The Beatitudes, and Beyond: "Arise!"

Sermon, 7/4/10 (Sermon on the Mount, 1 of 6). “Blessed are …” These opening words of Jesus’ collected teachings – repeated eightfold – in Matthew offer comfort to his audience in a passive way … according to the Greek. What about the equivalent in Jesus’ Semitic language, Aramaic? The answer to this changes everything …

Scripture     Matthew 5:1-16

The Beatitudes, and Beyond: “Arise!”

In his final book, A Man Without a Country, the late Kurt Vonnegut noted that some Christians want the Ten Commandments posted in public places, but none seem to want to do the same with the Beatitudes: “ ‘Blessed are the merciful’ in a courtroom? ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ in the Pentagon? Give me a break!”¹

Let we grow snide, let’s bring it all back home with this: How about posting the Beatitudes in our church? …

The Sermon on the Mount is making a comeback these days – in academic circles, and soon I hope in our churches. Among many recent offerings on the subject, Hans Dieter Betz of the University of Chicago has written this “short” book (massive tome is plopped down on the pulpit) – all this, on three chapters of scripture! A book I have taken pains to read … well, most of the hundred page introduction, at least.

Betz may wander extensively through theological thickets in this book, but he does see clearly a seminal concern: “The conflict between the authority attributed to the Sermon on the Mount … and the realities of common church life and history has never escaped astute observers inside and outside the church.”

Which may explain why the church institutional – especially over the last century – has largely ignored these three chapters of collected teachings. One notable example: the three-year Sunday biblical guide for many, if not most, mainline Protestant pastors – known as the Revised Common Lectionary, or RCL – only stretches through the first of the three Sermon on the Mount chapters in its triennial cycle. And then only if the cycles of the moon dictate a late Easter. What does a late Easter have to do with it? A late Easter means a longer season of Epiphany than usual. And it’s then, and only then, that Matthew 5 is added as Epiphany “filler”. (Luke’s shorter, and probably earlier, version – known as Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain – suffers a similar fate.)

And an interesting fate this is, for teachings so universally influential that spiritual thinkers from Tolstoy to Gandhi, from Christian mystics to Islamic scholars, have extolled all three chapters of its ethical riches. Words that Betz identifies as the “epitome” of Christ’ teachings.²

Why this lectionary oversight? Why this conflict – this discomfort – this dis-ease – between Sermon on the Mount and the church?

Maybe it’s not so much our conflict over or discomfort with the Sermon on the Mount that prompts us to cast these teachings to the discipleship sidelines. A recent nationwide poll of Christians from many denominations revealed that nearly three out of four of us consider the Sermon on the Mount to have very little relevance to our contemporary life.³

The Sermon on the Mount: It’s seen as irrelevant. Even though churches for nearly twenty centuries used this carefully-defined unit of teaching as a reliable guide for church membership preparation. Even though it is beautifully designed for catechetical instruction, and “studied more intensively, quoted more frequently” over time than any other text in Matthew. Even though …

Even though. For our last hundred years of world history seem to have swept its relevance away. What with two world wars and a great worldwide depression sandwiched between, the powerful promise of the progressive movement in the North Atlantic world at the beginning of the last century proved both utopian and naïve to many. Worldwide, more persons perished as a result of warfare in the 1900s than in all previous human history combined. Starvation, beyond compare and imagination. A Holocaust. A Great Purge. Ethnic cleansing.

So much for the hubristic notion held by Protestants millions a century ago of peaceably “winning the world for Christ by 2000” – an ideal swept away by realpolitik and total war. For with the sowing of the first bullets of World War I, and the reaping of national enmities that followed, a famine of interest in the Sermon on the Mount’s concept of a divine kingdom “on earth, as it is in heaven” swept over the face of Christendom. While amidst this kingdom famine sprang forth the tender first shoots of postmodernism, grafted to astonishing theories of relativity, convincing us there was no ultimate objective truth …

But wait – let’s stop right there! Don’t we, as Christians, believe there is ultimate, objective truth? Not that we might ever finally arrive at that truth – not in this lifetime. But the Sermon on the Mount presents us with a road-map for that truth that beckons us: Come along on the journey! As one wag puts it, it may seem all relative – but, then again, we are all related!

And so along this journey we go! Gathering at Jesus’ feet with his disciples now, those we are told who “came to him” to hear him. Beginning to listen to what Betz calls the epitome of Jesus’ teachings, metaphorically spoken from a mountain, what ancients considered the “navel” of the universe between heaven and earth. Listening to Jesus instructing, in Matthew’s context, Jewish and Gentile Christians both how to live among each other, and among the world.

It all begins with a series of blessings and promises known as the Beatitudes:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit … those who mourn … the meek (i.e., the powerless) … Blessed are the merciful … the pure in heart … the peacemakers … the persecuted …” And the “yous” that follow are always plural – he’s speaking to a community of disciples, here.

