Introduction: The Beatitudes

There are all sorts of things that could be said about the Beatitudes by way of introduction, but I would like to note only two of them:

Firstly, the Beatitudes speak to us of the countercultural nature of the Kingdom of God and therefore the life of discipleship. The first group of people – the poor, the hungry, those who weep and are persecuted – are the ones who would be thought of in our world as cursed not blessed. And the second group – the rich, the full, the praised – are those who would be considered blessed and not cursed. And yet, as far as Jesus is concerned, it is in fact the other way around. Translation: Jesus is introducing us to a completely different value system to the one we are used to.

Secondly, the word translated here “blessed”, makarios, refers not only to a future state of happiness but to a present one also. Christ is saying that those who are hungry, poor, weeping and persecuted will not only be compensated in the future but are actually blessed now and therefore can rejoice now.

Christ says about this, “Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven.” In other words, the blessing of the future and the hope that we have in God is enough to make us happy now. We are like wealthy heirs and heiresses, happy and secure because we know we will inherit the vast family estate. We don’t have it all now but we have some of it and we know we will have all of it soon.

There’s an old Syriac translation of one of the Beatitudes that captures this, “Happy it is for the poor in spirit, that theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Life Without God: Poor and Weeping

Let’s have a look at some of the Beatitudes in Luke and see what they mean. Firstly, blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” To cut a long story short, Jesus does not mean that people who are economically poor are blessed. That view might even promote the idea that poverty makes people happy, which it certainly does not.

Jesus is not romanticised the hell of serious economic hardship. There are two keys to helping us understand what he does mean. Firstly, Isaiah 66:2, “But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is poor and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word”. We can pair this Scripture with the same Beatitude recorded in Matthew’s Gospel but in a slightly longer form: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The poor, in other words, are not those who lack basic physical necessities, but the humble and pious who seek the presence of God and who recognise the poverty of their existence without him.

Contrast this with the “rich” spoken of by Christ. They have received their consolation. Why? Because whatever it is that makes them rich in this world is all that they have. They don’t know God and their wealth or their status or their pleasures or whatever they have is all that they have. And so woe to them because they do not have the only thing that matters ultimately.

A similar thing can be said of those who weep now, for they shall laugh later. There are many types of weeping. Those who weep in despair and hopelessness, those who weep in grief and physical pain and not those in view here. Rather Christ speaks of those who weep over their sin, who desire to overcome it, who are frustrated and anxious only because of their wayward hearts. As the old hymn says, ‘Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love.’ Do you feel grief over your sin? Do you wish to put it away and never to repeat it? Do you feel shame and the desire to know the presence of God in your life again? Although these feelings are not what one could call positive they actually indicate a position of spiritual blessedness. True repentance leads to forgiveness, reconciliation with God through Jesus Christ and, yes, even laughter. As the old Psalm says, ‘…weeping tarrieth for the night, but joy cometh in the morning.’

In this sense those who are poor in spirit and those who grieve and mourn over sin are the same: they are those who are not content with a life without God.

Hunger for God: A Desire for Righteousness

“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied.” Once again, Christ does not mean physical hunger. There is nothing blessed about being hungry and starving. As the great Middle Eastern scholar Kenneth Bailey reminds us, Christ is using “words rooted in physical needs to describe spiritual realities”. Here we can find the meaning once again by looking to the slightly longer form in Matthew’s Gospel: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” They hunger and thirst not for physical food and drink but for righteousness.

Consider physical hunger or thirst. What effect does it have? Can you remember a time when you really felt it? Taken to a certain extreme it brings about a sense of total preoccupation: the stomach churns and cries out for sustenance. The mind cannot think of anything else but to obtain food or drink. And the soul grows weary at the constant sense of gnawing hunger. In other words, there is a certain single-mindedness that hunger and thirst produce in us: we must have food, we must have drink, and we must have it above all else. This is the type of hunger in the spiritual realm Christ is speaking about: we must have the presence of God, we must obtain holiness, or else we will be empty and dissatisfied. And not only once, but continually, for hunger and thirst constantly reappear throughout our lives.

Those who hunger and thirst will be satisfied with a sense of God’s presence as they are continually fed by the Word of God and the Sacraments now and in the everlasting presence of God when they enter his Kingdom.

Many of you will be aware that this Sunday is called Septuagesima, which is the Third Sunday Before Lent. Lent is a special time in which we voluntarily take upon ourselves disciplines that will cause some sense of hunger and thirst, some desire for something which we deny ourselves: Why? Because we are training our souls to desire God above even the good gifts that he gifts us in this world. We are saying to ourselves: I will deprive myself of that which will satisfy me in the physical realm so that I might more earnestly and with greater desire seek spiritual consolation.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Death for God: Persecution and Hatred

Finally, the middle of these Beatitudes reveal what all of this is about: loyalty to the person of Jesus Christ: “Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.”

When we are persecuted and hated for Christ we enter the company of the Old Testament prophets who were persecuted for righteousness. We even see that the persecution they underwent was in some way pointing forward to the persecution that Christians would undergo as they are persecuted for following their Lord Jesus Christ.

We must be prepared therefore to realise that, to live for Christ in this world, may very well entail hatred, rejection, and persecution. This may be subtle in our culture: a sense of the cold shoulder, not being promoted as quickly as we might otherwise have been, the refusal to accept certain speech codes resulting in a sense of one being on the outside, and so on. But it will nevertheless be real.

But recognise that this persecution is a byproduct of faithfulness to Christ. We do not seek to be hated. Indeed we are instructed in the Scriptures in various ways to live at peace with all men to the extent that we can. When we are hated, therefore, we are hated not for wickedness and evil, not for trolling and antagonising our enemies, but for righteousness, for loyalty to Christ.

And we should not forget the very real situation of our Christian brothers and sisters who are persecuted throughout the world. The great scholar I mentioned earlier makes this point emphatically:

When praying for the persecuted church, one thing I often ask is that we might be encouraged by the witness of the martyrs – both those who have died through the millennia for the faith and those who continue to die today – that we may be encouraged to imitate something of their example in the comparatively small challenges that we face in our world today. May something of their faith, something of their courage, something of their commitment, be born in our hearts who have it so easy by comparison. May we be willing too to die for God as they are willing.

Be comforted therefore, if you are poor in spirit, if you tremble at the word of God, if you weep over your sin, if you hunger and thirst for righteousness, if you are hated on account of the Son of Man, for yours is true joy and yours in the Kingdom of Heaven

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.