I’ve had one or two positive reactions to my foray into poetry
but on the whole I am happy to not be planning to head that way again for a long time.(I wrote one good poem once years ago but I lost it and when I tried to rewrite it it was never the same.) Here(as the title suggests) is the lovely prose which was butchered to make that substandard sausage. As I said, I got tired of doing the poetry before I finished the text. I was thinking about having a contest. Anybody who makes a good faith effort to express verses 8, 9, or 10 with a focus on grace and the forgiveness of sins in poetic form, I will send a copy of Another Book when it comes out, the publisher confirmed that they expect that to be August. If there are enough submissions to make a real contest and judge a winner(there won’t be but IF) then the winner will get a hardcover and every other submission a paperback. Anyway, here is the real opening to our series on the Sermon on the Mount. Pray for me, not that the mysteries will become less mysterious or that I will be able to explain them but that I will find words to bring the mystery out of the shell of long familiarity so that maybe we can see and hear not our tired moralism but the shocking Gospel that our Lord intended to communicate.
One of my first authentic encounters with the Scriptures happened when I was a teenage boy. Raised in a baptist church, we were always pressured to read the Bible everyday, and whatever other issues I have with the church of my childhood they did make a real effort to give me a grounding in Scripture. Well, I never succeeded at reading the Bible everyday, in fact I have never done anything everyday voluntarily. I hate and fear routine and delight to see myself as an iconoclast in even small ways. But when I was young and made to feel guilty I tried. And, at some point, the program of reading brought me to the Sermon on the Mount. If I had been asked the day before if I knew what the Bible said I would have said something like, ‘I don’t know all of it. I don’t know every detail in the minor prophets or whatnot, but as far as the big picture, I’ve got it down cold.’ But on this day, I read lines about actively assisting someone who is robbing you, about settling out of court for more than you are being sued for, about wrath that seemed to be provoked by nearly nothing, and grace that was much too gracious. And the Lord’s words broke a hole in my world that has never been repaired. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know what they meant. I couldn’t even imagine a meaning that might possibly be right. Everything that came into my head was obviously wrong. In some sense, whatever Jesus is trying to teach here, and I still can’t claim to know, is the paradox at the heart of me, of everything that I have done and thought. I am going to try and open that paradox up, not so much to explain it as to force us to look at it. An apparent paradox can be resolved by explanation. But a true and divine paradox has no resolution. It is a mystery to be adored not a puzzle to be solved and I suspect that when we see the truth of the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount it will be clear that it is utterly impossible not merely to do or obey but even to understand.
So we begin with the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:3—10. When I was a kid someone told me that these were the ‘attitudes that you should be’ and that is obviously not what the name means it refers to the Lord giving His blessing but it shows exactly how our moralism views the whole sermon as a set of instructions for obtaining Chirst’s blessings. The Beatitudes are a group of statements that appear to be platitudes, obvious praises of good moral behavior, but when you look closer there are little pointy bits that suggest there is something more, and in context as the introduction to the very pointy main body of the Sermon, these cannot be blessings of the morally acceptable. I cannot prove it, but I intend to interpret Christ’s words not as blessings on the righteous, not as restatements of the righteous requirements of the Law and blessings on lawkeepers, but as paradoxical blessings on sinful men, as blessings on the One Lost Sheep that the Good Shepherd leaves the Ninety-Nine in pursuit of. For those of us raised in a Christian tradition of probable moralism this is the part where the ride turns upside down.
3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit,
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Who is it that is poor in spirit? Is it those who have the world’s goods and yet talk often about how little they have or how hard life is who are poor in spirit? No. It is those who are spiritually poor. But what does it mean to be ‘spiritually poor’? One way to figure out might be to ask ‘What would it mean to be spiritually rich?’ We usually call it being ‘like Christ’ or a ‘mature Christian’ or having spiritual gifts or being a Saint. These are the people who are normally blessed and thanked from pulpits, or couches for those who preach in house churches. Those who give, who support the work of the ministry, who build the kingdom are not however the subject of this blessing, I guess Christ didn’t get the memo of who we really appreciate and depend on. Those who ‘get it’, who have a wealth of understanding, a discerning heart, who know all languages of men and angels, who encourage, exhort, and prophesy will find no blessing for them here. Rather the Gospel is preached to the poor.
