Revolutionary Blessedness
A Lectionary Reflection on Matthew 5:1-12 for the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany
This article is adapted from the first chapter of my Lenten series entitled Living an Abundant Life: A Lent Journey through the Sermon on the Mount, which was published last year as a Liturgical and Devotional Guide through Sacredise. Download a free sample or get your copy from Sacredise.
UNCONQUERABLE CHAOS
If you woke up this morning with an unidentifiable sense of generalised anxiety, you are not alone. If you live with a constant concern that you’re not able to bring in quite enough income to cover your family’s needs and provide for a secure future, you are not alone. If your smile hides a broken heart that just won’t seem to heal, you are not alone. If you feel like your life is being swept along in a chaotic maelstrom that is out of your control, you are not alone. If you can’t shake your grief and fear at the conflict, corruption, and lack of compassion that seem to have permeated our world, you are not alone. And if you are tired of the empty promises of faith leaders who portray Jesus as a cure for every woe, you are not alone.
One of the most harmful and disillusioning ideas to come out of Christianity in the last few decades is the idea that faith is supposed to protect us from the world’s turbulence and give us a calm, prosperous, and joyful life. Many evangelists have tried to ‘sell’ Jesus by promising health, wealth, and happiness, but they seem completely disinterested when their guarantees come to nothing for their followers. Even our vision of the heavenly afterlife is based on this dream of a carefree existence in which we have everything we want and are troubled by nothing. The truth is that the dream of an unchanging, blissful life is a fantasy. It is never promised in the Scriptures, and it is unattainable in this universe. There’s a reason for that: the creation and evolution of life require chaos. Or, in the words of John Briggs and David F. Peat, “chaos is nature’s creativity.”1
Most of us have a negative perception of chaos. We see it as destructive and caused by evil and sin. In the Hebrew Scriptures, chaos was often portrayed as that which resisted or had not yet come under God’s order. In the first creation account in Genesis, we are told that, when God began creating the heavens and the earth, everything was formless, shapeless, and dark. God’s creative act, then, was not so much about bringing things into being from nothing, but about bringing order into chaos.2 The sea was often viewed as a place of chaos, and the Gospel writers used Jesus’ calming of the storm and the waves to demonstrate his divine authority to impose order on the unpredictable natural world.3
In keeping with these ancient ideas, we often view the chaos in our lives as something to overcome and eradicate, but we soon discover that this is easier said than done. As David F. Peat and John Briggs write:
At one time or another, we’ve all felt our lives were out of control and heading toward chaos. For us, science has striking news. Our lives are already in chaos—and not just occasionally, but all of the time.4
What this means is that the way of Jesus was never meant to lead us to a life of comfort and ease. Rather, it was always meant to teach us how to find abundant life in the midst of our chaos.
When Jesus began his ministry, his first ‘sermon’, according to both Matthew and Mark, was “Change your hearts and lives! Here comes the kingdom of heaven!” (Matt. 4:17; cf. Mk. 1:15 CEB).5 The word which the Common English Bible translates as “change your hearts and lives” is usually translated as “repent.” This is a word that has fallen out of fashion in our times, for good reasons. For many of us, it evokes a sense of heaviness and self-recrimination. In response, we can feel pressured to become spiritual high-achievers who overcome all inner and outer chaos. But this approach will not make us better followers of Jesus, or better people. I prefer to think of repentance—or the much clearer “change your heart and lives”—as an invitation; an opportunity to embrace and embody the life and values of Jesus in the midst of our world’s chaos, turmoil, and mess. It is a practice that is intended to help us develop our skills of compassion, connection, and creativity in the face of everything that seeks to deaden, disconnect, and destroy us. This brings us to Jesus’ mandate for his life and mission: the Sermon on the Mount, which is the Lectionary Gospel reading for the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, and begins with the much misunderstood Beatitudes.
BLESSED ARE…
The revolutionary message of the Sermon on the Mount has largely been ignored or misunderstood in our world. On one of the highways near my home, there is a massive billboard with the words “The best sermon ever preached,” and a reference to Matthew 5, 6, and 7. But the image on the billboard is of a medieval soldier dressed in full armour kneeling with his sword in front of him. And the church which erected this billboard is called Soldiers for Christ. Every time I drive past it, I think about how much they have completely missed Jesus’ point. In a far more dangerous way, though, the US Department of Homeland Security recently posted a video of American helicopters, paratroopers, and other forces on military operations with the words “Blessed are the peacemakers...For they shall be called the sons of God” from Matthew 5:9 (NKJV) appearing on screen. This doesn’t just miss Jesus’ point. It distorts it beyond recognition.6 These two examples of how the Beatitudes can be disastrously (mis)interpreted reveal the importance of doing the work to grasp what Jesus was saying here, and how it fits into his new, alternative revolution.
The first thing you may notice when reading Matthew 5:1-12 is that the people Jesus calls ‘blessed’ are those who are often considered cursed in our world. To be poor, whether financially or spiritually, is never seen as a blessing in our society. Grief, hunger, thirst, and persecution are usually viewed as curses. And while we may pay lip service to the idea that it is good to be humble and to work for peace and justice, these things are seldom spoken of as blessings. We live in a capitalist culture that views health, wealth, fame, and status as signs of God’s blessing and their opposites as signs of God’s judgment for some imagined sin. But in his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus invites us to reimagine what blessedness looks like. As Raj Nadella puts it, “Jesus clarifies that it is precisely the poor, the sick and the meek that are entitled to the blessings of the new kingdom.”7
