The Jesus Series
The Greatest Sermon Ever
“Blessed”
Matthew 5:3-12 September 12, 2004
Group Participation Time: would you gather into groups of 6-8 or so and work on a brief assignment for me? You’ll need to elect a secretary to record some stuff here. Please do this quickly; take a brief moment and introduce yourselves to one another. You have one minute. Go.
Take a look at Matthew 5; you’ll find the Beatitudes or the “blesseds” there. Here is the assignment: imagine what the Beatitudes would look like if written by someone other than Jesus, someone from contemporary culture. Let me give you a for instance: what if the Beatitudes were written by Donald Trump? What would his list look like?
Blessed are the cunning.
Blessed are the powerful.
Blessed are the efficient.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after the bottom line.
Got the idea? This exercise needs to take a maximum of 3 minutes.
Section 1: Oprah Winfrey
Section 2: A Hollywood producer
Section 3: Rush Limbaugh
Section 4: A group of 16-year-old American teenagers
When we ask this question, we are talking about what we alluded to last week; Jesus, in the Greatest Sermon Ever, answers the question, “what is the good life?” He sure answers it differently than most people would today in American culture, does he not? Blessed are the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the pure in heart…those things don’t sound like popular themes, do they? How is it that the good life can be lived by people like this? Stay tuned! Let’s pray.
Let’s take a look at Matthew 5 and the first portion of the greatest sermon ever. We said last week that the approach we take to this sermon will help us greatly in our understanding of it. It does not represent a list of ethical demands that we might satisfy in order to earn entry into Heaven and eternal life. Rather, it is Jesus’ manifesto of His kingdom; as we’ll see in a moment, the first word that Matthew gives as to the subject of Jesus’ preaching involves the simple declaration, “the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” And our key verse is to be found in Matthew 6:33, where Jesus tells us that our stance must be to seek that kingdom first. Today we begin looking in earnest at it. Stand with me as we read together!
SERMON
Did you recognize the singers as the offering was taken? Here are some of the “blesseds” Paul Simon wrote in 1966:
Blessed are the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on
Blessed are the meth drinkers, pot sellers, illusion dwellers
Blessed are the penny rookers, cheap hookers, groovy lookers
Ready for a revelation? When I preached this a few years ago, I consulted a number of authors and preachers and commentators and built a series of messages, one per Beatitude, around the basic idea that each Beatitude, logically ordered and building successively one upon the next, represented ideals for which we ought to progressively strive as Jesus’ followers. You ready for this? Know what I think now? I think that maybe, just maybe, Paul Simon has got it more correct than some of the commentators! What is Jesus doing in the Beatitudes?
As we said earlier, He is answering questions related to His overarching theme, the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven. It is near to us; it is immanent; it is at hand. But there is one thing that He consistently preached in relation to our preparedness for that kingdom, and we find that by looking back at Matthew 4:19. Notice
I. “Repent” –
The Kingdom’s Condition
“Repent, because the kingdom of heaven is near.” In view of the nearness of the rule and reign of God, the appropriate response, Jesus tells us, is that we repent. What is repentance? The word literally involves a true change of mind—a change of mind about sin, about self, and about God—a true change of mind that issues in a changed way of living if indeed it is real. That’s repentance. It is recognizing the bankruptness of my own way, the ugliness of my own sin, my own unworthiness as a result of my sin, the “error of my ways”. The blessedness that Jesus refers to is reserved for those who meet the kingdom’s condition, that of repentance. And while there is an initial repentance, to be sure, at the event of one’s conversion, for the kingdom subject, an attitude marked by regular repentance is essential. Such an attitude is undergirded by humility, an attitude that honestly appraises oneself in the light of God’s holiness and one’s own sin.
