Jeremy Duncan: Because if Willard is right, if that is what Jesus is saying, that if you have had your slice of the pie taken away from you, when you have had suffering inflicted on you, when you have nowhere else to go and no plan for where to turn, when all of your choices only seem to make everything worse and everyone knows it, when you're not even sure if you believe in God to begin with today, then the good news is that God is still, God always has been, God always will be for you. This reads a classic series has been a lot of fun. I learned a lot from listening to both Bobby and Scott. And now I've got some new books to add to my reading list as well. Hopefully, you do too.
By the way, when you need a book recommendation, those two really should be your go to. They read a lot of stuff, all good stuff. I like to read a lot of science fiction in my nonfiction summers when I'm not having to read theology. But as I was about to leave on vacation, Bobby recommended a book to me. It was called Piranesi by Susan Clark.
Not exactly sci fi, but it was close enough because it was great. So check that one out as well and add it to your reading list. This series, however, we are focusing on books that have come to shape our spiritual journey. And today, I want to reflect on a book that actually did a lot to shape my theology by shifting even just a couple degrees the way that I understood one of Jesus' most famous lines, and that book was a book called the divine conspiracy. Now you might know the author of that book.
His name was Dallas Willard. He passed away in 02/2013. And the divine conspiracy published in 1998 is possibly probably his most famous book. Certainly not his only one though. Renovation of the Heart and Spirit of the Disciplines are also some of my favorites, so check those out too.
But Willard was a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California for about fifty years. He's probably best known though less as an academic and more of a pastoral voice in Christian literature. And in particular, the divine conspiracy really hit that mark for me personally Because the central conceit, the conspiracy, if you will, in this book is the idea that the gospel, the good news of the kingdom of God is not actually primarily about getting into heaven when we die. It is instead about living as apprentices of Jesus, participating in God's redemptive work throughout the world through the reshaping first of our inner lives, which then as a bonus just might prepare us for for getting into heaven when we do die. But this approach, these five main ideas in the book, one, the invitation to apprenticeship, the presentness of the kingdom around us, The idea that formation happens from the inside out, not from what's imposed upon us or around us.
The incalculable cost of truncating the gospel into avoiding hell, and ultimately, the experience of the good life alongside God today, all of this had a profound influence on the way that I thought about, and I talked about my faith throughout my career. And ultimately, at least for me, all of that sprang from one little shift in the way that I understood one little phrase. All from one small quote on page one fourteen in the divine conspiracy. At least that's the page that it's on in the copy in my office, but we'll get there. First, let's pray.
Loving God, thank you for this community gathered today. For each person who chose to be here with openness and curiosity. In a summer season filled with motion and noise, we pause to make space for the quiet and for the voices who have gone before us to lead us. As we turn our attention to these classic works, these books written in faith to you, these words spoken from your Son to us. May we find more than just history today, but perhaps wisdom and simplicity.
Perhaps a presence that speaks even now to truths we let slip by too often. Help us not to rush past or through these moments, but to settle our hearts and to open our minds, to be drawn deeper into the practice of your presence that we spoke about just last week. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Okay.
Today, it's the divine conspiracy hidden in the sermon on the mount. And I'm gonna spend the majority of my time today focusing directly on some of the teachings of Jesus, but we will find ourselves returning to Dallas as we reach the end of our time this morning. And I wanna try to find this hinge point that might help us uncover some of that meaning in Jesus' words. That said, like many classics, the sermon on the mount has also been at times analyzed to death. Books could have been and have been written about these three short chapters in Matthew.
In fact, my first book, Durden Stardust, was written about it and very possibly contributed to the to death part of that analysis. My apologies. Today though, we turn our attention to a real classic, Jesus' first public sermon. And in that, we hope to find a bit of that conspiracy that our friend Dallas Willard helped me to notice all those years ago. To do that, we're gonna talk about who's in the audience, the meaning of meek, a poverty of spirit, and ultimately why making Jesus makes sense is probably missing the point.
Today though, I want to specifically focus on the first 10 verses of Matthew chapter five, traditionally known as the beatitudes. Because I'm actually really convinced that if we get the beatitudes right, perhaps we can get the sermon on the mount right. And if we can get the sermon on the mount right, then we will at least be off on the right foot when it comes to making sense of Jesus. However, before we get to all that, let's set the stage for how this first sermon comes about. Because we gotta remember here that the sermon on the mount is a pretty unique look into the early stages of Jesus' public life.