The very first words out of Christ’s mouth are Grace. He begins by promising all that He has, His kingdom, to those who are none of those things, to the Last, the Least, the Little, and the Lost. When Luke records in his 12th chapter what is either this exact sermon or another very like it that Jesus preached he writes this(one of my favorite verses quoted often),
“Do not fear, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Luke 12:32
It is to the believer who has no gift to bring, who makes no progress in sanctification or obedience, who is no ‘holier’ 50 years later, whose doubts still plague him, whose sins still master him, who still lies awake worried over things that all of the spiritual people have progressed past, who still groans for a Holy Spirit that never seems to come, that Christ addresses His blessings first and foremost. That is me, and if that is you then hear this, All that He has is yours, without exception, without condition, without qualification of any kind. Let no one take it from you by demanding that you jump this hoop or do this work. Have nothing to do with those who say ‘do not eat, do not taste, do not touch’1. It is our poverty, the impossibility of God ever getting a 'return on investment’ from us that qualifies us to be recipients of mercy. It is the one addicted to sin that Christ addresses as His heir.
4 Blessed are those who mourn,
For they shall be comforted.
What seems less blessed than sorrow? To mourn is to be so overcome with sorrow that you can’t hide it, that it interferes with your life so that you can’t function anymore. It is not merely to suffer grief but to be made weak by your suffering. First, note that Christ doesn’t distinguish between causes of mourning, between whether you mourn rationally for a thing that is worth mourning over or whether you mourn foolishly. His comfort is not confined to those who mourn in some way appropriately or those who mourn immoderately but is extended to all mourners.
The brokenness, the fallenness of our world gives many and constant causes for grief. I think especially of my daddy, Papa Andy. He lost his mother 13 years ago and he has never ‘gotten over it’. He has never been the same. The last gift that she gave him was a truck, and since it broke he has been unable to fix it or to let go of it, so it sits in his yard a monument to loss. He sinks deeper into depression and paranoia and into the dream world that is our gift and our curse. And our culture treats that as a failure but it seems, in some ways, admirable to me. It is appropriate for one destined for eternity to not let the truth of your life be washed away by the mere passing of time, to not stop grieving simply because x amount of time has passed but to hold on to the loved one and not to paper over the wound of loss.
Our society’s only response to mourning, what we would call major clinical depression, is to try and fix your broke brain with drugs or with talk therapy or to do whatever it takes to get you out of the mourning and ‘back to normal’, ‘back to work’, back to the rat race cause we are counting on you and don’t have time for you to stop and be a broken person. I think that everyone who has had a protracted sadness has had some ‘friend’ who came along and tried to fix us, and I don’t need to tell you how much the friend helped. To a mourner all help offered is just Job’s friends.
But the Good News is that there is a genuine comfort coming. Christ’s answer to grief is so complete, so good that those who receive it say, ‘I am glad that I suffered because the comfort is better than the grief was bad.’ Because we suffer we obtain the compassion of Christ, which makes suffering actually preferable. Our weakness, our loss, our failure, and our sin though horrible in themselves are the weaknesses in which His strength is made perfect. The prophets say, ‘It is better to go to the House of Mourning than the House of Joy.’ and if the House of Mourning is where the Great Physician is then they are surely right.
5 Blessed are the meek,
For they shall inherit the earth.