I fear that this is a neglected subject today. We live in an age of therapeutic Christianity, an age wherein we have so much majored on “felt needs” of individuals that perhaps we have neglected weightier matters. I have had times during the past few months when I have thought about that song, “The Heart of Worship”, and about the line that says, “it’s all about You, Jesus, it’s all about You”, and wondered if that’s really true for a lot of Christians, or if in reality, it’s all about them. Too many are approaching the church as consumers and not as committed servants; “what’s in it for me?” becomes the dominating factor. Yes, people need help with principles of raising their children and strengthening their marriages; yes, people need help with financial issues in this consumeristic age. Many are held captive to life-dominating sins, and there is good news for these, and the church ought to help. But at the core, at the root, our need as individuals is to come to terms with our own sin and repent thoroughly of it. That is Jesus’ way. Is there sin in this church? Absolutely. To what degree does our sin hold back the abundant blessing of Almighty God? Hard to say, but if there is unrepented-of sin in our lives, we are not living in accord with the kingdom; we are not living under the Lordship of its King. And thus Jesus’ message to His hearers—and to us—is this: repent, in light of the nearness of the kingdom of heaven.
Now, with that foundation, we move to the second point:
II. “Blessed” –
The Kingdom’s Benefit
Here is the good life of which we spoke last week; Jesus tells us that those who thus live in light and acknowledgement of the kingdom are “blessed”. Some translate this word, as we said last week, as “happy”; I think that in our modern parlance, that word is a little too fluffy for the sense Jesus is trying to get across. “Blessed” involves, in our parlance, a deep sense of joyous fulfillment. Those who are recipients of the kingdom are people who are thereby filled with a joyous sense of fulfillment. I wonder if that is really true for a lot of professing Christians? I wonder if the thing that really, ultimately, trips their trigger is the fact that they are cooperating with the very King of Kings and Lord of Lords as He rules and reigns, and that they experience the eternal, joyful benefits of that. I wonder how many people will sit in churches this day, professing to be followers of Jesus, who are so thrilled that the NFL is kicking off in earnest this afternoon that they can hardly wait until the sermon is over? I wonder how many people who profess to be followers of Jesus really, when it comes down to it, find their deepest fulfillment in a relationship with another person, or in their bank accounts, or in their work, or in their recreation? I wonder, if we sang that old chorus, “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus”, and we got to the part where it says, “take the whole world, just give me Jesus”, how many of us could sing that honestly? I’ve always fantasized that someone could invent a device to use in church that would shut people up every time they sang something that they really didn’t mean. Wouldn’t that be cool?
But Jesus says that there is real fulfillment, real blessing, to be experienced in relationship to one’s acknowledgement of the present-tense reality of God’s rule and reign. Now the question is, just who are the people who are so blessed? What is true of them? What does Jesus mean when he refers to these
III. Different Groups of People –
I believe that the point Jesus is trying to make here involves
The Kingdom’s Availability
I believe that that is what this is all about. Jesus, in His Beatitudes, is announcing a radical truth: the kingdom of Heaven, near as it is, is available to all. Look at the list. As I said earlier, the standard interpretation is that, if we parse these words enough, we will find necessary, ultimately praiseworthy qualities for which we must strive in order to gain entrance into this blessedness. As many scholars see it, these build upon one another, and the upshot is, effectively, “become like this!” And so we preach on the importance of becoming poor in spirit, and mourning, and being meek, and the like. Mourning that leads to meekness will eventually result in a hungering and thirsting after righteousness; those who reach this pinnacle will become merciful, and pure in heart, and peacemakers. Then somehow, though it’s difficult to understand, these merciful, pure, peacemaking people will be persecuted, but in being persecuted for Jesus’ sake, they will be blessed. Of course, there’s a problem there, because if we are speaking of things that ought to be true in order to receive God’s blessedness, we who live in America either have to greatly water down the whole persecution angle, or we have to say that very few of us are really very blessed, or at the very least that we aren’t nearly as blessed as those in other countries who undergo tremendous loss for the Name.
Now, it’s possible that these commentators are correct, that I got it right before, and I’m all wet in what I’m suggesting now. But the problem of interpreting Jesus’ words in this way is compounded by similar teaching as recorded in Luke 6; similar, but a little bit different. There, Jesus says, “blessed are the poor”—not the “poor in spirit”, but just “the poor”. He says, “blessed are the hungry”—period. Blessed are those who weep, and those who are hated for His sake. Now, what I’m thinking is that we miss Jesus’ plain teaching through the paralysis of analysis, that those who were listening to Him speak that day would never in a million years have picked up on the things that we, with benefit of fine-tooth comb analysis, supposedly have picked up. Or are we finding things that just aren’t there? “Blessed are the poor and hungry and crying, etc.”, Jesus says. Do you suppose that what we need to understand is not some terribly deep teaching, but the simple, on-their-face words of a Savior who was announcing that the Kingdom of God was available to all, Who was saying, as Paul Simon put it, “blessed are the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on; the meth drinkers, pot sellers, illusion dwellers; the penny rookers, cheap hookers, and groovy lookers”. Blessed are those who are down and out, because this wonderful kingdom of God is available to losers like them—just as they are, without one plea, but that His blood was shed for them!
