Principles of the Kingdom (Matthew 5:1-16)
“I like your Christ, but not your Christianity. I believe in the teachings of Christ, but you on the other side of the world do not. I read the Bible faithfully and see little in Christendom that those who profess faith pretend to see.” Almost a century ago, Dr. J. H. Holmes summarized Gandhi’s view of Christians and the Christian faith with these words. Speaking during a particularly harsh period of British imperialism in India, Gandhi was, unfortunately, blind to something. It wasn’t just the Christians on the other side of the world who saw what was not in the bible.
Unfortunately, Christians in India too at that time and even till today accepted things that would have baffled Jesus. The passage we heard is easily one of the most recognizable passages from the bible. Even if we cannot quote them directly, we will be able to say that these were the Beatitudes that we heard. Most of us will be able to state that this is also the start of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. But we need to ask ourselves some questions. Why does Jesus begin the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes?
Also, given that the Sermon on the Mount appears right at the start of Jesus’ ministry in the Gospel according to Matthew, why is this the case? Last Sunday I mentioned a difference between visual and literary art. Literary art is sequential in nature. One word follows another. One sentence is followed by the next. In order to get the full effect that the author intends, we must read what is written in a sequential manner. This means that Matthew intended to tell his Jesus story with the Sermon on the Mount at the start and with the Beatitudes beginning the sermon.
Matthew begins his Gospel with a genealogy, something we today might consider to be the height of tedium. However, what he accomplishes with this is locate Jesus within a story that began with Abraham and that had major turning points in the reign of David and the trauma of the exile. Some of you may recall from last Sunday the importance I placed on the story within which we believe we are living. Matthew knew this. Hence, he opens by telling us that Jesus is best understood as someone who belongs in this story of Abraham, David, and the exile.
Two Sundays back, I introduced us to the principle of Chekhov’s gun. If you remember, according to this principle, if a gun is shown in the first act of a narrative, it should be fired later in the narrative. The reverse is also true. If something has been prominent early in a narrative, then its absence should make us pay attention. Most of the Old Testament took its final form either during or immediately after the exile. Many of the books are written either holding out a hope of return from the exile or looking back to the return from exile.
However, this crucial event in the history of the Israelites is absent in Matthew’s narrative. If you did not have access to the Old Testament and read just Matthew, you would not realize that the Israelites returned from exile. It would be like reading a history of the USA without any reference to the Civil War. However, since we have access to the Old Testament, the glaring absence of even a mention of this central and formative event should make us ask, “Why?” This would be a difficult question to answer if we did not have other Jewish groups who also did the same.
You have probably heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are ancient manuscripts produced by a group known as the Essenes. One of the central claims of the Essenes was that they were still in a state of spiritual exile even though their ancestors had physically returned to the land. On account of this, they too minimize the Old Testament texts that looked back on the return from exile. If we use this perspective for Matthew, we can understand that Matthew too was giving us a view that the exile was ongoing when Jesus began his ministry.
We can then understand Jesus’ life as portrayed by Matthew in light of the history of the people of Israel. In fact, Matthew makes this explicit. When Joseph, Mary, and Jesus return to the land of Judea, Matthew links it to the original exodus by quoting from Hosea, “Out of Egypt I called my son.” Then, when Jesus was ready to start his ministry, Matthew tells us that Jesus went to the Jordan to be baptized. From the other Gospels, we understand that John the Baptizer was on the Eastern side of the Jordan. Then, when Jesus came out of the water, he was tested in the desert for forty days much like the Israelites were tested in the desert for forty years. Once that was done, Jesus entered the land, crossing the Jordan from East to West much like the Israelites had done many centuries earlier. And from the other Gospels we learn that this happened in the vicinity of Jericho, where the Israelites had originally entered the land.
What was Matthew doing? He was portraying Jesus’ ministry as a recapitulation of the history of Israel. However, there are significant differences. First, the Israelites failed in the desert by complaining about bread, putting God to the test with regard to water, and worshipping the golden calf. Jesus, on the other hand, passed the very same tests. Second, Moses was disqualified from entering the land because he disobeyed God. Jesus, on the other hand, obeyed God completely and entered the land. Third, because of this, Moses’ teachings were given outside the land, while Jesus’ teachings were given inside the land. Fourth, Moses received the commandments on the mountain while Jesus delivered his teachings on the mountain. Fifth, Moses had to go down the mountain to teach the Israelites, while Jesus’ disciples went up the mountain to him. I cannot develop any of these here today. But each of these differences is significant. Today, I want to focus only on the parallel between Moses’ location and Jesus’ location before moving on to an overarching view of the Beatitudes.
