently provided amusement in monasteries across the country with his comment, 'There's nothing sexier than a monk...they're so inaccessible.'"[5]

Despite all this popular acceptance of Christianity in public and by our culture, Jesus sets a standard that is impossible for any culture, society and nation to follow and measure up to without completely changing the way it exists.

The meek and the abused cannot rule by their very definition. If they were running things, if they were not meek but powerful instead, they would not be abused, they would not be without protection and they would not need God's help or yours or mine. What Jesus teaches in the sermon on the mount is an unattainable, unimaginable and unreal reality. It’s a paradoxical teaching that we as Christians nonetheless hold up as an example and work toward and hope for, but cannot truly achieve without the revolution, perversion and turning inside out of our universe.

The Beatitudes as we read them today have eight tenets. Sometime this summer we will take each one and break it apart and look more closely at what they have to teach us about how we might actually live.

But as we continue this current series on the Sermon on the Mount, of which the Beatitudes are only a small section, we will move into parts of what Jesus believes are the influences and effects we as Christians can have in the world around us.

Today we invited new members into our church fellowship. Some of them are young and fresh and new to adult church life. Others of them have had more experience and better teachers in the church and in Christian living than I or most of us can boast. Yet they and all of us who wish to be followers of Christ, who wish to be Christians and students of his teaching have a great challenge in these words, in these Beatitudes. Despite the difficulties and challenges we are met with in the world. Jesus says, "Rejoice and be glad." "Stick to what I teach, even if it goes completely against the grain of the world you live in, even if it means you are persecuted, ridiculed or marginalized, and you may suffer greatly, nonetheless," Jesus says, "Rejoice and be glad, for yours is the kingdom of heaven "

[1] The Scribner-Bantam English Dixtionary, 1990

[2] "Swing Low Sweet Chariot." Worship and Rejoice. Carol Stream IL: Hope Publishing Company. 2001. p520

[3] "False Measurements." Treasury of Bible Illustrations. 1995. AMG International, Inc: Chattanooga, TN. Ted Kyle and John Todd eds. p270

[4] "Who We Can Be" www.ozsermonillustrations.com/illustrations/who_we_can_be.htm quoted from Tony Campolo, Let me Tell You A Story

[5] Kathleen Norris,The Cloister Walk, New York: Riverhead Books, 1996, pp. 312-313 Quoted by Rev. John H. Pavelko. Crossroadspc.org/thebarrel/20020203.htm

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