Those spiritually impoverished ones present before Jesus in the crowd are blessed only because the gracious touch of the heavens has freely fallen upon them. But mistranslations remain attractive because they suit our human sense of propriety, which cries out against God's blessing on people just because of their need and just because he chooses.
What kind of mistranslations are we talking about here? Concerning the first of the Beatitudes, you might hear a sermon explaining it as, "You are blessed when you know how poor you are," or, "Blessed are you when you humble your spirit before God." This kind of thinking is precisely what the last posting has argued against. It takes Jesus' words completely out of context, and then mistranslates them to make it appear as though we must do something before we can receive God's blessing.
If all we need to be blessed in the kingdom is to be humble-minded through recognizing our spiritual poverty, then let's just do that and we've got bliss cornered. And we escape the embarrassment of receiving pure mercy, for our humble recognition makes blessedness somehow appropriate.
Was Jesus giving us a list of things to do and not to do in order to be blessed? Many have read it this way. I read it this way. In fifth grade I put on a play that read it this way. The fact of the matter is it misses the point.
And of course this also means that we can very neatly tell people how to engineer their way into the kingdom. Here we have full-blown, if not salvation by works, then possibly salvation by attitude.
Jesus simply was not a do's and don'ts kind of guy. He told stories and pronounced incredible truths about the spiritual world in accessible ways, but he did not give lists. Not only is the usual interpretation contradictory to Jesus' style, it also makes no sense today.
Consider the argument that in order to be happy today you must be humble. That sounds fine, and I'd even agree with it. But follow through that misinterpretation with the rest of the Beatitudes. In order to be happy, you also have to be mourning. You have to be suffering. You can't have wealth, and you can't be in a position of power. In other words, you can't take Jesus' words and directly apply them to your life right now without becoming a weeping, penniless monk in the middle of an anti-Christian country.
Thankfully, this is not the case.
The clear intent of the New Testament as a whole is that Jesus' teachings are meant to be applied now. Instead of denying Jesus' teachings to the present, we must simply acknowledge that he has been wrongly interpreted.
Let's attempt to move forward with a new interpretation. Here we have in clear letter what the Beatitudes are not.
The Beatitudes are not teachings on how to be blessed. They are not instructions to do anything. They do not indicate conditions that are especially pleasing to God or good for human beings. No one is actually being told that they are better off for being poor, for mourning, for being persecuted, and so on.
Instead...
They are explanations and illustrations, drawn from the immediate setting, of the present availability of the kingdom through personal relationship to Jesus. They single out cases that provide proof that, in him, the rule of God from the heavens is truly available in life circumstances that are beyond all human hope.
What is heaven like? The poor are blessed. The mournful are blessed. The persecuted are blessed. This is the gospel that Jesus brought. This is the good news.
The Beatitudes simply cannot be "good news" if they are understood as a list of "how-tos" for achieving blessedness. They would then only amount to a new form of legalism.
Jesus, who spent more time arguing against the legalistic ways of the pharisees than condemning "sinners", would never have begun his ministry pointed telltale in the opposite direction. Christianity is not about following a set of laws or a list of rules. It's not about trying to figure out God and then get on his good side.
Christianity is about the heart, in the same way that Christ was about the heart. He healed the people around them, set them free, and then let them know that, in spite of everything they were to society, they were now blessed because they had experienced the presence of the Kingdom of Heaven.
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