Matthew 5:1-12
I don’t know if any of you have had the chance yet to watch The Chosen, or if you’ve even heard of it yet. It has been around for a couple of years now, but Ben and I are very often late to things like this, and we are just now getting around to it. The Chosen is a TV series about Jesus, and about his followers, so it has been getting a lot of buzz in our world. Now, art about the Bible is not new, but the amazing thing about The Chosen is that it has been well-received by Christians who agree on little else. I know that conservative Evangelical pastors have used it in sermons, and I know progressive Episcopal priests who have taught classes based on it. As with all Christian art, there are liberties taken and gaps in the Gospel stories have been filled with imagination and creativity. I would recommend encountering this show in a community, and with a Bible in hand, to ensure that you can spot the differences between quotations straight from scripture and lines written by modern Christians using their skill and talent to tell a good story. But Ben and I have been enjoying this show, and as either the Holy Spirit or luck would have it, we happened to reach the episode about the Beatitudes just in time for me to write this sermon.
In The Chosen, Jesus works for weeks on the famous sermon on the mount, but it is not until the wee hours of the morning on the day he plans to give the sermon that he composes its beginning. Jesus tells his disciple Matthew that he will give the people a map, a way to find him when they don’t know where to turn. Matthew hurries for writing supplies to take down what his teacher will say next, and as Jesus looks out over the camp where his followers are still sleeping as the new day dawns, he says “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Jesus goes on to say the words we just heard from the Gospel according to Matthew, commonly known as the Beatitudes, the blessings. Matthew, portrayed in The Chosen as a very straightforward kind of person, asks Jesus how this could be a map. “If someone wants to find me,” Jesus says to Matthew, “those are the groups they should look for.”
I don’t know if the show writers knew this when they wrote that line, I suspect they did, but one of the words for blessing in Hebrew is ‘ashar. ‘Ashar is the first word in the first Psalm, which Jesus would have recited regularly from a young age. ‘Ashar is blessed in the sense of finding the right road, of heading in the right direction. So the Beattitudes, the Blessings, are a map, in a way. They mark boundaries and give us a direction, they point us toward the right path. If we are looking for Jesus, we can find him among the blessed.
The sermon that begins with this map is Jesus’s manifesto of sorts, the culmination of all his teachings into one long lesson. Jesus is introducing himself and his Gospel, and he begins by naming all the groups of people most likely to be forgotten and left behind by society, many of whom are likely represented in his first audience.
The poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, the righteous, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted- all blessed, promised a future to hope for and seek after. These are not moral injunctions, but simple facts. Jesus is not in this moment exhorting the crowds to be peacemakers- he is lifting up to the light those who are already living lives dedicated to peacemaking. Jesus is not telling us to be poor in spirit or to mourn- he is acknowledging that there are those among us who already feel this way. Jesus sees the meek and the pure-hearted and those who are desperate for justice, and he tells them they are on the right road, blessed.
This sermon of Jesus is about who God is, how God behaves. The world does not celebrate the poor or the meek or the merciful; but God does. The world does not reward true peacemakers, because division is more profitable. This is not so with God. The world does not see the pure in heart for the gifts that they are — but God sees them, and shows Godself to them. The righteous are often unseen, or underpaid and underappreciated, or dismissed out of hand by the world. But in God’s kingdom, the righteous will finally see that their labors were not in vain. The thankless workers for justice will find themselves numbered among the prophets, and their rest will be heavenly. The mourners will be comforted- not fixed, not told to let it go or move on or find closure. The mourners will be comforted, a promise from God’s own lips. It is God’s action, God’s blessing that Jesus is naming.
The world is not yet as it will be, and so the blessings include a future hope. They will be comforted, they will inherit the earth, they will be filled, they will see God. They are already blessed, but there is a fulfilment to come that will meet every need and wipe away every tear and wash away every clinging doubt. This is the already and not yet, the soon and very soon. Our faith tells us that Jesus has already destroyed death, and still we love and lose and grieve the separation when it comes, even as we sing Alleluia at the grave. Our faith tells us that the kingdom of heaven has come near, and still we pray that God’s kingdom will come. Our faith tells us that we are blessed, and still there will be more.
In my garden this week, as I took in the very last of my harvest before the freeze, I saw something that took my breath away. My faithful strawberry plant, which had done its very best all summer long, was on its last leaves. The foliage had withered and most of the leaves were brown or turning. But right next to the saddest looking leaf I’ve ever seen, was the brightest and most perfect little strawberry. I just had to take a moment to be in awe of that juxtaposition, of the crystal clear image of life and death, of endings and the hope of a new beginning, already and not yet. It felt like a beatitude of its own, a blessed piece of the here and now pointing toward a future hope. It was another map, like the one Jesus gave us to find him through one another. In this life, I talk to so many people who feel lost, unmoored, out at sea. I pray we will all have eyes to see and ears to hear the blessedness that means we’re headed in the right direction, the maps that lead us home. Blessed are we who look for God, for God will always show us the way.
Mother A Writes 