Reading: Matthew 5:1-12
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is presented as a
new Moses for the people of God – someone who leads them out of our imprisonment
to both Rome and Jerusalem (to state and church), to be free for the ways of
the kingdom of God.
Just as Moses led the people through the Red Sea and
then to the Jordan, so Jesus joined them in crossing the Jordan to new life on
the other side.
Just as Moses went up on a mountain to see the
glory of God, so Jesus went up on a mountain to be the glory of
God.
And just as Moses came down with a law for the
people to live, Jesus came down … not with a list of laws, but
with a list of blessings for people who felt like they were
failures in the world’s eyes, and a promise that maybe their awareness of
failure was exactly what made them people of God.
"Blessed are the poor ... are the meek ... and are the peace-makers..." he says. Or, as Monty Python says he says in The Life of Brian, "blessed are the Greek ... and the cheese-makers..." It's always interesting how things get heard and remembered.
Even among the Gospel writers. Like when Luke recalls Jesus blessing the poor, and making it clear he means the poor in wealth, resources and worldly power; while Matthew remembers Jesus blessing "the poor in spirit." Quite a different thing.
Some see Matthew and Paul alike as having to deal with churches that were very much caught up in the charismatic-celebrity thing -- the all-too-worldly tendency to look up to, and bow down to those in a community who seem to be especially gifted, learned, dominant, full of answers for everyone, and always more than ready to take charge of things -- those who are "rich in spirit." Those who leave the rest of us usually feeling somewhat envious, or inferior, or not as important, smart or "spiritual."
That is, until Jesus -- Son of God, no less, and the Messiah to boot, comes along, looks us all over, and says, "Blessed are you who are poor in spirit, who don't have it all together, who really struggle sometimes with all this God and spirit and faithful living stuff. Thank God for you! Cuz it's you who are at the door and know the way in to the kingdom of heaven."
Not many choose
to be broken. Nor to be emptied and
poor. To be bereft, and have their life
fall apart.
But it
happens. To all of us. Because of life, because of the world,
because of other people, even sometimes because of ourselves we end up in some
situation like that, and worse.
It’s worse if in
whatever we suffer, we also feel alone – cut off from God and from other
people. And that happens too, because of
the ways we see God sometimes and because other people aren’t always very good
at staying and being with us in the midst of the brokenness, the pain, and the
emptiness. It’s not where we want to be
ourselves – on the dark side of God; why would others want to be there with us?
Which makes it
all the more radical and graciously overturning of the way the world (and the
church?) usually works when at the very beginning of his ministry in the Gospel
of Matthew, Jesus looks out over the poor and the sorrowful souls of Galilee and
says,
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.
And
so on…blessed are you and blessed are others
who
are broken, empty, powerless, alone and in need one way or another,
for God is yours and you are
God’s,
and it is you who are blessed
and a blessing.
Sometimes in our
desire to be good and rewarded with blessing by God we interpret these
blessings as commands. As a kind of law
or a self-help self-improvement manual.
So we can go about trying to cultivate poverty of spirit, mournfulness,
meekness, a thirst for righteousness and so on, thinking if we manage to
cultivate these attitudes and ways of being we’ll earn God’s favour and be
among the blessed. And it can’t be wrong
for us to see the spiritual value of a little more humility and openness to
pain.
But what if Jesus
is more simply just saying to those who are already broken down and broken open
by life, by other people around them and by their own human sinfulness, “Blessed
are you, for in your need, your powerlessness, your vulnerability and your lonely
sorrow you are opened to grace, to God and to holy and healing community in
ways we cannot imagine nor create for ourselves, and can only choose to embrace
when they come.”
Anne Lamott calls
it a holy openness to “the gift of failure.”
A minister named
David Lose (an interesting name, given the context) puts it this way: “Jesus isn't setting up conditions or terms [of
holy living] but rather is just plain blessing people. All kinds of people. That is, all kinds of down-and-out, extremely
vulnerable, and at the bottom of the ladder people. Why? To
proclaim that God regularly shows up in mercy and blessing just where you least
expect God to be -- with the poor rather than the rich, those who are mourning
rather than celebrating, the meek and the peacemakers rather than the strong
and victorious. This is not where
citizens of the ancient world look for God and, quite frankly, it's not where
citizens of our own world do either. And
if God shows up here, Jesus is saying, blessing the weak and the vulnerable,
then God will be everywhere, showering all creation and its inhabitants with
blessing.”