Here, he's young and fresh faced. He's largely still pretty optimistic about the world really. The crowds are starting to share his name and pass it back and forth. Maybe they have heard whispers of that miracle at Cana, the mounds of miraculous wine he pulled off, and that alone probably has them at least a little bit interested in what he has to say. Be honest, you would be too.
I'd show up for that. But for the most part, at this point, he's still like a local attraction. Now, of course, that would change, but then so would Jesus. See, in the sermon on the mount, there are no stories. There's no parables.
There's no riddles to wrestle with. Jesus is certainly not yet talking about seeds having to fall to the ground and die, hinting that his life might be shorter than expected or that good news could possibly come from the other side of life's darkest moments. No. At this point, Jesus is still getting his feet under him. He's not yet seeing where the story will go exactly.
He's not even really teaching about himself at all in this sermon. Instead, this first sermon is less Jesus on God, and maybe we could say more Jesus on life. This is Jesus reading the scriptures of his people and reinterpreting them. Maybe this is Jesus watching the lives of the people around him and reinterpreting them. And perhaps for that reason, I think I do agree with David Gushy when he writes that the Sermon on the Mount is the single most important biblical text in the history of Christian ethics.
It's for understanding how we should live together. The sermon isn't theology. As much as it is, at least in a sense, really sociology. It's Jesus on how to get along. And so to set the stage for that, let's actually back up to the end of Matthew four to really make sure that we are as much as possible in the same place as those who began listening at the start of Matthew five.
This is verse 23. Jesus went through Galilee. That's where he's from, by the way, where he grew up. Teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. News about him began spreading across all of Syria.
Obviously, you can see why. And so people brought to him those who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain or the demon possessed, those having seizures and the paralyzed, and he healed them all. Large crowds from Galilee, from the Decapolis, from Jerusalem, from Judea, and even the region across the Jordan began to follow him. And so when he saw these crowds, he went up on a mountainside and he sat down. His disciples came to him and he began to teach them.
So here's what we have to picture in our minds. We got this huge crowd of people from all over the local area that have come to hear Jesus. He notices this crowd, so he goes up on a hill where he can see everyone. His closest friends come close to him, but then he teaches all of them in this sort of public open air address. Now we'll get to what he says to them in a moment here because it's big.
But first, we have to notice who Jesus is talking to here. That's gonna be important, and it's actually spelled out for us in the text. Says large crowds from the Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and the region across the Jordan. Now Galilee, that's where Jesus is from, where he grew up. A very Jewish, very religious, but for lack of a better term, this is a bit of an anachronism, but very blue collar kind of region.
And these are Jesus' people. Like, knows these people. He grew up with these people. The specific people in the audience near him, those are probably strangers to him. But, like, he gets these people.
Anytime you start to think for a moment that Jesus is maybe just a little too respectable for you, just remember Jesus grew up on the other side of the tracks, if you will. Jesus is from the Galilee, not Jerusalem. Now Jerusalem, those were also largely Jewish people. They were also very religious people, but they were also probably, perhaps, we could say, like, a little more fancy people. People from the big city, people who knew how the world worked, people who understood the power and the politics and probably had a much better sense of the machinations of Rome around them.
Jerusalem would have been where religious leaders in the Jewish culture migrated to and would have been found. And so there's a lot in common here with these regions, but at the same time, it's also a very different area from the more rural, less sophisticated regions that Jesus knew from his childhood. Do you remember that time when word about Jesus is starting to leak out and spread around? And there's this man named Nathaniel who hears stories about Jesus and remarks, are you kidding me? Can anything good come from Nazareth?
Like, that's what it says in the Bible. That's the kind of attitude you might expect from Jerusalem. Like, think if Jesus showed up claiming to be from Edmonton, how we would respond. That's the kind of idea here. Anyway, alongside the Galilee and Jerusalem, we've got the Decapolis tucked in here as well, and that's an interesting one too.
Because the Decapolis meant the 10 cities. And these were a collection of Roman cities on former Jewish lands Southeast Of Galilee along the coast, and they were not Jewish cities anymore. At least in the eyes of most Jewish people, they were also not religious cities anymore. In fact, for a lot of the people that Jesus would have grown up around, certainly for those religious cities in Jerusalem, these were the people that you avoided assiduously. So who your mom warned you about.
Right? Like, all the people with tattoos and cigarettes and motorcycles and whatever cultural stand in for loose morals there was in the first century. That's where you'd find it. And yet, here they are shoulder to shoulder with all the others listening to Jesus. Blue collar Jews and big city moguls, Roman pagans, everyone's here to see what this guy from Nazareth of all places has to say about the divine.
