Luke 6:20-26; Matthew 5:1-12

Blessed are the poor! Blessed are those who mourn! Blessed are you when people slander you! Blessed, blessed, blessed! We hear this passage, and it’s twin in Matthew, all the time. But it’s not an easy one. We don’t use the word blessed very often, which doesn’t help, but when some translations use ‘happy’ instead it doesn’t solve the problems.

The main issue, I think, is it seems quite at odds with our experience. Are the poor blessed? What about those who mourn? And how blessed do we really feel when people slander us? There is nothing inherently good about being poor. We shouldn’t be searching for opportunities to mourn, so we can be blessed. And I doubt Jesus is encouraging us to seek out those who slander us.

Perhaps Jesus is saying that all these people will be blessed in the future…in heaven. That seems to fit with the future tense being used. There will be no more poverty after all, or hunger, or tears. So we can count these people blessed, because in heaven all will be well. It’s tempting to interpret it that way, and there are some good biblical themes we could explore there. We might remember Revelation 21, ‘he will wipe every tear from their eyes….’ Good news for the future indeed, but is that all Jesus is interested in? What about now?

Perhaps there is another way of understanding Jesus’s words. Perhaps something different is going on?

In Matthew these words begin what we now call the Sermon on the Mount, and similarly in Luke they come before a bunch of Jesus’s teaching, some of it just as hard to stomach. Directly after the passage we read, Jesus tells us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. Something important is going on here…something profoundly different is afoot.

When NT Wright translates this passage, instead of saying ‘blessed,’ he uses the phrase ‘wonderful news!’ And it changes the feel of the verses: Wonderful news for the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Wonderful news for you who are hungry, for you will be filled. Wonderful news for you who weep now, for you will laugh.

Instead of an analysis of the way life is, or a prediction of future life ‘in heaven,’ Jesus’s words are now an announcement. He is proclaiming the arrival of something new, God’s new covenant, wonderful news. And it’s wonderful news especially for the poor, the hungry, those who mourn.

This covenant theme is easier to spot in Matthew. Because just as Moses brought Israel out of Egypt, through the wilderness for 40 years, and stood on a mountain to declare the law and God’s covenant with his people, Jesus has been brought out of Egypt as a child, spent 40 days in the wilderness, and now stands on a ‘mountain,’ proclaiming a new law, a new covenant. He announces the wonderful news that God will make things right. God will fill the hungry, God will comfort those who mourn. The rich, the comfortable, those who are praised and thought well of, they will realise that life with God is different now.

Something similar is happening at the start of Luke 4, where Jesus stands up in the synagogue and proclaims ‘good news for the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the oppressed go free.’ These are not promises for some future state, they are Jesus’s proclamation here and now.

But how does all this work? We don’t see it around us yet. Maybe we’ve not solved anything at all.

Many Jews in Jesus’s time looked forward to the coming of the Messiah, where this age of evil, suffering, and sickness would end, and be replaced with goodness, righteousness, and peace. In fact, when Jesus began preaching he proclaimed, ‘the kingdom of heaven is here!’ And yet evil, suffering, and sickness are still with us.

Early Christians began to understand that one age was passing away, and something new was happening in Jesus…but it wasn’t yet complete. Evil, suffering, and sickness were passing away. Righteousness, peace, healing were here, along with the Holy Spirit. But they aren’t fully realised. The kingdom of heaven is here, right now, but is not yet complete.

So this brings us back to us. Jesus has come to proclaim wonderful news for the poor, wonderful news for those who mourn, wonderful news for the hungry. But how?

In Matthew’s gospel, the Sermon on the Mount contains the prayer that Jesus teaches his disciples. And in it, we have the words, ‘your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’ We are called to pray those words, and to live out that calling in all we say and do. That will be wonderful news. We are called to live the new covenant of God’s kingdom.

As NT Wright says, ‘The life of heaven – the life of the realm where God is already king – is to become the life of the world, transforming the present ‘earth’ into the place of beauty and delight that God always intended. And those who follow Jesus are to begin to live by this rule here and now. That’s the point of the Sermon on the Mount, and these ‘beatitudes’ in particular. They are a summons to live in the present in the way that will make sense in God’s promised future; because that future has arrived in the present in Jesus of Nazareth.’

Through the power of the Spirit, may we all live in a way that will make sense in God’s promised future, a future which began with our saviour, Jesus Christ.