Meekness is the gentleness of an animal that has been tamed, it has had its wildness, its independence taken from it. Its spirit has been broken. It is to the Christian who continues slaving away in a gospelless church because he has no alternative that Christ promises an inheritance. It is to the ‘conservative’ who keeps working in the system because we feel ourselves dependent on it like tame livestock who can no longer live in the wild, that Christ promises an inheritance. To the one who goes with the flow, takes the shot, takes the shit because if he doesn’t he may lose his job, or lose his wife and kids, I say, ‘Christ has prepared a place for you.’ To the one who has compromised his principles over and over because he counted the cost of integrity, of bucking and couldn’t bear to pay it, ‘This is love. Not that you love Christ but that He loves you and gave Himself for you.’ Let us not seek to justify our meekness, our tameness, our brokenness but let us not despair under it either. He is kind to us not because there is anything noble or grand about being a house-broken slave, but because he loves us.
6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
For they shall be filled.
The first theme of the Sermon on the Mount is not what you are or what you have but what you lack. It is only those who have no food that hunger or no water that thirst that we should think of here. This is written to those who have no righteousness and find themselves panting for it. This is not written to those who have no righteousness but imagine that they have some righteousness or other to contribute. The repetition ‘hunger and thirst’ is as much as to say those who totally lack any righteousness at all of any kind. Those who have no goodness of their own, those who have not one good work, no claim at all for the goodness of God or their fellow man, on which to hang their hat, shall receive fully and freely the righteousness of Christ.
7 Blessed are the merciful,
For they shall obtain mercy.
The second theme that I want to look at is our response to Grace. I want to say again that Grace is given fully and freely, all grace all the time not just some grace for some specific purpose at some specific time. For a long time, I wandered why after hearing a sermon I was left with this sense of confusion and it was difficult to remember or explain what was said. It is because of the ‘bait and switch’. It is because they begin with free grace and then add legal righteousness on top and the two contradict one another. Mainstream Christianity, in which a ‘balance’ between Law and Gospel is sought, is much like Scientology, they bring us in with promises of relief and healing, with grace and the forgiveness of sin, and then put us to work, climbing their ladders to heaven, their bridges to nowhere, as slaves to build their empire. The mind recoils from this nonsense and refuses to hold on to it. If you ever leave a sermon with a vague, cloudy feeling about the whole thing then check and see if they mixed law and gospel together. That is probably the cause. It is the WHOLE kingdom that is given to the Last, the Least, and the Lost not part of it and not on condition that they become something other than what they are. Know that our minds are so bent towards works righteousness that no balance is possible. A single drop of Law turns all of the Gospel into Law, a single stitch of my own goodness unravels the robe of Christ’s righteousness.
And so having said that, we come to the merciful. I look at this verse as being sort of out of order. Because the first thing to see is the neediness here. The Merciful aren’t being held up as some sort of person to emulate or aspire to. Rather, we must begin by seeing their need to obtain mercy. The subjects of this verse are desiring to obtain mercy, that is the blessing that they seek. Mercy isn’t desired or sought or obtained by righteous people or by good people, but by low down sinners by crooks. These are not angelic, saintly people.
But when such people are enlightened by the Gospel preached above, that is that people such as they are exactly the designed recipients of Christ’s mercy, these people do come to show mercy, not the condescending mercy of the philanthropath, of the Pharisee dropping his bling in the offering box, but the kindness of one hospice patient to another, one soldier in the trench to another. They are not merciful in the hope of obtaining mercy, but rather having been given a sure promise of mercy, having been given the whole kingdom, though as yet it remains invisible and far off, such that they have no gain to hope for from their actions, they then show mercy. Where Law, where the hope of gain and fear of punishment fails to change lives, it is grace full and free that succeeds.
8 Blessed are the pure in heart,
For they shall see God.
I see three possibilities here:
We can read this as the standard Sunday School idea of a blessing on people who love God with their whole heart. This is a legit possibility. Essentially, it is the claim that this is merely a restatement of the Great Commandment to love God with your whole heart with a promise attached. I don’t mean to disparage it but this is not the interpretation that I will be adopting. If I err then I intend to err on the side of offering grace to sinners and not on the side of offering applause to the righteous.
