Beatitudes

From our friend Liam:

(This past Sunday) in the Catholic Church and the many Protestant churches that use the Revised Common Lectionary, the Gospel portion is take from the fifth chapter of the Gospel of St Matthew:

Seeing the crowds, Jesus went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
“Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (RSV translation into English from Greek)

The context of this passage illuminates for our own time and place. Jesus is speaking as the New Moses about a new kingdom to the Jewish people who live under the Pax Romana, an empire whose values and application thereof were the opposite of the values of that new kingdom. The Romans did have a fetish for law and jurisdiction that was
unusual compared to many of the empires and kingdoms it arrayed against, and the Romans did have an unusually (for Antiquity) deep and wide cultural appreciation for fidelity in relationships – values that the Christianized Roman empire later retained – but often opportunistically triaged those values in ways that benefitted the most powerful: a
kingdom that operates from the top downward, where might makes right.

Jesus starts his proclamation the new kingdom by turning everything upside down. This is not a Nice message that encourages largely happy and comfortable people to feel reinforced in their happiness and comfort. He does not start with . . . rugged individualism; instead, he starts with the ptōchoi (πτωχοί) – the lowly people bent over, crouched, utterly dependent upon others that the comfortable would prefer not to have to see, be aware of, or take account of – the people who can be trashed by the powerful – it is they, rather than the powerful of this world, who are the people who form the foundation of the new kingdom.

And then, for the first eight of the nine Beatitudes (the last Beatitude is a blessing warning more immediately particular to the Apostles, so it pivots to the second person), there’s a telling third person plural pronoun in English (which in the original Greek is simply embedded in the verb syntax) that we easily can skip over but should not: they/their. In the theology of original First Millennium Christian churches, the fact that these Beatitudes are communal, not individual, is another a sign that the new kingdom is communal, not individualistic. The new kingdom is not about Jesus & Me: rather, it’s formed of a group of people who strive to make the Beatitudes their way of life. (The bookend to this can be found near the end the 25th chapter of the Gospel of St Matthew.) It also cannot make more clear the heresy that is the so-called Prosperity Gospel (and the Calvinistic error, upon which it originally depended, that the Elect necessarily receive material blessings in this world) that infects so much of popular American Christianity: not a one of the Beatitudes imply any blessings in this world, only in the next.

To conclude: here’s an illustration of this point in cinematic movie history from a scene from the much-lauded The Song of Bernadette (1943), taken from the life of St Bernadette Soubirous, who was canonized decades after her life not for her visions (and the many miracles that were the fruit of them) but for her heroic perseverance through terrible personal physical, mental, and spiritual suffering for most of her life – as one of the ptōchoi (πτωχοί).

There’s a wonderfully cinematic moral lesson in the testimony scene that where the Churchly powerful men … rise as the lowly group of women enter bearing the lowliest of their number (because she is utterly dependent upon their perseverant kindness and she has the least official status), and it is the women who decide when the testimony ends.
It’s a little Easter egg, as we’d say today, of the Beatitudes in action.

The image above, Sermon on the Mount, Robert Reid 1901, Fairhaven (Massachusetts) Unitarian Memorial Church.