August 11, 2013 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Really?

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 24
Matthew 5:1–12

“Rejoice and be glad.”
Matthew 5:12 (NRSV)

There is an almost Zen-like quality to these statements: riddles given by the master to make us redefine our reality. He praises what we would normally avoid—hunger and mourning—so that we need a new life paradigm to understand what he is saying.

Richard Rohr

One of my favorite movies is one that was produced in 1979 with the title Monty Python’s Life of Brian. I wonder if any of you know of that movie. It was a comedy, of course. If you know the Monty Python genre you’d understand that. In many ways it was a satire on Hollywood’s penchant for producing those huge biblical epics. In many ways Life of Brian is also an indictment on religious close-mindedness and bigotry. It was controversial when it first came out. The movie begins with the birth of Brian in Nazareth at the same that there is another birth in Nazareth. And it turns out that the magi bringing their gifts first come to Brian’s stable and then realize they are in the wrong place and hurriedly retrieve the gifts and go to the right stable, which is bathed in light. At one point in the movie, which tracks Brian’s life with that of Jesus, Brian and his friends find themselves on the edge of the crowd who are listening to the Sermon on the Mount. You can see Jesus in the distance and barely hear him offering these words of blessedness that we find in the Beatitudes. Brian and his friends at the end can barely hear, and their dialogue at one point goes like this:

“What was that he said?”

“I think it was blessed are the cheese makers.”

“But what’s so special about the cheese makers?”

“Well, obviously this is not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.”

That, folks, is a brilliant satire on the history of the interpretation of the Bible.

There were people who complained about this movie. There were in states in this country that banned it from being shown because they believed it was blasphemous, but to my mind, all those who complained about Life of Brian as making fun of religion or being hurtful or blasphemous simply got it wrong.

C. H. Spurgeon was probably the most famous preacher in England during the Victorian period, and when he was asked, “Why do you defend the Bible?” he replied, “Defend the Bible? I would as soon defend a lion. Unchain it, and it will defend itself.” The reality is that the actual words in the Sermon on the Mount are much more radical, much more controversial than anything that the Python crew could do.

Matthew’s Gospel is set out in such a way that there are five major sections where Jesus is teaching, where Jesus is giving discourses. This is the first of them. Jesus has just begun his ministry and called his disciples and done some healing, and then he launches into this first major piece of teaching. It’s important to recognize that Matthew identifies this as being one of the primary aspects of Jesus’ ministry—that of a teacher. The Sermon on the Mount we call it. Mountains are places where holy things happen in scripture. Jesus going up to the mountain is a reminder of Moses being on Mount Sinai and receiving the Torah, the law of God. Here in this first section, known as the Beatitudes—from the Latin word for “blessing”—we have Jesus offering this proclamation of God’s blessing, this litany of those whom Jesus said God’s favor is upon.

It was popular at one point in translations of the Bible to translate the word blessed as “happy”: so “happy are those who mourn for they will be comforted.” But I dislike that, and I think it’s much better to think of this differently, because blessed is a difficult word as well. Think of it as Jesus offering this litany of people “upon whom God’s favor rests.” The extraordinary, radical, and controversial thing about this litany is that those whom God favors are people who all live in some liminal or marginal human condition.

The Beatitudes express a religion of the margins. God’s favor is upon the poor in spirit, those who struggle to believe in God and God’s promises and the hope that God brings. That maybe speaks to some of us gathered here this morning. God’s favor is upon those who mourn, who know loss—not just, I believe, the individual experience of loss of a loved one, but also those who mourn a world that has moved away from where God would want it to be aligned, a world that has become a more individualistic and competitive place. God’s favor is upon the meek, the simple, those who know their station in life. God’s favor is upon those who seek righteousness, that difficult biblical word that really just means to be in right relationship—those who are seeking to be in right relationship with God. God’s favor is upon the merciful, the kind. God’s favor is on the pure in heart, those who are childlike in their faith. God’s favor is upon the peacemakers, on those who stand up against violence in this violent world. And God’s favor is upon the persecuted, on those who are the sufferers of violence. Rejoice and be glad, says Jesus of those in these conditions. Really, Jesus? Really? It is those who live in these conditions who receive God’s favor? In these miserable states of being?

Now it is important, I think, for us to clarify what’s happening here in these sayings. The scholars of grammar tell us that Jesus here is speaking in the indicative and not the imperative. What does that mean? It means that Jesus is describing a current state of being. Jesus is not saying to his hearers or to us that these are commands that you must carry out. Jesus is not saying to us you must be mourning or poor in spirit. Jesus is offering a word of hope for those who find themselves in such marginalized states. Beatitudes, this list of blessings, of blessedness, bring hope for those who are not valued in the terms of the world’s value. What we have here in this list, in this foundational text of our faith, is the very clash of God’s reign, of the promised coming kingdom, with the world’s understanding of what it means to be blessed.

This litany of blessedness is that which we hold up against those who would preach a “prosperity gospel,” one that says that God’s blessing comes upon us when are wealthy and when we acquire things. The Beatitudes means that there is no place for that. I recently came across a book that I have had for some years, but I have not read for a while. It’s a profound and touching anthology of sermons preached on the occasion of the death of a child or a young adult. It’s titled The Incomplete One. It takes sermons from as far back as Schleiermacher in the nineteenth century to Karl Barth in the twentieth and even up to contemporary preachers like Laura Mendenhall.

There is one particular sermon in that book that spoke to me as I reflected on these words of blessedness, of God’s favor that Jesus shares. It is a sermon by the late Episcopal priest John Claypool. Claypool lost his daughter to leukemia when she was ten. Two decades later in a sermon he reflected on that time and that experience, asking questions of where God was present in that time. He writes about how there were different ways they hoped for God’s presence. They and many others prayed for miraculous healing just as Jesus heals in the gospel. But that didn’t happen. And Claypool is sophisticated and knows of the concept of collaboration, collaborating with God, and so they worked with medical science and technology to seek to bring a cure. But that never happened. And then Claypool reflects that there is a third way that God can be present: “God did give us something. God gave us the power to endure what we could not change. God gave us the power to stay with something and instead of defeating us and turning us bitter somehow we were sustained by a strength that was not our own.”

And that is to be blessed. Amen.