The significance is in the words ‘in heart’ in contrast to the external purity of mainstream 1st century Judaism. In this case, the subjects of this blessing are probably the poor, the working class or any who are not ‘professionally religious’, those who do not have the time or put in the effort to achieve Pharisaical purity. This is, I think, an improvement on the first position but it is still a handing out of praise to the righteous, simply a more subtle and ‘spiritual’ definition of righteous. That is, it is a justifying not of men who have sinned before God but only a declaration that those who have sinned by man’s judgment may be righteous before God, an idea which seems hopeful at first glance but leaves us in the same legal trap that we have always been in.
And so I will adopt the contrarian position that those who are being blessed are in fact having a sin of theirs pointed out and being told that Christ’s Gospel is for them. And it goes like this,
Purity is a concept that has little place in our society. On the rare occasion that we talk about purity even in the church we usually mix it up with virginity, a very different thing. Purity though is simply defined as being entirely one thing, with no contamination or mixture of any kind, it could as easily be pure heroin as pure gold or pure arsenic or mercury, pure poison. So purity does not particularly mean the absence of sin, but rather the absence of anything except for the one thing that the thing IS. It is an absolute monomania, a complete obsession with one single thing, to be pure in heart. It is the person that whatever happens he always sees it the same way. Whatever happens it is the Globalists evil schemes. Whatever is wrong with you you can fix by adding cow uterus to your diet. The real cause of everything is race. Or, it’s all about the money, follow the money and you’ll always find the truth. Every new technology is the Mark of the Beast. Or whatever.
Whether the obsession is with health, or with safety, or with injustice, or with justification, or with the goods and cares of this world, or with the political realm, or with the eschatological end that seems to be rushing towards us, Jesus does not condemn us no matter what the world does. But what is the Good News that He offers? ‘They, we, shall see God’ It is that we will finally see something else besides our obsession. It is not that we will see our own pet theories of the world, whatever they may be, vindicated. It is neither the victory of our heroes nor the defeat of our villains. The Good News is not that we shall be vindicated, our theories proven right, our fears realized. It is not even that we shall cease to be obsessed and live a ‘balanced’ life, like the normies around us who flit from thing to thing. No, it is that we shall see God. Our tendency to obsess will finally have a worthy target. We shall not become less monomaniac but monomaniac towards Someone who will draw us ever deeper into Himself. It is that we will finally have an obsession in light of which the whole world really does make sense, a skeleton key that really opens every lock, a conspiracy between Gracious Father and Compassionate Son and Almighty Spirit that is the true story behind every event. We will not cease to be nutty theorists spinning our spider web theories in basements and poolhouses, but nutty theorists spinning our spider web theories about the One who truly is. We shall run like Peter on Easter morning not towards what we have always meant by God or religion but towards the lover of our soul, the one whom it was unbearable to be apart from while He was in the tomb. Blessed are the obsessed for there is One worthy of your obsession and He will give Himself to you.
9 Blessed are the peacemakers,
For they shall be called sons of God.
When I hear this I always think of the Buntline special, the .45 caliber long Colt pistol from Tombstone(and some other Wyatt Earp stories but probably not authentic), engraved on the butt it says ‘Presented to Wyatt Earp by the Grateful Citizens of Dodge City —The Peacemaker’. We like to imagine this Peacemaker as some mighty man who forces two opposing sides to make peace if not like Wyatt Earp at least by some force of his will, some moral strength, some inner purity. We usually gin up some story about Christ making peace when we spin this yarn. But we almost never have a good story for that part, because He wasn’t and isn’t some Solomon reconciling the feuding parties. He didn’t come to bring peace but a sword to divide brother against brother and He was itching to do it.
