The beatitudes

As much as anywhere, I attend an ELCA congregation near my home. I’m drawn to traditional Lutheran emphasis on tangible means of grace, as opposed to the magical and invisible transformations implied in Calvinist soteriology. And the other blessing of Luther’s conflict with Zwingli, is in identifying our source of confidence in God’s intervention. Zwingli would look inward, following John’s first epistle, for evidence of something distinctive within ourselves. Luther would look backward, to God’s tangible, historical demonstrations of Grace, and their extension to us by Sacrament.

A long introduction to a silly comment on the Beatitudes, but recently, our Sunday School took up Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship, where he takes a very un-Lutheran pietistic view. And I think our common reception of the Beatitudes is pietistic, approaching ascetic. And I’ve come to reject that.

Jesus was crowded by people wanting a piece of Him. He climbs a mountain for solitude, not a pulpit to the masses. He’s speaking, perhaps after some solitary reflection, to those who made an effort to follow. To maybe minister to their weary Reb Joshua, rather than the “Gimme” crowd. And Jesus surveys that motley bunch of humanity, to which the ordinary assessment might be “There, but for the Grace of God, go I”. The assumption that their many disabilitie make them somehow accursed, and ministry to them some vanity as far as having any influence, and more done for the sake of pietistic brownie points. I’ve shared poems here…. this reminds me of one suited to the Advent season.

I’m just going to link to it, not liking what this editor does to poetry.

http://www.thestarlitecafe.com/poems/90/poem_694965.html

Anyhow…. what Jesus is teaching in beatitude form usually linking piety to prosperity is turning it around. “These people are blessed, because, my friends, through them God’s glory is to be exhibited through our ministry. They are no longer bywords of God’s curse, but persons awaiting a blessing — a transformation. The one I was sent to bring.” (some people think it vain of me to speak extrapolated paraphrase of Christ in the first person. I apologize for the temerity of my rhetorical device)

The Beatitudes, I believe, are best understood through the prism of John 9:14-41.

A puff away from 3 packs a day

Samlcarr made reference to “hungering and thirsting after righteousness” in the discussion of his post ‘Ramifications”. Since the etymology of “righteousness” and “iniquity” is something I obsess upon, I wondered if a change of context wouldn’t help the theologizing.

6 makarioi oi peinōntes kai dipsōntes tēn dikaiosunēn oti autoi chortasthēsontai

dikaiosunÄ“n — or in Strongs — dikaiosune (1343)

• in a broad sense: state of him who is as he ought to be, righteousness, the condition acceptable to God

  1. the doctrine concerning the way in which man may attain a state approved of God
  2. integrity, virtue, purity of life, rightness, correctness of thinking feeling, and acting
• in a narrower sense, justice or the virtue which gives each his due

And I have to say that I’m inclined, whenever I see “righteousness” in the Bible to favor the second definition — better decribed as “justice”.

Strongs places first, though — what might suggest v. 6 as “greedy for what makes me right in God’s eyes”. And the traditional pietistic exegesis of the Beatitudes would support that. (and my Calvinist bias rebels against). But it was my own bias toward reading this as “justice” that I was led to propose the exegetical slant above. This is a rabble who craves justice, social justice… and Jesus tells his closest disciples — “That’s what I came for”. Craving gone — injustices (often, among other things, translated as “iniquity”) corrected. A new ethic where the favored are favored for their service, not for their status.

A puff away from 3 packs a day

Thank you for your stimulating essay on the beatitudes. I think your study of the beatitudes and mine have run on parallel tracks. I’d like to pick up on a statement you made, “Jesus’ approval of peacemakers no doubt implies disapproval of the activity of the militants or zealots who sought to bring about the kingdom of heaven - to save Israel - by violent means.” I have come to believe that there is a strong polemical element to the beatitudes, as Jesus is presenting us a new definition of Israel and a new eschatological hope for Israel that is in distinction from the competing revolutionary and eschatological hopes of his day.

When Jesus blessed the spiritually poor and the mourners and those who hunger and thirst for justice (meaning they aren’t currently seeing it), I believe he’s addressing precisely those who were caught in the middle between Roman compromise and the flavor of revolutionary zeal. Jesus blessed the meek and claimed they would inherit the land, not the zealots, who sought it by force. Jesus blessed the “pure in heart,” not those who thought purity of outward ritual, thinking by overachieving there, they might bring a son of David to bring the revolution hoped for.

There simply is no room to follow the path of the Saducees and seek political compromise until God decides to act; there’s no room for the zealots’ hope in a national revolution; there’s no room for the Pharisaical hope for purity; and there’s no room for an Essene withrawal from society until God intervenes. Believers in Jesus’ eschatological vision are defined as those who show mercy and seek peace in the midst of the oppression and injustice that occurs all around them. And that’s a recipe for persecution, for followers of Jesus will not enlist in these competing revolutionary schemes. In fact, I believe the beatitudes were Jesus’ roadmap to execution, and yet also for true revolution—as those who follow in the wake of his resurrection display the values of the kingdom to a world in darkness and injustice with the same hope he gave us that we will share in the kingdom of God when it comes in its fulness.