This morning, and for the next few Sundays remaining in
this season of Epiphany, I want us to spend our time looking at what has been
called the great manifesto of the kingdom of God. It is Jesus’ Sermon on the
Mount. In some ways the title “sermon” is a little misleading. For what I
believe we are reading in these three chapters of Matthew’s gospel is a very
concise summary of teachings that Jesus gave over a period of days. So we might
be better advised to call it the sermons on the mount, or perhaps the retreat
on the mount; and this morning I want us to look at just the first sixteen
verses. Even at that, I think we will find that we do not have time even to
begin to give them justice, but only to skim the surface.
A teaching for disciples
As we open Matthew 5 and begin to read, is there anything
that strikes you as odd? “When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain.”
Right away we realize that Jesus is not your typical preacher. Most preachers
would welcome a crowd. We dream of our congregations becoming megachurches like
Willow Creek or Saddleback, with thousands of people filling the seats and so
many cars you have to have traffic directors and parking lot attendants. But
not so with Jesus: when he saw the crowds, he went in the opposite direction,
to a remote spot on a mountainside.
What does this tell us? Not that Jesus hated crowds. We know
that there were times when he addressed large crowds, so large that on one
occasion at least there was no room for him to stand, so he had to climb into a
boat and preach from the water. We know too, as Mark tells us, that the crowds
that gathered listened to him with delight.
This time, however, what he was about to share was not for
the world, but specifically for disciples. For the world these words could only
lead to confusion, misunderstanding and derision. For disciples, for those who
had committed themselves to following Jesus, they would be life giving. And so
Jesus takes his disciples up a mountain—and Matthew’s readers would instinctively
think of another mountain. While we will not see the smoke and thunderings of
Sinai, we will be exposed to teachings that are earthshaking, life-changing.
Once they arrive at their destination, Matthew tells us that
Jesus sat down. This was not just for comfort; it was the posture that all
rabbis took to teach, with their pupils gathered around them. We are learning
that Jesus has something very deliberate and important to say. This is further
indicated by the phrase that in our Bibles is rendered, “Then he began to
speak…” Literally translated it would sound more like, “Opening his mouth, he
taught them…” It is a very specific choice of words on Matthew’s part, of which
William Barclay wrote,
The use of this phrase indicates that the material … is no
chance piece of teaching. It is the grave and solemn utterance of central
things; it is the opening of Jesus’ heart and mind to the men who were to be
his right-hand men in his task.[1]
And so the stage has been set. Our ears are perked. What is
Jesus going to say to us?
“Blessed”
Jesus’ opening word is “blessed”. It was a familiar term to
the disciples. We find it peppered all through the Old Testament. “Blessed are
those … whose delight is in the law of the Lord.” “Blessed are those whose
sins are forgiven.” “Blessed are those whose strength is in you, whose hearts
are set on the pilgrim’s way.” The word in Greek is makarios; in Hebrew ’ashar,
and both are notoriously difficult to put into the English language. Thus you
will find that some contemporary English versions have substituted the word
“happy”, which really doesn’t bring us any closer to the original meaning. “’Ashar,” the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament informs us, “is a word
of envious desire, ‘to be envied with desire is the one who trusts the
Lord.’ ”
For this reason David Buttrick at the Vanderbilt University Divinity
School chooses to use the word “congratulations”: “Congratulations to the poor
in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens. Congratulations to those
who mourn, for they will be comforted. Congratulations to the meek, for they
will inherit the earth…” My own preference would be for something more like
this: “You ought to envy the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven. You ought to envy those who mourn, for they will be comforted. You
ought to envy the meek, for they will inherit the earth…” Already we begin to
understand why Jesus took his disciples away for these teachings. For us their thoroughly
paradoxical nature has been lost through familiarity. Yet how deeply puzzling,
how shocking, these words must have been even for those disciples, not to
mention the confusion they would have brought to the crowds.
For the few moments that remain to us, I’d like to make an
attempt to tease the beatitudes out a little, but I am afraid we won’t even be
scratching surface of them. Who are the poor in spirit? “They are those,”
writes David Buttrick,
who have embraced the essential poverty of the human
condition, namely a basic dependency not only on one another but on God. To be
human is to be profoundly needy. These days, advertising appeals to having
something, being somebody, and getting somewhere. Above all, advertising
encourages us to seek self-justification by means of social approval. The ‘poor
in spirit’ are those quite untouched by such appeals… [They] are not out to
make a buck, nor do they attempt to ease their insecurity by acquiring things,
property, or blue-chip investments.[2]
That poorness in spirit is summed up for us in the third
verse of the hymn “Rock of Ages”:
Nothing in my hand I bring,
simply to thy cross I cling;
naked, come to thee for dress,
helpless, look to thee for grace…
simply to thy cross I cling;
naked, come to thee for dress,
helpless, look to thee for grace…
It is the attitude of the tax collector in Jesus’ parable
who, when he prayed, did not even dare look up to heaven but beat his breast
and cried out, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:9-14).