That's very cool. Also important though, particularly when we get to the big reveal. So, let's see what Jesus has to say to them. He began to teach them saying, blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God.
And blessed are the persecuted because of their righteousness for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Now there it is. A series of eight declarations that we call the beatitudes. By the way, beatitude is, just from the Latin translation of the Greek word for blessed. But even starting there for me brings up some conspiratorial questions because, like, what on earth is actually going on here?
Like, I get it. It sounds nice. Right? But none of this makes any sense if we're actually being honest. Blessed are the poor and the mournful, the meek, and the persecuted.
In what world is that actually true, Jesus? And so as often happens when confronted with data that doesn't fit our expectations, I think we subtly endeavor to make it fit. We massage the message so that our assumptions about the world can remain intact. For example, I have a commentary in my office right now that tried to explain to me that meek meant strength under control. That's why they'll inherit the earth.
When Jesus says the meek will inherit the earth, what he really means is that the powerful will inherit the earth, but only those who know when and where to use all of that power. And that certainly fits a lot better, at least in my world, except it's also clearly not what meek means. At least not in English anyway. Meek means submissive or easily imposed upon. That's what my dictionary said.
Now maybe the problem is meek is just not a good English word. It's a bad translation, except the Greek word here is prowse, and it doesn't mean strength either. It means, I'll quote, not overly impressive, humbled. In fact, the Hebrew equivalent is the word Anah, and that comes from a root that means bowed down and cowering. In other words, there is nothing in the word meek, whether you read in English or Greek or Hebrew, that should give you the image of coiled strength just waiting to be let loose on the world.
The only reason to read it that way is to make Jesus make sense in the world we're already familiar with. Except, what if that's not the point? What if Jesus isn't trying to make sense in our world? What if he's not even really talking to us in this moment at all? See, think we tend to read this.
Actually, tend to read everything through modern Western assumptions about the world. But if you're a Jewish person in the first century, particularly a poor rural Jewish person standing in the audience, you would probably hear this differently. In fact, you might hear a callback to a song that you know from your childhood. A song that we call Psalm 37, a song which sings about the fall of Israel and the apparent victory of the ruthless. A psalm which then declares that eventually the righteous will inherit the earth because the Lord will not leave anyone in the power of the wicked.
A psalm which ends with the line, salvation comes from the Lord because the Lord helps and delivers. God delivers those who overcome. No. That's not what it says. It says God delivers those who have to seek refuge.
The meek are not the powerful under control. May we might wanna see ourselves here. The meek are those who've been crushed, put down, those who've been humbled and forced to bow, those who've had their land, their earth, their everything taken away from them by the more powerful. Listen. You don't want to be meek, not in this context, because the meek are those who've been forced to watch the world divvied up in front of them by those who are more powerful, more beautiful, more wealthy, more well connected, more strategic, more everything.
And they know they don't have the power to fight back. That's the meek. So if you're a Roman person from the Decapolis, shoulder to shoulder with a Jewish person from Jerusalem, standing on lands that have been taken from them by your government, listening to Jesus from Galilee talk about inheritance, probably an awkward moment. The point isn't something that you should aspire to be. The point is that one day all things will be made right.
And I know we have the sense. I do anyway. Almost every level of our lives that the world is being handed out, and those who have the courage and the strength to get theirs will get it, and those who don't won't. And yet here Jesus seems to say to that, I know it seems that way, but do you imagine that that is what God dreams of? Or is there something different?
See, I think we instinctively want to assume there's the reason that the meek will get the earth. Something that we can aspire to. Something that we can be so that we will get the earth too. But what if Jesus is saying, look, your imagination of who deserves what, that's part of the problem to begin with. Said another way, I think the beatitudes aren't a checklist telling us what to do to earn God's favor.
The beatitudes are a reframing of who already has God's attention. And once we get a glimpse of that, once we see what Jesus is doing in these lines, that he's not explaining our world to us, he's declaring a new world among us, well, then all of a sudden, opening salvo, all of these beatitudes, these declarations of how the world could be if we would let it, they stop needing to be sensible and they start to become aspirational. If this is what God is really like, what could we be like if we could aspire to see those who mourn comforted? Where the merciful shown mercy, what would we be like if the peacemakers among us, they were the ones held up as the children of God? What if we could believe that those who hunger and thirst for the things of God won't just search in vain for lives on end, but instead, they will actually find themselves one day wrapped up in the arms of the one who loves them full of every good thing they need.
What if all this isn't just pretty poetry to get the sermon rolling, but it's language intended to shape the things that we teach ourselves to dream about? And the thing is I've kinda come at this backwards, but all of this really started for me with what is possibly the most important opening line in history. The blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Is it just like the meek and the mournful? Poverty in spirit is not something you want to aspire to.
