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Sermon on the Mount - Bonus
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
We are in a series on the Sermon on the Mount, and on Sunday we kicked that off with the Beatitudes. But the thing is we can never make our way through all of the beatitudes in the detail they deserve if we're going to move through this whole sermon in eight weeks. And so what I wanted to do was put together a quick few videos talking about each of these beatitudes and giving you a bit of a new way to think about each of them. And so this first one is this, blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And for me, for my money, this beatitude is incredibly important, not just for understanding the beatitudes, not just for understanding the sermon on the mount, but really forgetting the whole project that Jesus is up to.
Speaker 1:If we miss this, if we don't understand what he's saying here, then I think we risk missing everything that follows in his teaching. Because Jesus is not giving us something to live up to here. The point isn't that poor in spirit is something to figure out and be. This isn't something that we should aspire to or there's nothing admirable about this. In fact, the whole point of poverty of spirit is something deeply, almost embarrassing.
Speaker 1:It's the idea that we don't know anything about God, that we're confused about the divine, that we don't know how to make heads or tails of who God is or what God is or how to move towards God. And yet, Jesus says that the divine has come close to us. And part of the key here is understanding who Jesus is speaking to. Matthew actually makes a pointed effort to let us know that it is rural Jews who are just trying to do their best. It is religious elites from Jerusalem.
Speaker 1:And it is Roman pagans from the Decapolis that can't make heads or tails of this itinerant Jewish preacher and why everyone is so fascinated by him. And to this mishmash of humanity, this hoi polloi, Jesus says, the divine has come near to you. You are blessed. This is like the God who leaves the 99 to go and find the one and bring us back home. There's nothing in our poverty of spirit that has drawn God to us.
Speaker 1:This is simply a statement about God. That God is good. God is gracious. God looks for us. God finds us.
Speaker 1:God comes near to us. And if we miss this, if we think of this as something to live up to, then I think we are going to head down the wrong path with all of Jesus' teaching. Because all of a sudden Jesus isn't special. Jesus is just like every religious teacher through all of human history telling us to be better. But that's not good news.
Speaker 1:That's the standard news. The good news here is that God is out for us. God is looking for us. God is finding us and bringing us home. And that's what makes Jesus different.
Speaker 1:Now, the beautiful thing here is that once we get this, once we understand that God comes to us in our poverty, God loves us in our poverty, and God will love us in our poverty whether we make another step toward God in the rest of our lives or not, then all of a sudden the rest of Jesus' teaching gets read in a different way. No longer is it rule after rule after rule to live up to, teaching that we have to put in place in our lives if we're going to be loved by God, But it now becomes the natural outflow of the grace that has found us. All of Jesus' teaching is saying, if you get this, if you get that God comes to you in your poverty, if you get that the divine loves you right now exactly as you are, then this is the person you will slowly become as grace infiltrates you, as grace takes root in you, and grace begins to change you. Because that's the gospel. We don't get better because we try harder.
Speaker 1:We become the people God imagines us to be because grace takes root in us. Grace transforms us. No longer do we have to be afraid. No longer do we have to be selfish. No longer do we have to protect everything we have and gather everything we can to ourselves.
Speaker 1:Now we can be kind, we can be gracious, we can be generous because we know that the divine has been all of those things to us first. And that's Jesus' message. Grace and generosity and kindness and goodness has come to meet you, and all of those things will begin to change you once you recognize that. This is how Jesus starts. You don't need to be anything than you are right now because God loves you.
Speaker 1:And once you get that, you will begin to become everything God imagines. That's the beauty of the Gospel, that you don't need to dance for God because God has met you where you are. And if that sinks somewhere deep inside, it will change everything about you. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. This second beatitude is very tender and very comforting, I think right off the start.
Speaker 1:This idea that God comes to us, God meets with us even in our grief. That God is there around us, surrounding us, comforting us even right now. And I think all of us need to hear that at different points in our lives because all of us mourn and all of us recognize this. And that's beautiful. But I think Jesus is also telling us something here about the Divine.
Speaker 1:That's what this Beatitude is really about. All of us have this assumption through all of human history, particularly in Jesus' time, and let's be honest here, in the world that we live in now, that those who are wealthy, those who are prosperous, those who are happy, those who have a smile on their face all the time, this is who God favors. God is near to them. God is on their side. Their prosperity is an indication of God's blessing in their life.
