Matthew 5:1-12 "Blessed Are YOU"

         “Blessed are you,” Jesus says in these verses from the Gospel of Matthew that we just read, verses that perhaps ring a bell with many people (though certainly not all) who sit in churches on Sunday mornings.  Blessed are you who are poor, Jesus declares, or who mourn, or are meek.  Blessed are you when you hunger and thirst.  Blessed are you when you are merciful, pure in heart, a peacemaker.  Blessed are you when you are
persecuted, reviled, and slandered, when evil overwhelms you.  Blessed are you, he proclaims.  Rejoice and be glad!

         Come on.  Let’s be honest here.  These are not the sorts of blessings we want or would go out of our way to experience.  These are more like circumstances we would hope to avoid.  Poverty?  Mourning?  Hungering and thirsting?  And what about persecution?  Slander?  Being tripped up by evil and falling flat on your face?  If we acknowledged those attributes as things we ought to aspire to, our culture warriors would be accusing us of aiding and abetting the “wussification of America.”  Where is true manliness in all this claptrap?

          Blessed are you?  Rejoice and be glad?  Who wants any of that?  If we do not watch out, we will find ourselves sitting on top of a dung heap comparing our sores and boils with Job himself.  I mean, really, when we want blessings, surely we are angling for something else.   One writer, who identifies himself only as Thomas H, puts it this way. 

         “Who are the ones we as people regard as the lucky ones? The fortunate, the blessed ones? What do we think of? We tend to think of those with money. They can afford to live the way they want. They never have to worry about paying their bills. If they want something, they can have it. We think of those who can afford a nice home, a nice car. When they travel they fly at the front of the plane and not in cattle class. And who can afford whatever their heart’s desire is.

         We don’t just think of the rich though. We think of the beautiful, those who are so attractive. Everyone wants to be with them. If (he is) an attractive guy, (he) can get whatever girl (he wants). And vice versa. The attractive woman gets the guy she wants. We can envy the beautiful people.

         We also think of the powerful. Those who have access to privilege and status. And of course, these things often go together. The rich, beautiful, powerful people. The fortunate ones, the lucky ones, the blessed ones. People like pop stars, movie stars, sports stars. Who wouldn’t want to be Michael Jordan…Taylor Swift, or Justin Bieber?  (Well, maybe not Justin Bieber these days.).

         Who of us hasn’t wondered why we haven’t got the lucky breaks they have? Now even if we don’t go looking at famous names, who of us wouldn’t wish to be more beautiful, richer and more powerful than we are now?”

         But poor, sad, persecuted?  Blessed is that sort of person?  Rejoice and be glad if you are one of those beleaguered men or women?  Jesus seems to be turning good old-fashioned rational logic upside down and inside out.  Whatever did he have in mind when he spouted these little nuggets that we have come to call the Beatitudes?

         Let’s look first at where these so-called blessings occur in the Gospel of Matthew.  They come at the beginning of three chapters worth of sayings, one liners, and short pithy descriptions of the kingdom of heaven that the Gospel writer lumps all together in something we have come to call the Sermon on the Mount. 

          However, it was not a real sermon like the ones you sit through here every Sunday.  That is, Jesus did not preach these three chapters all at once on a single occasion.  After all, that would have taken way longer than the God-proscribed 20 minute time limit on sermon length. 

         No – the Gospel writer came across these sayings and teachings – most likely from a source Biblical scholars simply call “Q” (a source that the Gospel writer of Luke also had access to).  Then the author put them in the order that he thought best, and included them in his narrative about the life of Jesus.  The Beatitudes then begin the first of five major blocks of Jesus’ teaching in this Gospel of Matthew.

         There are eight beatitudes or blessings that the Gospel writer includes:    

Blessed are the poor in spirit, those people who are broken and hopeless.

Blessed are those who mourn, those men and women who have suffered loss and know the empty feeling that always follows.

Blessed are the meek, those folks who stay in the background and who will not use power as a tool to make things happen.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, those sorry souls who will keep slogging along until everyone is slogging along together.

Blessed are the merciful, those bleeding hearts who go out of their way to improve the lot of others.

Blessed are the pure in heart, those crazy sorts who keep doing things like eating with whomever will share a meal with them – even tax collectors or prostitutes – knowing full well that they too will be seen as ritually impure in the eyes of the religious elite.

Blessed are the peacemakers, those persons who put themselves in the middle of conflict, instinctively knowing that life is meant to be lived in harmony.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of justice, those misguided human beings who just will not give up their quest for global dignity and wholeness.

         There are two ways we can interpret these Beatitudes and take them to heart, you know.  The first way is pretty scary if you ask me – and that is to understand the Beatitudes as proverbs, that is, as Quaker minister Timothy Henry noted, a set of “God-ordered truth that is helpful and useful as a general rule.”

         Using this interpretation as our guide, we fall into a terrible trap because we end up figuring that these beatitudes are conditions for being blessed.  As Lutheran pastor David Lose writes, “When I hear the Beatitudes, it's hard for me not to hear Jesus as stating the terms under which I might be blessed. For instance, when I hear "Blessed are the pure in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven," I tend to think, "Am I pure enough in spirit?" or "I should try to be more pure in spirit." Or, when I hear "blessed are the peacemakers...," I think, "Yes, I really should be more committed to making peace."