Who are the mourners? They represent a condition from which
none of us is exempt. For who among us has not been deeply pained by the loss
of a mother, a father, a spouse, a child or a dear friend? Yet at another level
we need to recognize that Jesus lived in a nation of mourners, men and women
who grieved at living in a land that once had been theirs but was no longer, who
every day were reminded that they were a captive people. Again, David Buttrick
moves this mourning into the twenty-first century as he writes of those
who mourn their captivity in a world ruled by power and
greed and heartless human exploitation. They are grieved because God’s new age
has not yet arrived…, because they have some vision of the world God intends—a
world set free for exchanges of love, a world for glad partying among all the children of God—but they suffer
because God’s will is not done and we are all captive to our alienations. Weep,
for the world is not as it should be.[3]
Meekness is a characteristic that we associate in these days
with weakness, perhaps because the two words rhyme. Yet to be meek is to be
anything but weak. The Bible tells us that Moses was meek, “more so than anyone
else on the face of the earth”. But Moses was anything but weak. He was a
formidable leader who stood up to the most powerful ruler on earth. No,
meekness does not mean weakness but something more like controlled strength.
Think of leaders in our own time like Martin Luther King Jr or Nelson Mandela,
whose commitment to non-violence even in the face of terrible injustice changed
the course of whole nations. To quote David Buttrick one last time, to be meek is
to be “strong with the unassuming power of God”.[4]
What about those who hunger and thirst for righteousness? Martin
Luther wrote of “a hunger and thirst for righteousness that can never be curbed
or stopped or sated, one that looks for nothing and cares for nothing except
the accomplishment and maintenance of the right, despising everything that
hinders this end.” Then he added, “If you cannot make the world completely
pious, then do what you can.” To hunger and thirst for righteousness, he said,
“is not to crawl into a corner or into the desert, but to run out, if that is
where you have been, and to offer your hands and your feet and your whole body
and to wager everything you have and can do.”[5]
Blessed are the merciful. Mercy is a willingness to open our
eyes to the needs around us, and then to open our hearts as well. Mercy was the
quality shown by the good Samaritan, who could not pass by the wounded man at
the side of the road without stopping and stooping down and binding his wounds
and taking him to the inn. Mercy means breaking through the busyness of our
lives and the preoccupation of our own needs to give attention to others. Mercy
also means forgiveness, even if it is to the seventieth times seventh time.
Blessed are the pure in heart. When Samuel was commissioned
to find a new king for Israel, he could easily have picked any one of Jesse’s
seven older sons. Yet the God told him, “The Lord does not see as people see.
People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart”
(1 Samuel 16:7). Martin Luther wrote, “He wants to have the heart pure,
though outwardly the person may be a drudge in the kitchen, black, sooty, and
grimy, doing all sorts of dirty work… Therefore, though a common laborer, a
shoemaker, or a blacksmith may be dirty and sooty or may smell because he is
covered with dirt and pitch, still … though he stinks outwardly, inwardly he is
pure incense before God.”[6]
In an age that gives so much attention to outward appearances, Jesus tells us
that it is what is on the inside that really matters.
“Peacemakers” is a word found only here in all of the Bible.
Peacemakers are those who not only long for the coming of God’s shalom. They seek to make it a reality
in the here and now, to make the world a better place. That does not mean being
an international power broker. What it does mean is taking the opportunities
God gives me within my own sphere of influence to show forth and to touch the
lives of others with something of his beauty, his goodness, his healing power.
Finally there are the persecuted. Within a generation that
category would come to include all of Jesus’ hearers. Many of them would be put
to death because of their allegiance to him. But what Jesus was saying was
that, terrifying though it is, there are some things that are worth suffering
even unimaginable pain for. It was Tertullian who observed that the blood of
the martyrs is the seed of the church.
Salt and light
Now I want you to take just a moment to imagine a community
of people who were living in just this way. It would be like those few sprinkles
of salt that are able to preserve a whole side of meat. It would be like
opening a door into a shuttered room. A shaft of light pours through and
pierces the darkness. It would be the kingdom of God breaking into this world.
It would be what Jesus is calling you and me to be as his body in the world.
[1]
The
Gospel of Matthew, vol. 1, 87
[2]
Speaking
Jesus: Homiletic Theology and the Sermon on the Mount, Westminster John
Knox Press, 2002. 65,66
[3]
Speaking
Jesus, 67
[4]
Speaking
Jesus, 68
[5]
The
Sermon on the Mount, 1521, in vol. 21 of Luther’s Works, Concordia, 1956. 27
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