The word
translated “blessed” in most English translations is the Greek word “markarios”
and it can also be translated “happy.”
But markarios is not just fleeting, circumstantial earthly happiness; it
refers to the celestial bliss of the gods, a life free from the work and
worries of the world. So used of human
life in this world, it refers to a bliss somehow above, beyond, or at least not
determined by the cares of life. It’s the
blessing and joy of a person who is self-contained and who somehow deeply knows
themselves to be right with God independent of external circumstance.
Ever wonder how you get there, though?
A few years ago Japhia and I saw a
film documentary called “Happy.” The
start of the film outlines scientific findings that a basic feeling of
happiness in life is about 50% genetically determined. We all have a 50/50 chance of being basically
happy or unhappy. Beyond that, our life
situation and circumstances – the things we work hardest for and think are the
most important to happiness, like job, money, health, friends, family,
meaningful activities, are of about 10% importance to a basic feeling of
happiness. Only 10% !! The rest – the final 40% that really tips the
balance one way or the other, is behaviour and attitude. Our choices and our spirit.
And that’s what the rest of the film
is about – little life-sketches of maybe 20 persons around the world from a
Louisiana swamp to a Tibetan cliff village, from a small Danish co-op to a cardboard
camp on the edge of Kolkotta near the garbage dump. All of whom profess to be, and truly are
happy. Most are poor; some have suffered
terrible accidents and losses; few have any real chance of what we call
“improvement.”
One story I remember
is that of Manoj Singh, a rickshaw driver in the slums of Kolkotta. By day he runs and pulls people through the city
streets on his rickshaw; by night he comes home to his family’s little
cardboard shack in a village of hundreds (if not thousands) of side-by-side
cardboard shacks. His is protected from
the rain in monsoon season by a tarp (he’s so thankful for the tarp), and
through the rest of the year it’s the most wonderful home he can imagine
because there is a window in one wall, lovely air flow through the shack, and
the chance to enjoy life there with his son, his son’s baby daughter, and the
good neighbours they have all around them.
“I feel that I am not poor,” he says, “because I am the richest person. Sometimes we eat only rice with salt, but
still we are happy.”
This week I had
the pleasure of being included in the Quilt Club tea time. Almost a dozen women were there, and at one
point in the conversation over tea and cookies, for a few minutes there was a
sharing of story after story of deep woe.
It began with questions about Melissa’s aneurism and her current
condition, and from there quickly went to someone’s friend’s brain cancer, to a
growth on someone else’s pituitary putting pressure on the optic nerve, to how
traumatic and terrible one of the member’s move has been from her home to a
condo, to an acquaintance of someone else who after years of sad singlehood
finally and miraculously was engaged to be married only for her fiancé to die suddenly
and mysteriously before they could be married.
As the stories added up, the room grew
darker and sadder. And the fellowship
and sense of community around the table grew deeper and stronger. More holy and heavenly. Then without fixing or resolving anything,
after a few minutes of quiet togetherness one of the women shyly turned on her
phone, found a picture she said she had been waiting for a good time to share,
and quietly passed around the ultrasound of a new great-grand-daughter.
“Blessed are you,” Jesus says,
“who are poor
in spirit,
who know how
to mourn,
who are
familiar with, and okay with powerlessness,
who know what
it’s like to long for justice and righteousness,
for you are the ones
who know the
kingdom of heaven on Earth,
who are
blessed by God,
who are filled
in ways beyond merely human imagining,
who are the
ones able to live in, and live out
the mercy, the peace and the love of
God for all on the face of the Earth.”
And it’s not a law, nor a
self-improvement program. We don’t have
to run out and find ways of making ourselves poor in spirit or bereft and
sorrowful. We do have to learn, though,
not to run or hide from such things.
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