         At least with "blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted," I have the assurance of knowing that on those occasions when I am mourning I will be comforted. But, to be perfectly honest -- and if you'll pardon the pun -- that's relatively small comfort because the truth is I don't want to mourn, and hearing this beatitude doesn't make me any more eager for additional mourning. (Ditto for being persecuted!).”  Understood this way, the Beatitudes are a shopping list for how to get on God’s good side.

         Not very encouraging, I would say, so let’s look at them in another way.  First though, we need to recall where these Beatitudes come in the Gospel narrative.  Remember? They occur at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount.  As preaching professor Fred Craddock reminds us, they come “before a single instruction is given, before there has been time for obedience or disobedience. If the blessings were only for the deserving, very likely they would be stated at the end of the sermon, probably prefaced with the conditional clause, "If you have done all these things."  What comes first, always, is God’s grace.

         I think if we interpret these Beatitudes differently and, I would say, in the way they were intended when Jesus spoke them, we will find them far more satisfying rather than scary. And so I pose this question for you to ponder:  What if these Beatitudes really are blessings, just blessings?   

         What if Jesus is just blessing the victims gathered about him (and I would say that includes all of us at one time or another) - the down-and-out, the oddballs, the ones having a tough time?  What if the pronouncement of the blessing actually conveys the blessing?  I men, what if Jesus, in his blessing, is reminding those he spoke to (and again, I would say that includes all of us), reminding them and us that, in the end, we are not alone but rather are cocooned in the promise of God’s love and presence? 

         Can you imagine how his disciples would have reacted to this message of grace?  Here is Jesus, speaking to people who are struggling to keep their heads above water in an oppressive foreign domination system, people who have been told over and over again that their desperate plight is of their own making, a clear sign that God is punishing them. It is to these people that Jesus says, “Blessed are you.”

         His pronouncements must have been so startling that at least a few people probably thought their ears were not working.  Maybe someone shouted, “What? Can you repeat that?”

         “What did he say?”


         “I think it was ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers.’

         “
Aha, what’s so special about the cheesemakers?” 


         “Well, obviously it’s not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.”

         Those are lines from the movie, “Monty Python's Life of Brian”, and I included them for a bit of comic relief from a very serious topic.

         Back to my point:  Instead of issuing a sharp reprimand, which is what his unfortunate lot of listeners expected, instead of saying, “You are getting what you deserve,” Jesus said, “Blessed are you.”

         Blessed are the poor in spirit:  Blessed are you who feel broken and hopeless, you who feel that your life is coming apart at the seams, you whose marriage is iffy, you who feel only stress and deepening darkness.  Blessed are you.  God has not forgotten you.

         Blessed are those who mourn:  Bless are you who still tear up when you think of a loved one who has passed away, maybe years ago, you who mourn for the better days when relationships were simpler and more things were black and white, you who mourn for a life your child will never know again.  Blessed are you.  God walks with you in these desperate and troubled times.

         Blessed are the meek:  Blessed are you who believe that life should be gentle, that more flies really can be caught with honey than with vinegar, who, when life presents you with lemons over and over again, you still try to make lemonade.  Blessed are you.  God is there with you, squeezing the lemons, adding the sugar.

         Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice:  Blessed are you when you do not turn your back on the poor, when you actually try to do something about income inequality even if everyone around you is telling you that either it is a political football – or simply a lost cause.  Blessed are you.  God is there in the trenches with you.

         Blessed are the merciful:  Blessed are you who keep paying it forward time and time again though no one seems to notice, who, even when you have the power to execute and deliver judgment, choose not to – difficult as that is at times.   Blessed are you.  God smiles at you and your endless efforts.

         Blessed are the pure in heart:  Blessed are you who insist upon seeing the world through God’s eyes, who witness God at work in the most amazing and outlandish places, whose starting place is with God-thoughts and ending place is with God-actions, who take seriously the over-used phrase, “what would Jesus do?”  Blessed are you.  God embraces you.

         Blessed are the peacemakers:  Blessed are you who are the family negotiator, who walks into the middle of cruelty and abuse and tries to set things right, who stays to talk rather than running out,

who is the facilitator who intuitively understands that nothing, nothing is worth the pain of not forgiving.  Blessed are you.  God stands with you in the midst of conflict.

         Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of justice:  Blessed are you who take your call to discipleship seriously, who continue to live by the message of the Good News of Jesus even when people laugh at you, call you unrealistic and irrational, or label you as “one of those.”  Blessed are you.  God has got your back.

         Blessed are all the victims – all the ones who know that either figuratively or literally the world has chewed them up and spat them out.  Blessed are you – all of you – because in some way, shape, or form, we are all victims.  Some of us are poor.  Some are in mourning.  Some of us are meek, and others of us try so hard to be merciful, peaceful, pure.  And surely some of us hunger and thirst for justice or are harassed in our quest for that elusive thing. 

         Blessed are you.  Take a moment and soak up God’s grace and promises inherent in that simple blessing.  Breathe deeply of God’s grace because blessed – nothing more, nothing less – just blessed are you – and you – and you.

by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church (U.C.C.), Raymond, Maine