“Blessed are … Blessed are … Blessed are …” – What to make of all these blessed “blesseds”?

Some of you might recall the Good News Bible – Today’s English Version, it was called, so popular in the 1970s. “Blessed” came to us in that translation as “Happy.” A feel-good word, for a feel-good generation.

And yet, Jesus spoke in a Semitic context, and Matthew, the most Jewish Christian of all the gospel writers, understood this well. And in the Semitic context – conveyed so well by most of our Hebrew scriptures – the concept of righteousness is key.

Righteousness: meaning, doing right by God by doing right by others. Actions of right relationship – the prophet Micah called it “doing justice, loving kindness, walking humbly with our God”. Action laminating the resting of God’s blessing on us.

Righteousness: Right action leading to good feeling, much more so than vice versa. The ideal of the individual? – this Semitic world celebrated it not. Priority is placed on ethical duties providing communal fulfillment rather than moral choices revolving around individual pleasure.

And what a communal fulfillment these “blesseds” provide – and can provide us, still!

Elias Chacour provides a special window on the meaning of “blessed” for us. Chacour is a Melkite Catholic priest of Eastern Orthodox background from Galilee – and now archbishop of areas that include his home region. He has worked tirelessly for justice for his fellow Palestinians and reconciliation with the Jewish people in Israel.

We come closest to the true meaning of the Beatitudes, Chacour states, when we understand the Aramaic equivalent of the Greek word makarios, so often translated in our English bibles as “blessed”. For in Jesus’ native language of Aramaic, Chacour notes – a language with which this Galilean priest is very familiar – the equivalent of the Greek “blessed” is active – and not passive. It means “wake up” – or “get up” – or “stand up” – or, “arise”. As in, “Get up, arise, you poor in spirit … Arise, you who mourn … Arise, you who are meek …” Participatory words, rather than being blessed as a spectator.

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“Arise – Arise – Arise!” Take action! As in Jesus’ very active words subsequent to the Beatitudes: Be salty! Let your light shine! Do not keep it under a bushel! Don’t just say, as a people of hospitality, “Here we sit – y’all come!” Shout out to the world, “Here we stand – y’all come!”

And a shout-out to Jesus the Jew, teaching his audience anew, the weepers, the persecuted, the approximately one-half of the Roman Empire world at that time suffering in debt slavery, that they – that we – are all created in God’s image, and we can therefore stand up – arise – for the sake of basic human dignity!

A dignity of being created in God’s image that trumps all tyranny or idolatry  on this Fourth of July, the madness of King George III notwithstanding. A dignity that transforms persons and communities and churches anew, that transforms nations anew. Where “all men (and women!) are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”…

The right to worship freely. The right to speak freely …

But most importantly, in Jesus’ day and in many lands still today – perhaps our own included: The right to eat. The right to be clothed. The right to have adequate shelter, and a sense of general well-being.

Enslaved, ensnared, entrapped at times as we may feel today, in the midst of violence and vulnerabilities and social stratifications of endless varieties, we can take faith in the empowerment these Beatitudes provide. Not that our lives might become more orderly. But that our lives, and the lives of those around us, might become more just.

As we read in our Prayer of Confession and Healing today:

  Dare we long for God’s kingdom: the freedom to be loved?

  Dare we pray for God’s kingdom: the freedom to be heard?

  Dare we work for God’s kingdom: the freedom to be fed?

With these holy rights come – as ever – holy responsibilities, so others may enjoy them as well. We shall hear of some of those responsibilities in next Sunday’s message: Sermon on the Mount, Part 2 of 6.

Until next week, then: Arise! You mournful, meek, and merciful – you poor, pure, peacemakers, and persecuted: Arise! For it’s you who shall be loved. For it’s you who shall be heard. For it’s you who shall be fed. You: the salt and light of the world.

  You – yes, you: Arise!

¹Kurt Vonnegut, quoting Eugene V. Debs, in A Man Without a Country (Seven Stories Press, 1995), p. 81.

²Hans Dieter Betz, The Sermon on the Mount (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), p. 1.

³Personal notes from a workshop with the Rev. Dr. David Buttrick on the Sermon on the Mount, Houghton Lake, MI, June 2004.

Benediction

A rabbinic saying in Jesus’ day runs like this: "Any benediction in which there is no mention of the kingdom is no benediction."

The Sermon on the Mount is one long benediction – i.e., a statement of blessing – on the kingdom, or commonwealth, of God. Jesus preached the kingdom as already come, and near – at-hand – to each of his hearers.

So arise, you blessed ones, for your holy rights and the holy rights of all, already at hand … even and especially in the midst of hard times. Arise!