The Puzzle of the Beatitudes

Three months into the blog, one quarter through the book. I can do the math, and I'm looking at a full year to finish this book. I think it will be worth it. Especially this chapter.

For weeks now we've explored the idea of "God's Kingdom" or "The Kingdom of the Heavens" or "The Eternal". We've examined how this is the first thing Jesus teaches in the gospels, and how it seems to be the last thing taught from the pulpits of churches today. In the last chapter we studied how knowledge and belief of God formulates knowledge and belief of God's kingdom. In other words, the two are intertwined.

In Chapter 4, we finally begin to study how we can live inside this kingdom.

What we have come to call the Sermon on the Mount is a concise statement of Jesus' teachings on how to actually live in the reality of God's present kingdom. It concludes with a statement that all who hear and do what he there says will have a life that can stand up to everything (read: the eternal life now).

Great! We have access to God's kingdom; we have access to the eternal life now. We need only hear Jesus' words and put them into action. Of course, there are a few in between steps. First, we must understand Jesus' words. Second, we must understand how we are supposed to put them into action.

To give a general idea of how complicated this task is, I have been studying Jesus' words for well near twenty years now, and I am only just beginning to understand what he meant by them.

As outstanding thinkers before and after him have done, Jesus deals with the two major questions humanity always faces:

1) Which life is the good life? What is genuinely in my interest, and how may I enter true well-being?

2) Who is truly a good person? Who has the kind of goodness found in God himself, constituting the family likeness between God and his children?

Chapter 4 deals exclusively with the first question. You may think that an entire chapter devoted to a single question is stretching the point, but honestly I think you could devote a library to this question and people still might come away unsatisfied with the answers they receive. Thankfully this is not the case when exploring Jesus' answer to the question.

His teaching on what is good for human beings are, taken as a whole, unique and uniquely deep and powerful. 

Currently this is just hearsay. If you haven't read Jesus' words or you haven't understood Jesus' words (as I have not for the past two decades), then you may wonder how he stands out from the other great moral, spiritual, and religious teachers. Hopefully, by the end of the next two chapters, we will have answered that wonderment. However, until then, patience is required.

Let us start with the first question.

Who is it, according to Jesus, that has the good life? The Beatitudes of Jesus drive home his answer to this question. They are among the literary and religious treasures of the human race. They are acknowledged by almost everyone to be among the highest expressions of religious insight and moral inspiration. 


The Beatitudes, or the Blesseds, are common knowledge among much of the world's population. Read them to anyone you know, and they will probably acknowledge that they have heard them once before. In fact, you can do that right now, as here they are, taken from Matthew 5:

   ³ “Blessed are the poor in spirit,
   for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
⁴ Blessed are those who mourn,
   for they will be comforted.
⁵ Blessed are the meek,
   for they will inherit the earth.
⁶ Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
   for they will be filled.
⁷ Blessed are the merciful,
   for they will be shown mercy.
⁸ Blessed are the pure in heart,
   for they will see God.

⁹ Blessed are the peacemakers,

   for they will be called children of God.

¹⁰ Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,

   for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

   ¹¹ “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. 

¹² Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

We can savor them, affirm them, meditate upon them, and engrave them on plaques, but a major question remains: How are we to live in response to them?

This question you can ask to a hundred different people, and I doubt you would get the same response twice. The fact of the matter is, while we as a people have become extremely familiar with the words of Jesus, we are exceptionally unfamiliar with how to put them into practice as he intended when he spoke them.

Keep in mind our theme from the last chapter. Nothing about the ultimate condition of man has changed since Jesus was alive. When he spoke to the question of "what is the good life?" he spoke words that have not changed in their intended meanings because mankind has not changed. And Jesus spoke to mankind. But did we hear him right?

Misunderstanding of the "blesseds" given by Jesus have caused much pain and confusion down through the ages. Outright rejection of Christianity so understood is a constant burden of guilt conscientiously borne for not being on this list of the supposedly God-preferred. On the other hand, pride often swells in those who think of themselves as conforming to the "blesseds".

Speaking as one who has always misunderstood the Beatitudes, I can say with great honesty that I am looking forward to learning much from this chapter. After all, I do believe that Jesus gave the words of eternal life, and that is something I desire to have and live out.

Until next time...