Teaching from the Context

Do you ever read through the letters of the new testament, think you've figured Christianity out, then read Jesus' words in the gospels and feel like once again nothing makes sense? I used to love reading through Romans and Corinthians and the other New Testament writings because they were so simple and straightforward.

Do "A" but don't do "B". People who do "A" are doing well. People who do "B" are NOT doing well. Then I would see if it matched up with what Jesus said, and I'd get something obscure such as "how hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, it is like a camel passing through the eye of a needle." And I would be absolutely clueless as to whether I was supposed be poor and living the easy life or be rich and having a hard time of things.

This book has helped to fix that problem. It starts by following Jesus words as they were meant to be followed: in a logical and straightforward manner.

It will help us know what to do and what not to do with the Beatitudes if we can discover what Jesus himself was doing with them. 

Jesus was not walking down Broadway, chatting with a friend, when he was suddenly struck by an epiphany and started quoting platitudes to any man on the street who would listen. And so his message should not be taken that way. It should not be viewed as a dozen lines of pure truth that can be quoted on a dark day to make the storm clouds go away.

Since great teachers and leaders always have a coherent message that they develop in an orderly way, we should assume that his teaching in the Beatitudes is a development or clarification of his primary theme so far: the availability of the kingdom of the heavens.

So far Jesus has kept to a very simple and straightforward message. He preached just two lines in Matthew prior to his Sermon on the Mount.

1) "Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is near."

2) "Come and follow me, and I will make you fishers of men."

We studied his first line in Chapter 1 (see early blog posts). We haven't gone deep into his message to his disciples, to whom he directed his second line.

So Jesus has been preaching about the nearness and availability of the Kingdom. He has shown this nearness by healing sickness, casting out demons, and treating diseases.

Having ministered to the needs of the people crowding around him, he desired to teach them and moved to a higher position where they could see and here him well. But he does not, as is so often suggested, withdraw from the crowd to give an esoteric discourse of sublime irrelevance. Rather, Jesus teaches his students about the meaning of the availability of the heavens.

His message has been brief and straightforward up until this point in time. No confusing parables, no philosophical questions, and no re-examination of the Old Testament. You can imagine being one of the peasants of the day who strolled out on a Saturday to hear this kindly, blue-collar worker talk to you about this other kingdom and then demonstrate its presence to you by healing all the sick from your village.

Certainly after you saw the lives of those around you be drastically changed, you would want to know more about this kingdom, would you not? Who has access to it? Is it a one-and-done kind of thing? Could it change your life? Jesus, it would appear, saw this curiosity, this "teachable moment," and set about spelling out the parameters.

The context makes this clear. He could point out in the crowd now an individual, who was "blessed" because The Kingdom Among Us had just reached out and touched them with Jesus' heart and voice and hands. Perhaps this is why we only find him giving the Beatitudes from the midst of a crowd of people he had touched.


And so Jesus said, 

"Blessed are the spiritual zeros 

- the spiritually banrupt, deprived and deficient, the spiritual beggars, those without a wisp of "religion" - 

when the kingdom of the heavens comes upon them."

This is not the way many translations phrase Jesus' opening words. We hear, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," and we wonder what it means to be poor in spirit. Do you think it means humility? Piety? Do you think these common townsfolk and laborers were the spiritually pious of their region?

Look at the context! Jesus has just healed them; he has just shown them the blessing of the Kingdom of the Heavens, and so he naturally tells them that they are now blessed. I may be going to fast here, but do not fret. I shall be hitting this point home again and again.

Standing around Jesus as he speaks are people with no spiritual qualifications or abilities at all. They are the first to tell you they can't make heads or tails of religion. They walk by us in the hundreds or thousands every day. They would be the last to say they have any claim whatsoever on God. And yet, the rule of the heavens comes down upon their lives through their contact with Jesus. And then they too are blessed - healed of body, mind, or spirit - in the hand of God.

And that is precisely what Jesus tells them. That is the meaning of the first Beatitude. The poor in spirit are blessed, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Not exclusively theirs. Not theirs by right or by birth or by deed. But it is theirs, and that is what makes them blessed.

Those poor in spirit are called "blessed" by Jesus, not because they are in a meritorious condition, but because, precisely in spite of and in the midst of their ever so deplorable condition, the rule of the heavens has moved redemptively upon and through them by the grace of Christ.

This blows my mind. In all the mistranslations and misunderstandings of Jesus' words over the years, I've never considered that his words might have been meant, and still are meant, for real, everyday people right in front of him. Shouldn't there be some upper echelon or spiritual plane where this takes us? Isn't he the smartest man in the world? (see chapter 3)

Yes to both of these questions, and because of that, yes to the simplicity of this message. It's like staring at a diamond and realizing that in all it's glorious beauty is a divine simplicity of one single molecule latticed together. In comparing Jesus' words to the apostles', I've been comparing diamonds to gold, and wondering how they could both exist in the same place without presenting a problem. I think I've been suffering for quite some time from a lack of imagination. More on this topic tomorrow.