Speaker 1:And yet Jesus flips all of that upside down. He says that blessing comes to those who mourn, those who grieve, those of us who suffer from depression. God is near to us. There is blessing in this because God comes alongside of us, God experiences our world with us. And really, Jesus is telling us something about God here.
Speaker 1:That God is not on the side of those who are doing well. That God is on the side of all of us, but maybe even first, God is on the side of those who suffer. And our imagination of the divine as one who favors the wealthy, God who favors the prosperous, God who favors the ones that we aspire to be, this is upside down. And that actually we will understand God better by understanding that God draws near to us when we are at our lowest. That when we mourn, when we suffer, when we are sad, this is where God comes near to us and blesses us.
Speaker 1:That God is closest to us when we feel farthest from God. And this does a lot to upend our assumptions about who God is and what the divine is. It takes all of human history where we have assumed God is on the side of those who are doing well and flips it upside down. And so if you have felt like you are sad and therefore God is far from you, maybe God has abandoned you, Maybe the people around you have begun to assume that everything in your life is going wrong, and therefore it must be some reason that you have distanced yourself from God, and God has left you to your own. This is not true, Jesus says.
Speaker 1:God is near to you, even when you sometimes struggle to recognize it. And sometimes, all that we need to do is be reminded of the divine presence that is around us all the time. And that may begin to shift our perspective of the world, not just our moment right now, but our perspective of exactly who God is and how God shows up in our lives. And so if this is a difficult season for you right now, and maybe you have heard subtly from the people around you that God is distant from you, know that Jesus says that is not true. And maybe even in this moment, God is closer to you than God has ever been before.
Speaker 1:Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. This one's a really interesting one, and I think it's one that throws us off. Because if someone is going to inherit the earth, we automatically assume that there's something inherently in them that makes them deserve it. That we should be meek somehow. That we should be looking to the meek to find out what is it about them that we want to be so that we can get the earth.
Speaker 1:Thing is, this is actually a quote and we have to understand that what Jesus is doing is calling back to the Hebrew scriptures here. Psalm 37 talks about the meek inheriting the land and that Psalm is all about the crushing defeat of the people of God at the hands of their more powerful enemies. See they have had their land, livelihood, sometimes even their lives taken from them. And the writer of the Psalms says that one day they will get it back. That the world will be made right, and things will be made just, and everything that has been unjustly taken from the meek, those who can't defend themselves or stand up from themselves, it will be returned.
Speaker 1:That's what Jesus is playing off here. He's not saying that the meek deserve the earth. He's saying that the meek are those who've had their land, their livelihood, their imagination of their lives taken from them by the more powerful. And one day, all of that will be made right. Remember, again, Jesus is speaking to rural Jewish people.
Speaker 1:He's speaking to Jews from the city of Jerusalem. He's speaking to Romans from the Decapolis that have been part of taking everything away from the Jewish people. He's speaking to those rural people who are having their land, their farms taken from them by the usury practices in Rome right now. And he's saying one day things will be different. And so if we want to understand this beatitude, the idea here isn't saying look to the meek and try to emulate them.
Speaker 1:He's actually saying to those who are not weak, those who are powerful, those who have opportunity and privilege in the world, do you see the ways that you have used that to abuse and depress those who can't stand up for themselves? Well, is wrong and this will one day be made right. And therefore, you have an opportunity right now to allow your life to align with God, to align with the imagination that God has for the world one day as things could be and should be. And right now, you have an opportunity to participate in the kingdom of God by using your privilege and your strength and your power to advocate for those who don't have it. You're not supposed to try to become meek.
Speaker 1:You're supposed to try to ensure that those who are meek and easily overpowered in the world are not taken advantage of. Because this is who God is. This is what God imagines in the world. And this is what you, those of you who are on the top side of the power equation, this is what you have the opportunity to participate in. For those who are on the downside, the meek and the oppressed, they can look towards the justice of God, but the justice of God also being played out in their brothers, their sisters, their siblings that stand beside them right now in the audience.
Speaker 1:If only we can capture in our hearts what Jesus is speaking of here. This is Jesus imagining a completely new world and offering us the opportunity to participate in it right now. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be filled in the first beatitude we talked about the importance of getting where Jesus is going by starting where Jesus starts. That in our poverty of spirit, God comes to us, God meets us. It's God's grace that saves us.