If that dream of peacemakers is moonshine then who and what are these peacemakers? They are the settlers, the compromisers, the tolerators of evil, the ones who start a job and quit when it gets too hard, or don’t even start because they know already that they can’t win. They make peace by ‘going along to get along’. We despise them because we are them. They are the ones who won’t upset the apple-cart, the noble defenders of the status quo. The RINOs, the Establishment guys, conserving the corpse of our country in some sort of American mummification as if there is no God of the Resurrection. If you notice that I have interpreted two of these groups to be the people that I personally despise the most, and who express the things that I hate most about myself, it is because I am quite proficient and energetic in condemning them and they need an extra helping of grace when I go on the warpath. And although I hate them my Master has grace a plenty for them. I call them lots of names which aren’t fit to be repeated. But He has another name for them. He calls them by His own name, Sons of God. He covers them in His own righteousness to see if I dare accuse them then. They will be so busy enjoying His goodness that they will never even see that I am right and they are wrong. Let’s just move on.
10 Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
The word translated here as persecute, means to be chased. It is used in the negative sense of persecute but also in the positive sense of legitimate, even righteous, pursuit. For example in Romans 9 it is used to describe pursuing righteousness, even though that pursuit is a failure, and in Romans 12 of pursuing hospitality, that is looking for occasions to be hospitable. So, there is nothing in the words themselves to tell us whether the person being pursued in verse 10 is pursued legitimately. Verse 11 and 12 I think make it clear that they are referring to unjust pursuit, persecution, and perhaps that has shaded the understanding of verse 10 but I want to consider the idea that this one is pursued legitimately. We will talk about unjust persecution next time with verses 11 and 12 but let’s look here at those who are pursued legitimately and what blessing Christ pronounces on them. I see two possibilities which turn essentially on the question of whether ‘for righteousness sake’ is interpreted as referring to an impersonal law or whether the righteousness refers to a righteousness that the persecuted wrongly imagines himself to have, ie a self-righteousness.
Perhaps this is not some Supersaint being chased by an evil world system, but a simple lawbreaker, ‘pursued for justice’ as we might render it more neutrally. Christ then is pronouncing His blessing on those who have failed to keep the Law, which would be a very fitting summary for the Beatitudes. He does so indiscriminately, without inquiry as to whether they tried and failed with some good excuse or neglected righteousness entirely or were knowledgeable of the Law or ignorant but speaks peace to those who are near and those who are far off.
Another possibility to consider is that these are those who are persecuted because of self-righteousness, that is the sanctimonious Pharisee that the crowd has finally had enough of.(I make a point to extend grace to any group that I suspect I might be part of. It’s just good policy.) Verse 11 and 12 are talking about someone pursued falsely for a real righteousness that he has but perhaps the appropriate complement is to be found here in one who is pursued legitimately for a false righteousness. There is grace even for the ‘holier than thou’ and believe me we need it.
Interestingly, the blessing which closes this section is the same blessing which opened it, ‘For theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ promised to the spiritually poor and now to the criminal or to the Pharisee. We began by including those who the sanctimonious wish to exclude and end by including the sanctimonious themselves. The lion and the lamb, the persecutor and the persecuted, both find rest in His kingdom. All of our righteousness and all of our sin are drowned in the floodwaters of grace. When we finally know the truth about things we will be very surprised at who Christ is pleased with and what about them pleases Him. But the bottom line takeaway from all of this is, ‘You are not excluded from the hope of the Gospel.’
Colossians 2:20 and following
I am sorry to hear that you are in mourning. I don't know your situation but I asked the Lord to see to it that you have someone who can understand and give you some comfort in your loss. Mourning is miserable and nothing can or even should change that but the Great Physician does come and He has mourned Himself.
'For just as faith and hope without love are a sounding gong and clanging cymbal, so, too, is all the joy that is proclaimed in the world a sounding gong and clanging cymbal if sorrow is not heard along with it. It tickles the ears but repels the soul. But such a voice of comfort, this voice that shakes with pain and yet proclaims joy—the mourners’ears hear that, they keep what it says in their hearts, they are strengthened and guided by it to find for themselves the joy to be found in the depths of grief.' -S. Kierkegaard commenting on Job's words 'The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord'
That was lovely, and I thank you for bravely sharing your poetic meditations on the Beatitudes. The 4th one on mourning really spoke to my heart and current situation. The slough of despair, as John Bunyan called it, is a very hard part of the road, as it feels endless. I needed to read what you had to say tonight.