Sermon for 2005 October 30, St Mary Magdalen, Sheet

Bible reading: Matthew 5:1-12

What is your attitude to the Beatitudes? What do these wonderful words of Jesus at the start of the Sermon on the Mount mean to you? They will surely mean something.

1. They are beautiful words. I found Lesley Leon’s take on the words so moving I tried my hand at setting them to music as some of you know.

2. I’m sure that for some the Beatitudes are a pillar of the Gospel – or to use another analogy, if the cross and resurrection of Jesus are at the heart of the gospel, maybe the Beatitudes are the lungs? They certainly have a sense of breathing in and out.

Blessed are the poor in spirit (breathe in)…

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven (breathe out, relax)

Blessed are those who mourn (breathe in)…

for they will be comforted (breathe out, and relax).

They are surely a summary of Christ’s teaching to us, showing us how to live our lives, how blessed it is to live in this way.

3. For some the Beatitudes might be arranged a bit like Paul’s list of gifts in the church – teachers, pastors, healers – so here we have merciful people, the pure in heart, peacemakers, a tapestry of attributes that go to make up the church. And for each, a suitable reward: you’re merciful, you’ll be shown mercy.

4. For others these sayings of Jesus are more of a progression. This is very strong in the Orthodox tradition, where there is the idea of the "Ladder of the Beatitudes" – a path for the pilgrim, if you will. You start with poverty of spirit, a recognition of your abject need for God’s mercy. You progress to mourning for the sorrows of others. And so on, until you have progressed enough to be a peacemaker, and finally a sobering reminder that this may not bring a peace prize but suffering and persecution. The Beatitudes are sung as the Gospel is brought from the sanctuary to be read to the people.

5. You may, like me, be interested and passionate about what the Beatitudes are not. Each of these gritty, hard sayings of Jesus has a kind of saccharine equivalent, so that they are often misunderstood and the gospel loses its strength. To be meek is not the "meek and mild" of an earlier generation of Sunday school teaching. To be merciful is not to sidestep the demands of justice. To be a peacemaker is not the same as being a peaceful person.

6. Maybe you see them as a blueprint for living – commands of Jesus to be obeyed.

And so on. You can see that we could easily get to as many ways of looking at the Beatitudes as there are Beatitudes themselves. And they are all useful and valid up to a point.

But if we are to gain the full strength of this teaching, it is very important to look carefully at what the words actually are – what Jesus really said. It’s remarkable how easy it is with familiar Bible passages to remember a kind of filtered version. So let us look at the words. This is not always easy, and sometimes it takes us where we didn’t think we were going. In our case we are going to go on a journey through time, and to make the point I’m going to take us backwards!

So I will start with something that is undeniable about the Beatitudes and something I’ve conveniently forgotten to mention: These sayings of Jesus are very much about the future. The middle six all have the future tense: they will be comforted, they will inherit the earth, they will be filed, they will be shown mercy, they will see God, they will be called sons of God.

An aside – as a mathematician I rather like this saying: "There are two kinds of people in the world when it comes to mathematics. Firstly there are those who are really good at mathematics. Secondly there are those who are not so good. And thirdly there are those who can’t count."

I have found that there are two kinds of Christians when it comes to looking to the future. There are those for whom the future hope of meeting God face to face in heaven is supremely important; everything in this short life is seen in the light of that future hope. And there are those for whom such thoughts of the future are almost irrelevant; the Kingdom of God is here and now, we have no idea what comes afterwards and we are even commanded not to speculate.

Now you might think that people might be in one or other group according to their circumstances. Perhaps the future group has people who are older and also people who are not so well off. Surely it was that future hope that inspired the slaves to write those wonderful spirituals? Well, maybe, and yet I don’t think it’s as simple as that. It just seems to be different approaches to faith. Why am I saying all this? It’s because I’m fair and square in the group that doesn’t think so much about the future. To be frank, the hope of future rewards in heaven is not what makes me tick. Perhaps it goes back to my school and college days, the ridiculing view of Christianity that still rings in my ears –"it’s pie in the sky when you die"

And yet here we have these words of Jesus, no getting away from it, they speak of future promise. And they are contrasted with the difficulties of life in the present.

So is it "pie in the sky when you die"? Let’s go back to the words – always go back to the words. Does Jesus say "if you are merciful, you will be shown mercy"? "If you are pure in heart, you will see God"? The "I’ll do a deal with you" familiar to all parents. "If you finish your homework, I’ll take you swimming". No, that is not what Jesus says. He doesn’t even say: "You are merciful, so you will be shown mercy". It’s actually more impersonal, what he says. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. The words are much more like statements of fact. To me they seem more like laws of the universe – laws that link the future to the present. The peacemakers will be called sons of God. Such direct statements – not "ifs. Jesus us not exhorting people to be good – he is speaking to his disciples and telling them how the world is made.

So if I were one of those disciples I would be sitting on the mountainside listening to this teaching, and I would be saying to myself, so Jesus is giving us these laws of the universe, but what does that mean to me? And at that moment what does Jesus do? He takes the last of the eight sayings, Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And he applies it straight to me and to you. Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven. Jesus brings it from these universal principles to apply it straight to his friends, here and now, in the present. Rejoice and be glad.

These are words of assurance. In fact what Jesus is saying is you don’t have to be concerned with the future because your future is assured in the present. This is so much more than saving up for a pension (even when pensions were safe and secure things), this is past and future brought together – this is how God’s plan works.

But then I would be asking myself, what is the evidence? And amazingly Jesus says this – and I missed it when I first read this passage – for in they same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. Jesus asked them to look back in time, back into history, at the example of the prophets. And we have even more time to look back over. This is the feast of All Saints. Something we can take from looking back at the lives of Christians who went before us is that there we can find the evidence that those words of Jesus were not empty or just clever but that they are true. When we look at the lives of saints (and I do like the broadest interpretation of that word) we see example after example of men and women who lived in that assurance of the future, who lived hard lives and sometimes died terrible deaths, but who showed that they were blessed as they lived and died in their present.

About thirty years ago I was very inspired by a book by Mary Craig – Candles in the Dark, Six modern Christian martyrs. If anyone has a copy I would be interested to read it again. You could take any one of the six and be convinced of the truth and relevance of the Beatitudes.

• Janani Luwum, about to be executed by Idi Amin, saying "Do not be afraid, I see God’s hand in this".
• Maximilian Kolbe, who gave his life for another in Auschwitz. blessed are the merciful.
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer who stood up to Hitler and not without controversy. Blessed are the peacemakers.
• Martin Luther King – inspired by Rosa Parks (who died this week) to share and live his dream.
• Maria Skobtsova – twice divorced, preached on the Beatitude of the poor in Spirit, died in a concentration camp for helping Jews and the French resistance.
• Perhaps most inspiring of all for me was Oscar Romero, the gentle, conservative compromise archbishop who liked a quiet life but when he saw the injustice in his beloved El Salvador he could not help but speak out for the poor and oppressed. He challenged the military to stop the repression and paid with his life. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

What shines through in the stories of so many holy people is the fact that they lived knowing the future was assured – not that they knew what would happen in the future – in fact they did not need to know. They are the real evidence of the universal laws of the Beatitudes; here were the people who lived those principles in the assurance that the Kingdom of Heaven belonged to them.

Ponder on the lives of Christians who inspire you and you will complete the journey that links the past, the present and the future.. And let us retrace our steps from these stories of inspiration from the past, to our own lives, our lives which are blessed as we live them in the assurance of our future in Christ Jesus.