Moses received the commandments on the mountain and then had to descend to give them to the Israelites. And he carried a set of mediated tablets inscribed with the commandments. Jesus, on the other hand, sat atop a mountain and his disciples ascended the mountain to receive unmediated, oral instruction from him. What did Moses give the Israelites? When we consider the first set of commandments, commonly called the Ten Commandments, what do we think the purpose of those commandments was?
The prologue to the Ten Commandments gives us some insight. God begins with the words, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Scholars recognize this as similar to the Hittite suzerain-vassal treaties that were common in the Levant and Mesopotamia. Here, the suzerain opens with a declaration of what he had done for the vassal. And the rest of the treaty spelled out the obligations of both parties under the treaty.
In much the same way, God declares what he had done for the Israelites. This means that what follows, namely the Ten Commandments and other laws, were the obligations of the Israelites and God’s reciprocal obligations. God was forming them into a nation and these obligations delineated how this new community would function. They were the guiding principles, which, if followed, would result in a community that reflected the intentions of the God who made the treaty with them.
Given the large number of parallels between what Moses did and what Jesus did, it follows then that the Sermon on the Mount, given with Jesus seated at the top of a mountain, spelled out the guiding principles of the community that Jesus was forming. And what principles does Jesus spell out for us? Jesus begins with what we call the Beatitudes. Each Beatitude has two parts. It begins with a declaration of a trait that is blessed. And it concludes with a promise of what the blessing would look like. Hence, those who are poor in spirit are blessed. And the blessing they receive is that the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Of course, each of the Beatitudes can be explained in greater depth as I have done in my book Weathering the Storms. This is because we need to unpack what the trait is as well as what the blessing would mean. For example, what does it mean to be poor in spirit? And what does it mean to say that the kingdom of heaven is someone’s?
Once again you will realize that I will never advocate an easy way to read the scriptures. If, on any day someone who looks like me seems content with a surface reading of any passage, you can be rest assured that the body snatchers have come to Pocatello.
But back to the Beatitudes, what portrait does Jesus paint here for what his disciples would look like? People who are poor in spirit, who mourn, who are meek, who hunger for justice, who are merciful, who have a pure heart, who make peace, and who are persecuted for the causes of justice.
Let’s be honest here. None of these are conducive to marketing or advertising. I mean, can you imagine being attracted by the invitation to mourn or to be merciful or to be persecuted? We know in our bones that these are not easy things that Jesus is describing. As a result, Christians have, for the most part, taken three approaches to interpreting the Sermon on the Mount. Two of these are similar, with the third being different. Let us begin with the two that are similar.
For both these approaches, the Sermon on the Mount pertains to a future Millennial reign of Jesus. They diverge with respect to how they expect the Millennium to come about. The first approach is that of those who hold to what is commonly called Dispensationalism. This is a futurist perspective that expects things to get progressively worse on earth so that this descent can only be stopped by the return of Jesus to usher in his Millennial reign on earth. However, since the expectation is that things are going to get progressively worse, there is no incentive to work against injustice.
This is an escapist perspective of Christian discipleship, which cannot be squared with Jesus’ insistence that his disciples are going to be salt and light. Salt is inert until it comes into contact with water and other substances. Light shining without context is something that no one can describe because light depends on objects for its powers of illumination and shadow-casting. In other words, the metaphors of salt and light war against any ideas that Christians can have an escapist attitude toward this world and the creatures that, by God’s grace, live in it.
The second approach is that of those who hold a perspective known as Postmillennialism. This is also a sort of futurist perspective, but one that expects things to get progressively better due to the spread of the gospel. Eventually, when things become good enough, Jesus will return to a Church that has succeeded in Christianizing the world. Since the expectation is that things will become more and more Christian - whatever that means - there is an incentive to promote certain ideas that the proponents consider Christian.
This is a dominion perspective of Christian discipleship. This is the way of movements like the New Apostolic Reformation, the Seven Mountain Mandate, and Christian Nationalism, all of which plan to legislate what they consider to be Christian values, criminalizing those who do not fall in line with these values. Both these approaches explicitly exclude the Sermon on the Mount from being relevant to Christians today. The escapist perspective declares that the Sermon is only valid for the Millennium and, since we are disengaging from the world, there is nothing we can do.