There's nothing admirable here. It's not worthy of commendation. This is just Jesus simply talking about us, you and I. And despite what you might have heard in countless sermons, Jesus does not open his first public address by talking about those who are humble or those who know their need for God. Poverty spirit isn't actually about any of that.
It is about a state of complete and utter confusion when it comes to the things of God. Blessed are you who've got absolutely no clue what you're doing. This is where we come back to Dallas Willard, to that divine conspiracy that's hidden from us in our attempts to make Jesus make sense. In all the ways that we mistake, the gracious initiative of God is the good news of our own creation or merit. Because Willard writes in a small quote on page one fourteen, a quote that quite literally began to reshape how I understood the entire message of Jesus.
He says, the poor of spirit are the spiritual zeros, the spiritually bankrupt, the deprived and the deficient, the spiritual beggars, those without a wisp of religion. Those are who are blessed when God shows up because that is the good news. He goes on to write on the next page that the poor in spirit are blessed as a result of the kingdom of God being available to them in their spiritual poverty right now. Today, the words poor of spirit no longer convey the sense of spiritual destitution they were meant to bear. Amazingly, somehow they become a praiseworthy condition.
But no. Standing around Jesus as he speaks are people with no spiritual qualifications or abilities at all. You would never call on them when spiritual work is to be done. There's nothing about them to suggest that the breath of God might move through their lives. They have no charisma, no religious glitter, no clout.
They don't know their Bible. They know not the law. They are mere laypeople who at best can fill a pew or stuff an offering plate. They are the first to tell you they really can't make heads or tails of religion. They walk by us in their hundreds and their thousands every day.
They would be the last to say they have any claim whatsoever on God. The pages of the gospels are cluttered with such people, and yet the kingdom of God belongs to them. And I don't think I can overstate the significance of that quote in my thinking, in all of our lives if we actually pause to take it seriously. Because if Willard is right, if that is what Jesus is saying, that if you have had your slice of the pie taken away from you, when you have had suffering inflicted on you, when you have nowhere else to go and no plan for where to turn, when all of your choices only seem to make everything worse and everyone knows it, when you're not even sure if you believe in God to begin with today, then the good news is that God is still, God always has been, God always will be for you. Or as another classic writer, Walter Brueggemann, says, the beatitudes are God's bless you to the god awful.
And this means that not only is the gospel more beautiful than we imagined it to be, but now I think I understand why we struggle with it so much. Because deep down, I think we want to know why we deserve God's love. Maybe more importantly, I think we often want to know why the person beside us doesn't. Except if God is love, infinite and inexhaustible, then not only is there no way for us to ever measure ourselves against it, there's no way for us to measure ourselves against each other either. So maybe you're a Roman pagan in the audience or you're a Galilean day laborer.
Maybe you're a religious leader from Jerusalem, and you've taken the time to come and stand shoulder to shoulder to listen to Jesus. The good news is that all of you, all of us stand shoulder to shoulder on equal ground before God. That's good news. And so in whatever way you have been told that you are a failure spiritually, however you've internalized the narrative of your spiritual bankruptcy, it's simply not relevant to the conversation. Because the God of the universe is already on your side surrounding you with love, chewing you on.
That's who God is. You just need to pause to notice. Blessed are we who don't have a clue, the divine has come to find us anyway. And if we can get that part right, if we can sing that part somewhere deep in our bones, I'm convinced it will change everything about us, but more importantly, everything about how we see everyone else. Henry now and once wrote that the path of theological formation is the gradual and often painful discovery of God's complete incomprehensibility to you.
You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God. And Jesus' first public words start by unraveling the conspiracy of our own competence. You are poor in spirit already, and God is on your side because yours is the kingdom of heaven. Let's pray. Gracious God, for all the times we have taken news that seemed too good to be true and tried to find a way to truncate it, to squish it, to pull it back down into something that made sense to us, a way to measure ourselves against a yardstick, a way to measure ourselves against each other, and believe that your goodness could be awarded to us because of some meritorious, competency in us.
We repent of that, and we let it go, and we turn the other way, and instead we follow the path of Jesus. Not because we can get to where we need to be, but because one step in front of another over the course of a lifetime can draw us back to the people you imagine us to be. Might our awareness of your grace surrounding us in our poverty Become the awareness of your grace surrounding our neighbor in their station, and may it slowly become our eyes toward them. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.
Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website commons.church for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel, where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server.
Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.