Blessedness is not reserved for those who turn Jesus’ words into a “to-do” list, as in “I’ve got to become poor in spirit, and meek, and cry a lot; I’ve got to go hungry and pester someone about Jesus long enough that finally I’ll get slugged right in the kisser!” Instead, if you were one of the poor and hungry and hurting people, the losers, and you heard Jesus say that, in the economy of His kingdom, you would be astonishingly fulfilled and joyfully satisfied, wouldn’t you leap for joy? Does this help explain why the drunks and the hookers and the lowlife tax collectors loved the Man, while the religion boys hated Him?
See, one of the teachings of the times was that material wealth and prosperity were a surefire sign of God’s blessing—unfortunately, the “health and wealth” charlatans on TV have resurrected this for today. If you were poor, so the teaching went, there was clearly something spiritually wrong with you. But Jesus comes on the scene and He says that the nearness of the kingdom is good news for the downtrodden, the rejects of society, available to all. It is not because of these things that one is blessed—as Dallas Willard, one whose insights I drew heavily upon today, puts it—some almost come to the point where Jesus becomes superfluous to His own Beatitudes, as though we could achieve blessedness through a program of self-reformation using these words as a guideline. But the truth is that there are plenty of poor and hungry who never come to Jesus; some who mourn never find blessedness in Christ; some who are meek are just gutless; some who are persecuted because they follow Jesus become embittered and turn away from following. No, these are not conditions to blessedness; rather, I believe that Jesus is announcing that His kingdom is open to all; that no human, regardless of condition, is beyond the possibility of the rich blessing of God. When it is the kingdom of God that I acknowledge and seek, all issues of status or lack thereof fade into irrelevance and oblivion.
The poor in spirit? This isn’t a praiseworthy condition; these are instead spiritual zeroes, people who don’t know their Bibles, who couldn’t find Lamentations with a compass, who would never be called on to pray, who are not thought of as “church people”.
Those who mourn? These are people at their wits’ ends, people who have rung up disappointment after heartache after frustration; these are the clinically depressed, ones whose lives are characterized by pessimism and despair, who find little hope. These are those who live lives of quiet desperation.
The meek? They might be well-meaning, but when push comes to shove, they just get shoved. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness? Perhaps these are the perpetually frustrated, longing for the wrong to fail and the right to prevail, only to see their aspirations dashed again and again. And on down the list, Jesus extends kingdom blessedness to those who wouldn’t seem to qualify, at first blush.
Three brief take-aways: one, this is the good life, the life of blessedness. Contrary to what Wall Street and Madison Avenue and Hollywood and Washington will tell you, life lived under the rule and relgn of the kingdom of God is the blessed life. “Set your affections on things above, not on things on the earth”, Paul tells us. Jesus tells us, later in the sermon, to lay up treasures elsewhere, in heaven, and not on earth. These represent life lived in the kingdom.
Second, repentance is our response to the kingdom. Are you living in open rebellion to the King? This is what sin is, a life lived wherein we are unwilling to acknowledge and turn away from our sin. Jesus gives no quarter on the necessity of this.
Last, here’s the main takeaway today: if you are here, and you’ve not yet decided upon this issue of living your life in submission to the King, perhaps it is because you wonder if you are good enough. Well, there are two answers to that question. The first one is, “no way, no how”; you are not, nor will you ever become, good enough. But the second, according to the Jesus Who announced that the kingdom He was presiding over was open to all, the second answer to the question of whether or not you’re good enough is that the question is as irrelevant as it can be. Who cares if you’re good enough? That’s not who the kingdom is reserved for. The kingdom of which Jesus is the King is open to all!