The dominion perspective also proposes that the Sermon is only valid for the Millennium. But the adherents of this perspective excuse themselves by insisting that they can do everything that the Sermon rejects in the hope of ushering in the Millennium. In other words, to bring in a world in which people are meek, they allow themselves to be most aggressive. To bring in a world in which people are poor in spirit, they accumulate wealth without restraint. To bring in a world in which mercy is elevated, they become the most merciless of people.
Both these approaches - escapism and dominion - are problematic. And this is because they make Jesus out to be an idiot. After all, which teacher would give his/her students a lesson that would never be relevant to them? When his disciples came up to him, Jesus opened with the Beatitudes and continued with the rest of the Sermon. However, from the escapist and dominion perspectives, the relevance of the Sermon lies in the future. This means that Jesus knowingly opened his teaching with a lesson that none of his disciples would ever have found relevant. That is the sign of an idiot.
In his book The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard said that the statement “Jesus is Lord” is quite meaningless for anyone who has to hesitate before saying that Jesus is the smartest person who ever lived. In other words, no one can honestly follow someone who is not really smart. This is precisely why people who hold to escapist or dominion perspectives of discipleship do not bother about what Jesus called the weightier matters of the law - justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Such perspectives deny the transformative power of the Spirit in the context of discipleship in the here and now.
Since any perspective that makes the Sermon on the Mount irrelevant for discipleship in the Church age is one that paints Jesus as an idiot, such perspectives, like traditional Dispensationalism, the New Apostolic Reformation, the Seven Mountain Mandate, and Christian Nationalism, need to be rejected. You see, in the kingdom of God, there are no ends that can justify any means. The means always need to be in alignment with the ends. What we do must always be in accord with the kind of people we say God is transforming us into.
This brings us to the third approach to interpreting the Sermon. When we look at the Beatitudes, we can see that there is a common thread that runs through them. All of them go against the grain. To draw from the message two weeks back, all of them expect us to swim upstream because death is downstream, while life is upstream. It is easy to clamor after more, or to just chase after what gives us pleasure, or to allow ourselves to be aggressive, or to permit injustice when we benefit from it, or to insist on our rights and be merciless, or to accept twisted visions of God, or to allow conflict when we stand to gain.
It is much more difficult to align ourselves with the traits Jesus blesses in the Beatitudes. However, there is supposed to be no daylight between our character and the character of Jesus. After all, we are predestined to be conformed into the image of God’s unique Son. And if we think about it, we will find that the Beatitudes perfectly describe Jesus. Paul says Jesus became poor for our sake. Isaiah says that he is the man of sorrows. Jesus described himself as meek. He advocated for justice. People asked him for mercy and he granted it. He was single minded in obeying God. He is the Prince of Peace. And he was persecuted because he stood for justice.
When Jesus opened with the Beatitudes, he was signaling to his disciples what they should look for in him. He would not ask anything from his disciples that he was unwilling to embody in his own life. This is a sharp contrast to our modern Jar Jar Binks, who scampered off into another plane when he thought his life was endangered while allowing some of his staff members to stay in the plane that was threatened. Jesus does not ask from us anything he himself was unwilling to demonstrate in his own life. This is one main reason why I follow him.
But Jesus caps the Beatitudes with the twin metaphors of salt and light. Both are nonviolent metaphors. But also they are invincible metaphors. Salt will sterilize or preserve or enhance flavor depending on how it is being used. There is nothing that can be done to prevent the process once it has started. Light will illuminate and cast shadows depending on how it is being used. There is nothing that can be done to prevent it from accomplishing its purpose. As mentioned earlier, both metaphors envision interaction with the surroundings.
But also too much salt can destroy, as when armies in the past salted cities and their surroundings to ensure nothing would grow. And too much light can blind, as would happen if we dared to look directly at the sun. It’s a tricky balance that Jesus calls us to. We are to be engaged in the world and in contact with the people of the world. But we are not to attempt to overwhelm the world. And we are to do this by embodying the traits Jesus mentions in the Beatitudes. May the Spirit of God empower us with her wisdom to bring this embodiment to light in Pocatello and beyond.