Blessed? Really!? (Matthew 5:1-12)

4th Sunday after Epiphany - A
Matthew 5:1-12
January 30, 2011

Blessed? Really!?

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

These Beatitudes are not among my most favorite parts of the Bible. Maybe it’s because I had to memorize them when I was in confirmation some forty-six years ago. I am a still a part of the church in spite of, rather than because of, my confirmation experience. The classes consisted of thirteen weeks of Wednesday after-school meetings with the pastor, an imposing man of whom I was afraid. The twelve or fifteen of us sat around a square of tables and listened to him drone on about that week’s chapter in our textbook. That mind-numbing boredom, though, came as a blessed relief. The first thing that happened each session was that each of us would take a stab at the weekly memory assignment. All together, we had nine memory assignments: the books of the Old Testament, the books of the New Testament, the names of the twelve apostles, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, Psalm 23, Psalm 100, the Apostles’ Creed, and, yes, the Beatitudes.

There is nothing wrong with memory work, but it was mortifying to stand up in front of the class and individually struggle to recite our latest piece, especially when I was not prepared, which, let’s face it, was most of the time. Once, in fact, I procrastinated so thoroughly that Wednesday came around and I hadn’t even looked at the assignment. What made it worse was that this particular Wednesday happened to be my birthday. I regarded this predicament as a lousy gift from the universe, so I appealed to its Maker. I prayed something like, “God, if you’ll get me out of this somehow, I promise I’ll do all of the rest of the assignments on time.”

If you ask me I will tell you that this is not a good way to pray. Making bargains with God is a bad idea on several levels. But I’ll say this: that Wednesday was the only snow day I remember from my elementary school days! I learned a valuable lesson from this: Whenever I am in a jam of my own making for which I—and no one else—am entirely responsible, I can always pray and somehow God will get me out of it, even if it means redirecting global weather patterns.

I’m kidding! It’s not true. But that was the lesson I took away and I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to unlearn it. So, kids, do not try this at home. And do not say to me, “But you said...” Just make sure you remember all of what I said.

Okay, back to the Beatitudes. I find them impossible. They stand my world on its head. The don’t make any sense. “Blessed are those who mourn...blessed are the meek...blessed are the merciful...blessed are the peacemakers...” Remember, “blessed” isn’t a word that describes some other-worldly thing. The word describes, according to my dictionary, “the privileged recipient of divine favor.” Another translation of the word is simply “happy.” “Happy are those who mourn...” What? “Happy are those who mourn?” Jesus, are you kidding me? “Those about whom people say all sorts of nasty things are the privileged recipients of divine favor?” Really??

I guess we should be grateful that we aren’t stuck with Luke’s version of these. How about this?

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.
“Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.
“Blessed are you when people hate you...¹

And, just in case there was any doubt, just in case we thought we saw a little wiggle room there are four woes to match the four blessed’s:

“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
“Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.
“Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.
“Woe to you when all speak well of you...”²

These are hard words for us. We like to laugh. We like to have people speak well of us. We like a good meal with plenty of the foods that we like to eat. We may not aspire to being rich, but we like having a little money. We don’t want to be grief-stricken, to have the people we love stripped away from us. We don’t want to be hungry, I mean the hunger we have when we haven’t eaten for a day or more and don’t know where our next meal is coming from. We don’t want to be hungry like that. We don’t like it when people say nasty things about us. In short, it’s really hard for us to call the state the Jesus describes for us as something to be sought after, even if we would then be “the privileged recipients of divine favor.” If that’s divine favor, I think I’d rather go without.

Scholars are pretty much agreed that Luke’s version of the Beatitudes (with matching Woes) is older and lies closer to Jesus than the version in Matthew. We can certainly sympathize with the members of the early Jesus followers who read Luke’s words and said, “Are you sure this is right? Are you sure that’s what he meant?”

When Christians who were well enough off not to be able to call themselves poor—we think maybe in Antioch—when these better-off Christians first heard someone say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit...” and “blessed those who hunger and thirst for justice...” we can easily imagine them saying, “Oh, so that’s what he meant! The poor in spirit.”

We all have our little tricks, you know, to avoid the more uncomfortable ways of reading the text. The move that the members of the First United Methodist Church of Antioch made even has a name. It’s called “spiritualizing.” We take a text that has a clear economic or political message and we turn it into something spiritual and therefore safer and more comfortable.

More comfortable, maybe, but not entirely comfortable.

We can turn these words into pretty little plaques. We can embroider or cross-stitch them on fine cloth and frame them for our walls. We can even decorate them with cutesy Precious Moments figures. But the words are still hard: meekness, mercy, purity of heart, poverty of spirit—these are not in vogue today. Meekness is not a useful virtue on Wall Street. Poverty of spirit is not what we look for in our leaders. Mercy is not a trait that is valued in a time of war. The paparazzi do not swarm around the pure of heart. These are all profoundly counter-cultural aspirations.

The Beatitudes describe someone who has been stripped of everyone and everything they love and depended on: these are those who mourn. They describe the state of someone who has so little to lose that they are willing to risk whatever is left for the sake of justice. They hunger and thirst for it. They want it so badly they can taste it.

Standing outside of that state, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like inside. I suppose we’re seeing some of it on our televisions and in the YouTube videos from Egypt. We’re having a hard time imagining a state in which the present is so bad that we would be willing to risk what little we have left—our bodies and our lives—for the sake of a better future for our poor and shackled nation. But Janis Joplin sang it right: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”³

If we were free, free enough to enter the world of the Beatitudes, we might find that we were able to become that rarest of human beings, the peacemaker. Wouldn’t that be something to see? And wouldn’t that be something for the world to see?

I confess to you, my brothers and sisters, that I am afraid of the world that Jesus offers us. I have so much to lose, you see. But I’m also unwilling to let go of Jesus’ words.

Or maybe that’s the wrong way to say it. It’s never really been up to me to decide whether to hang on to them or not. They won’t let me go. They hold out a dream that won’t die. I am haunted by the “blessedness” that Jesus describes and offers. So I have hope that grace will overcome my fear.

I have hope and I have something else, too. And so do you, if you want to be a part of this. We have each other, you know. We have each other to encourage each other, to egg each other on, to exert some positive peer pressure on each other.

So here’s the deal. I promise to take some risks in following Jesus. Will you promise to egg me on? I will urge you on if you take some risks in following Jesus. Will you promise to take some? If we do this, if we encourage each other in the profoundly counter-cultural gesture of following Jesus, we have Jesus’ promise that we, too, will be the oddly “privileged recipients of divine favor,” that we, too, will be blessed. It sounds scary. But it also sounds good.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1Luke 6:20-22.

2Luke 6:24-26.

3Kristofferson, Kris and Fred Foster, “Me and Bobby McGee,” Combine Music Corp., 1969, recorded by Janis Joplin for her album Pearl in 1970.