Speaker 1:But the significant part here is that it's also God's grace that sanctifies us. Grace is what comes and meets us and pulls us out of our poverty, but it's also grace that begins to shape us and transform us into everything we are meant to be. It's not trying harder. It's not doing better. It's allowing God's love to infiltrate us, to take root in us, and then to begin to shape us in new ways.
Speaker 1:This is the story of the Gospel. It's what God does and what God wants for us and in us. Well, now Jesus says, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Not those who have found righteousness, not those who have mastered righteousness, but those who hunger for it. They thirst for it.
Speaker 1:They have gotten a glimpse of God's goodness. They have a taste of what it means to understand God in the world, and now they want more of it. This is a really compelling idea, but it's one that I think we can miss because often this beatitude gets read is something that we have to once again live up to, that our lives have to be motivated and driven and shaped by righteousness, but that's not really what Jesus is saying. What he's saying here is that once grace gets into us, grace begins to shape us, and we want more and more of it. We want a world that is right.
Speaker 1:We want a life that is right before God. We haven't achieved it yet. We haven't gotten there. But we know that there's something beautiful. It tastes good.
Speaker 1:It's satisfying. And we want more. So when you notice the world around you, that it's not what it could be, but you see how it could be more beautiful, more generous, more kind, when you look at yourself and you recognize how you could be more of the person that you're becoming, that desire in and of itself, that is a blessing. Because it's an imagination of the world. It's an imagination of your story that is in line with God's dream for you.
Speaker 1:The blessing is that our imagination of the world is beginning to align with God's, and that is beautiful. In fact, it's sacred just as it is. Now, it's a process. It's this process that classically in Christian language we have called sanctification. But even the beginning of that, even the glimpse of what could be, this is the blessing of God that comes to us.
Speaker 1:Once, we were mired in an imagination of the world that was so closed off and closed down. It was so small that we could barely even begin to hope for a world that was better. But now that grace has met us, grace has touched us, grace has opened our imagination to everything that God imagines, now our hope, our potential, our ability to see the world in new ways is beginning to blossom and grow and invite us into everything that we could be. So when you look around the world and you see how things could be different, when you see how things could be more beautiful, when you recognize all the areas that you have to change, don't be discouraged by this. Recognize that this is the blessing of God beginning to open your imagination to everything that's possible.
Speaker 1:Are the merciful for they will be shown mercy. And Jesus is on a roll now. He set us up with this idea of grace that comes to us, that meets us, that infiltrates us and changes us. And now he's really starting to begin to talk about what all of that process looks like when it takes root. And the last one, we talked about those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
Speaker 1:They're not there yet, but they want to get more of a taste, more of an experience, more satisfied with what it means to draw close to the divine. Now Jesus says, Blessed are the merciful. Those who grace has begun to shift and change, those who are beginning to live out grace in their lives with those near them. Jesus says, Now you will be shown more of what is taking root inside of you. And this is the beauty of the Gospel, that as we are shown mercy, we become merciful.
Speaker 1:As we are more merciful, we get a better sense of what mercy is all about. And it's this virtuous cycle that draws us up and in and closer to the divine, that draws us up and in and closer to the people that we were meant to be. Again, not because we're trying harder, but because we are becoming who we were always meant to be. And as we take one step, then Jesus meets us there. And as Jesus meets us there, we see ourselves in a new light.
Speaker 1:And as we see ourselves in the new light, we want to take one step farther, and Jesus is there to meet us as well. Every time you show mercy, every time you show grace, you show kindness, every time you extend yourself just beyond yourself, you realize that there's nothing to fear. It's okay to be generous. It's okay to be merciful. It's okay to extend yourself in places you never thought you could because God meets you there and God shows you it was worth it because this is the story of the universe.
Speaker 1:And the more we step into it, the more that we are met and we experience everything God has for us. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. This one's actually kind of a tough one because I think right off the bat, our first instinct is to return to that kind of task list, like measuring up that Jesus is trying to direct us away from. Pure in heart. Even that word pure seems to draw us back into some kind of measurement, like how pure?
Speaker 1:How pure do you have to be? Do you have to be 99.44% pure just like a bar of Dove soap? Or can you be 80% pure? Like, what's the line here? And I think that really goes against everything Jesus has been inviting us into in the Beatitudes so far.
Speaker 1:So the key here is putting this into the context of Jesus' larger teachings. Let me read you a section here. This is from Matthew 25, where Jesus is really going after some of the religious leaders of his day. It's in a section called The Seven Woes. But he says this, Woe to you, teachers of the law, you hypocrites!
