In today’s interconnected world it’s never hard to find the present trends in christianity when it comes to the things scholarship, theologians, churches are interested in.
The book of Revelation is a current trend.
The Beatitudes are another current trend, having a moment.
I’ve long been fascinated by the Beatitudes. There is good reason to see them as the Gospel writers’ reimagining of Sinai in light of Jesus. Jesus is born into a world where the elder sons are being hunted and killed. Jesus is depicted as coming out of Egypt, going through the waters (of baptism), into the wilderness, and eventually to the mountain to give the beatitudes (the Law).
What is unfortunate is that there exists tendencies to misunderstand what the Law is. Therefore, what Jesus is doing at this mountain (or technically the valley) gets equally misunderstood.
Beatitude literally means blessing.
More than this though, it is describing the characteristics of the kingdom of God (and therefore belonging to or participating in the kingdom of God).
The Law is both the story of Gods liberating act (freeing from slavery) and the revelation of Gods true character/kingdom.
It represents a contrast between two realities.
When Jesus says in Matthew 5:17, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them”, he is speaking of a trajectory, an aim, an expectation. He is not rewriting a set of rules, as is so often assumed. He is not establishing something new. He is not entering into our modern debates between faith and works.
He is, rather, establishing a new reality which hinges on the Law’s fulfillment. The thing the Law promised to bring about is now being fulfilled in Jesus.
In other words, Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law. Jesus is the new reality. The beatitudes tell us, then, the shape and character of this new reality as one framed by the hope the Law represented.
As Darrell Johnson says in his current sermon series on the Beatitudes (you can find this on his podcast), the Beatitudes don’t tell us who will inherit the kingdom of heaven, they tell us how the kingdom of heaven on earth shapes those who participate in it.
There is a debate that exists over the question of whether Matthew spiritualizes Lukes social Gospel (for example, rewriting blessed are the poor to read blessed are the poor in spirit), or whether Luke socializes Matthews spiritual concern.
This is just my take, but I think it is neither. Such a debate hinges on the assumption that the beatitudes are outlining virtues that will inherit (earn) salvation. At it’s most erroneous, such an assumption might suggest that poverty or sickness might be something God calls good or right, or something we should seek. As though it is saying, be like this and you will be saved. Which, not coincidently, is how people tend to perceive the Jewish Law- a set of rules or commands that one needs to follow perfectly to be saved (or the flipside, Jesus’ message that He embodies these rules perfectly in order to save us inspite of our imperfection)
I don’t think this is how ancient Jews thought about the Law. And I don’t think it’s how Jesus fulfilled the Law.
The beatitudes don’t exist to create division between the kind of people who will inherit the kingdom and the kind of people who won’t.
The beatitudes tell us what it looks like to participate in the kingdom of God as an expression of hope and hope fulfilled.
Blessed are. Meaning, when you participate in the kingdom of God, you are to experience the life that comes from this new reality in Jesus. And these experiences hinge on two commonalities which we find in both Matthew and Luke:
- Our shared need for Jesus, which means an awareness of the contrasting realities and our need for transformation.
- The shape of this transformation as one which then experiences a different reality in Jesus (the first section of the beatitudes) thus empowering us towards the second section of the beatitudes (living out of this reality).
There is a model for this. Framed against the phrase, “I have brought you out of Egypt” (the need for liberation and for the presence of God to dwell amongst them), we get the ten commandments which are famously summed up in its two definable sections as love of God, love of other. The same pattern, only now we find that which Sinai pointed to having arrived in our midst.
That which the scribes and pharisees’ anxiously mulled over and recontextualized in their day had come and done a new work.
The beatitudes, then, reflect a procolomation regarding what is true about the Law in Jesus.
And they reflect an invitation to be perfect (to place our hope in the fact that the Law has been fulfilled in Jesus, and to allow that to inform how we operate in the world) as the Father is perfect in Jesus.
In this we find Jesus declaring a new reality having broken in, transforming their expectations into what He calls the Gospel, the good news of this new reality now taking shape
The Stories of my Life 