NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE BEATITUDES (MATTHEW 5:1-12)

 

Some time ago I posted a lesson entitled “Matthew 5:1-12: The Beatitudes.” But as Rebekah Eklund writes in Christianity Today in excerpts from her book The Beatitudes Through the Ages, “the Beatitudes are more complex than they first appear. They are (like all of Scripture) inexhaustibly rich. The deeper you dig, the more they yield.” So here are some additional thoughts on the subject from Eklund, those she cites, and other sources.

One insight that is rather obvious in retrospect is pointed out by Sam Wells. It can be pictured below:

PAST                                                                       PRESENT    FUTURE

Blessed are the poor in spirit                                      ,                for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are the meek                                                  ,                 for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger...for righteousness     ,                 for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful                                            ,                  for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart                                     ,                  for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers                                    ,                  for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted...                   ,                  for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

For Wells, the first part of each beatitude represents the Cross while the last half is the Resurrection. And this can apply to our lives also.

The first and last of Matthew's beatitudes are in the present tense while the others are in the future tense. But even in these two cases, according to some, the last phrase should probably read, “the Kingdom will consist of such as these.” Both present and future aspects to the kingdom are stressed in George Eldon Ladd's book, the aptly named The Presence of the Future. And therefore, we are living in the in-between space, where the comma is found.

Eklund says, “Life in the middle of the Cross and the Resurrection is not easy, but it is joyful. It is deeply painful but also beautiful.” She illustrates this with the examples of two godly women “who live on both sides of the Beatitudes: mourning and comforting, making peace and needed it, offering mercy and receiving it.”

Then J. Nolland approaches the Beatitudes from another perspective when he says that “they can be seen as an expanded restatement of Matthew 4:17. This is what it means for the kingdom of God to have drawn near...The list seems to have been designed to echo key elements of the historical experience of God's people chastened by the humiliation of exile and beyond; longing for God to finally put things to rights; peacemakers, not after vengeance because they have recognized their own need for mercy; well conscious of past failure, now seeking to be pure in heart; and ready to suffer, as needs be, out of their freshly affirmed loyalty to God.

On a different front, I came across this perceptive thought from Richard Lischer of Duke University Divinity School: “When the Beatitudes are reduced to virtues or the maxims of positive thinking, the rest of the Sermon is lost as well. Then the sayings about purity, love, generosity, piety and all the others can no longer be understood as representative portraits of the new community's daily life of discipleship. Rather they become new rules, and as rules they inevitably produce the predictable forms of ethical activism, anguish, or security – depending on the species of self-deception at work in the hearer.”

Finally, de Roo summarizes some findings from fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls labeled the Beatitudes Text. “They recall the famous collections of beatitudes in Matthew 5:3-10 and Luke 6:20-23. However, unlike the NT makarisms [a more scholarly term for beatitudes], the Qumran beatitudes do not tell us why the person in question is blessed. The Qumran beatitudes remind us even more of those found in Sirach 14:20-27 [an OT apocryphal book] and in Proverbs 3:13 and 8:32, 84, which unlike the NT makarisms, also have 'the pursuit of wisdom' as a theme.”

It is the fact that new insights seem to pop up every day helping us to understand God's Word that keeps me reading and attending church and Sunday school on a regular basis. And I would urge all believers to keep doing the same. When we think we have learned it all and are content to rest in our limited knowledge of God's will, that is the time our Christian life begins to stagnate.