Speaker 1:You clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are full of greed and self indulgence. Blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and then the outside will also be clean. And I think when we put it into this larger context of how Jesus talks about cleanliness, purity, these types of ideas, I think we see what he's starting to get at. The idea isn't here that you have to be incredibly pure, you have to be perfect to see God. I think what he's saying is if your expression of religion is really about getting some kind of a claim, if you're into spirituality so that you can be praised by others, you will get what you want out of it.
Speaker 1:But if your intent, your heart, what's on the inside of you is pure, that if your desire is actually to see God, if that's what spirituality is about for you, a pursuit of the divine, then you will achieve it. This is really about what our intent is. Why do we pursue religion? Why do we engage in spirituality? Is it to get something out of it or is it to actually uncover the truth of the universe?
Speaker 1:Because if it is, then you will find what you're looking for. I think you could almost paraphrase Jesus here: Blessed are those who want to see God, for they will see God. That's what purity of heart is about for Jesus. It's about our intent. It's about our aspiration.
Speaker 1:It's about what we're reaching towards. But if your intent with spirituality is to get famous, to be looked up to, to use that as a weapon so that you can push others down and elevate yourself, well, that's what you might get out of it, but you certainly won't see God. And this is what we have to get back to. That for Jesus, this idea of being pure is not about being perfect. It's not about measuring up.
Speaker 1:It's about what we want from our spirituality, what we want from our religion, what we want from our journey in this world. And Jesus is telling you here that if you want to see the divine, you will eventually find your way there. Because the divine is looking for you just as much, in fact even more, than you could ever look for God. Close to the end here, but the seventh beatitude is this. Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God.
Speaker 1:And this one is really powerful because all through the Hebrew scriptures, in fact all through most of human history, the guiding principle when it comes to making peace has been Lex Talionis or the law of retaliation. This idea that the punishment must fit the crime. An eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. This has been the governing human principle for most of human history. It's what has allowed us to maintain some semblance of social order even in the face of evil.
Speaker 1:But now in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is going to upend even our most powerful, our most deeply embedded rules. Alex Talyanus gets thrown out and Jesus says that to an evil person, to someone who slaps you, you turn the other cheek. To someone who demands you go a mile, you go two. That ultimately what we are really trying to do is not find retribution that matches the offense, but instead to bring peace. To create peace even at cost to ourselves.
Speaker 1:And here Jesus says that those who do this are following in the footsteps of God. They are the children of God. Because this is what God does. In fact, this is what all of Jesus' ministry and life, eventually his death, is about. That Jesus is willing to be scapegoated.
Speaker 1:Jesus is willing to have our violence and our retribution absorbed into his story and not to pay it back so that Jesus can show us another way forward. There is more than just just retaliation in the world. There is the way of peace, The way of peacemaking. The way of love and the way of grace and the way of the one who illuminates us to our scapegoating tendencies in the world. This is what it means to be children of God.
Speaker 1:It means to follow in the footsteps of God. It means to be like God in the world. Not only dealing out retribution for pain, but finding new ways to call injustice out, to highlight injustice in the world, to actively take direct nonviolent action against everything that is wrong in the world, but to do it not with more violence, not with more retribution, not with more of what the world has already descended into, but with a new way that leads towards real and true and lasting peace. This is Jesus saying that when you understand everything that God is up to in the world, it will transform how you look at everything, including violence and injustice, and it will lead you to a new way to overcome, to contrast, and ultimately to disarm the power of violence in the world. Are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Speaker 1:And the beauty of the poetry that Jesus uses here is evident as now this final grouping, this final blessing are gifted the kingdom of heaven. The same thing that the poor in spirit were gifted in the very first beatitude. It's like this inclusio that brings us all the way around back to where we began. That the kingdom of God is gifted to all of us. That God comes to all of us.
Speaker 1:That the divine meets all of us and reminds us of how loved we are. And then that same kingdom begins to transform. It begins to inspire. It begins to change us into righteous actors in the world. This is the power of grace.
Speaker 1:That grace is what saves us and grace is what sanctifies, changes, transforms us in the world. But when we look at this one, there's something really important here. We are told that blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness. And there's two things we have to be aware of here. First, they are not blessed because they are persecuted for their righteousness.
Speaker 1:Jesus does not personalize it here. That's not what turns people against them. No, he is talking here about rightness. We have to understand that Jesus is informed by the Jewish story, and in the Jewish imagination, in the Jewish culture, the ideas of righteousness and justice were not separable. So the word in Greek is dikaiosune, but it corresponds to the Hebrew idea tzadek.
