How on earth to even start with such a rich array of passages this morning?
Last year we were invited to select one of the Beatitudes for the community Lenten series. They are biblical selections that are honored more as a pretty name than in their difficult message. Matthew’s version leans toward the spiritual, at least compared to Luke’s version, so that’s where I will focus attention this morning. We find it especially in the poor in spirit instead of the poor.Yes of course poverty’s condition renders one poor in spirit easily. My sense is that Matthew has the phrase deliberately for all who suffer a poverty in spirit. we take it for granted in a cliche that money can’t buy me love, that wealth does not guarantee happiness. To be poor in spirit is to suffer with a damaged sense of self. It may well create an opening toward God and then discover the healing power of prayer and relationship with God. It reminds me of AA where only in admitting a powerlessness against a demon like alcohol addiction can strenght emerge.
Surely few feel blessed or happy in the experiences which Jesus is using as an example.Jesus is coming at this material from an interesting angle. Most of the material would suggest that people are feeling punished or abandoned by God in a difficult circumstance. He is saying that they are precisely in the ambit of God’s embrace at those times. Surely anyone would rather not mourn so as to eliminate the need for comfort. It makes no sense to me to try to make a blessing out of a terrible experience. The comfort we receive is such a blessing, but it never, never eliminates the pain of loss in the first place.
When we are poor in spirit we feel distant from God, or we assume God is distant from us in some sort of cosmic game of hide and seek. We get frustrated at times, as we grow impatient for a sign of the presence of God, well often it is more actual physical help as much as the sheer presence that we often seek. (praus=meek, maybe humble from Micah here. It does not mean meek in the sense of being weak, passive, a milquetoast, I think was an old phrase. It means tamed, domesticated, well balanced, even, neither too hot nor too cold, the ?goldilocks position of being just right) Put differently, the kingdom of heaven includes more than the usual suspects. it may well include super bowl heroes; it may even include the positive thinking advocates. The kingdom of heaven, the place where God;’s way in the world is made clear includes htose hwo are downcast and downhearted too.
We can use Paul’s passage as a way to help explore this arresting set of phrases. Paul sees our complex God as one of deliberate irony, of astounding reversals. God subverts the use of power with the cross. God subverts the very notion of wisdom with the cross. it’s an elaborate reverse psychology in its way.so Jesus can say tha tthe grieving are blessed by God ofr they are not being punished but will be comforted. for Paul, the decisive entry of god into the world included full immersion into a baptism of suffering.
Put differently, if God were a God of coercive power, of stripping things away to start over, God could and would. Instead God works with an imperfect world as it exists.The Torah stories present that as tried and failed as temptations to god that are dismissed. In Jesus Christ God takes a totally different direction. Instead of removing suffering totally, God enters into it fully in Jesus Christ at the cross.
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