Speaker 1:And tzadek was this idea that meant righteousness. But in the Jewish culture, there was not a separate word for your internal, personal rightness with God and your external corporate rightness in the world. Both of those were tzadak. Both of those were righteousness. And when Jesus says, Blessed are those who are persecuted because of rightness, righteousness, and He doesn't personalize it to your righteousness, what He's talking about here is our rightness corporately together in the world.
Speaker 1:And in English, this is what we call justice. This is those of us who work for what is right in the world. We work for justice in the world. And when we work for that, it will upset the status quo and that will threaten some people. When we work for a righteousness in the world, not our righteousness, but a justice among us, that will offend, it will upset, it will overturn the balance of the status quo that works for many people.
Speaker 1:And this is exactly what happens in Jesus' story. The oppressed and the marginalized, they are immediately drawn to the significance of Jesus' message, this kingdom of God that has come to them in their poverty. But those who are powerful, those whom the status quo works for, the wealthy, the powerful politically, the powerful religiously, all of those people, well, they are threatened by Jesus. And they then begin to persecute Jesus because Jesus is challenging this status quo. This is what Jesus ends with here.
Speaker 1:In all the ways that we begin to see the kingdom of God, that we begin to understand the kingdom of God, in all the ways that God's imagination for the world comes to us and reinvents us and reimagines us from the inside out. Well, then we are going to begin to call for that rightness, that right way of being in the world. And that is going to threaten those for whom the world works. When we are persecuted for that, when we are persecuted for standing up for those who are marginalized, voiceless, and powerless, this is when we are blessed. Because this is when we come into alignment with everything that God imagines for the world.
Speaker 1:You are not blessed when you are persecuted for your righteousness because you hold your religion up in front of people and you annoy them or bash them over the head with it. You are blessed when you align your imagination of the world with God's, and you begin to work for those who do not have what you take for granted. You are persecuted when you work for righteousness, when you work for justice. And when you do that, you will find yourself in alignment with this Kingdom of God, this Kingdom of Heaven that comes to all of us equally, just as it did in the first Beatitude. Okay, so that's all the beatitudes.
Speaker 1:We've worked through all eight of them. But what do we do with that now? Well, I think one of the things we want to keep in mind is that these beatitudes are Jesus' declaration for how the world could and should and will one day be. These are not teachings. These aren't telling us how to think about ourselves.
Speaker 1:They're not telling us what we should live up to. This is Jesus making a declaration about the world. That the world can be like this. That if we can allow his words to sink somewhere deep into us, if we can allow our story to then begin to align with God's, that this will begin to describe the world that emerges. And this is really important.
Speaker 1:I think we need to go back through all the beatitudes over and over again and keep reminding ourselves Jesus is not teaching us about us here. Jesus is telling us something about God, something about what God dreams of, something about this kingdom of God that is coming slowly to the world. And every time we go back and we read one of these beatitudes, if we read it through that lens, what is this telling me about God? What is this telling me about what the divine dreams for the world? I think we will continue forever to get new insights and new glimpses, new awareness of what God is doing.
Speaker 1:And then we can use this as the basis to judge and interpret and make sense of everything that Jesus teaches us in the rest of his ministry. That this is Jesus setting the stage from the very first moment. This is what I dream of. This is what I believe the world should be like. This is your Rosetta Stone that will begin to unlock everything that I say and I do, everything, all the action that I take in my life.
Speaker 1:If you can understand what I think about God, all of my choices will begin to make sense to you. And that becomes a really powerful way for us to think about everything that Jesus does. What does this action, what does this saying, what does this parable mean in light of the Beatitudes? The declarations Jesus has already given us about what he dreams about the world. Beatitudes are this sort of strange little piece.
Speaker 1:They're almost like poetry and I think sometimes because of that, because they don't really make sense and they don't seem tangible, we move past them quickly. But when we understand these, as Jesus telling us what Jesus dreams about the world, I think they become instructive for everything that follows in his project and ministry. And for that reason, I really love the Beatitudes and I continue, even at this point in my life, to find new things, to awaken, to new glimpses of what God is doing in the world. Hopefully, as you continue to read them. Now, in this series that we're doing in the Sermon on the Mount, but for years to come, you will continue to get new imagination for God's kingdom, God's dream, right here, right now.