The hearer’s first mental reflex is to transpose “Blessed are those who . . .” into some form of “You ought to be. . . .” So Jesus would be promising us God’s reward if we would do the right kinds of things and be the right kind of people. Then the Beatitudes would be simply a back-handed oriental way of saying, “These are eight basic virtues” or, “These are eight kinds of good deeds.” Many sermon series use our passage that way.
But that will not work. The things of which Jesus says “Blessed are those who . . .” are not all things that one can by an act of will set out to do. One does not make oneself poor or make oneself thirsty for righteousness, or make oneself mourn, or even make oneself pure in heart. Jesus is describing a set of ways of being, or states, or conditions in which people already find themselves. He is not saying, “If you become thus, you will get a reward for it.” He is saying, “There are some people who are already thus: good for them.”
The Greek term makarios, which is translated “blessed,” does not apply first to people who are praised or people who get a reward for achievement, but to people who are fortunate, even “lucky.” So the reversal of values that God’s new regime brings is described in terms of the reversal of the categories of people who will be well off when the Kingdom comes. Those who are poor will be well off, because in the Great Reversal5 they shall be provided for. Those who mourn will be consoled. To fill in the contrasts from Luke’s version, those who are rich will lose their wealth.
The presupposition of all this is that the coming of the Kingdom whose approach Jesus has just announced (Matt 4:17, “Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand”) is socially real. To “repent,” as the exchanges between John the Baptist and his listeners had already made clear, means not only to confess one’s sinfulness, or to be remorseful about one’s failures, but to change one’s pattern of life in order to reflect a change of worlds or of lords. So the presupposition of the Beatitudes is the proclaiming of the Kingdom. The Beatitudes are good news because of the Kingdom. They are the Gospel.
Some people are poor: good for them, for the Kingdom is coming and they shall receive it as their inheritance;
Some people are peacemakers: good for them, because in the coming Kingdom it will be manifest that they are like God their Father.
Some people are meek: good for them, for in the coming Kingdom their kind will be in charge;
Some of you are rich: too bad for you; you have had all you will get.
The counter-cultural newness and the concrete realism of the good news of the coming new regime inaugurate a new age in which things are true that were not true before. Jesus is not merely raising by a degree or two the intensity of the general moral idealism with which all good people try, when they can, to be a little more loving. Nor is he escalating the divine demand in an intentionally unrealistic way in order to make us all recognize that we are sinners. For none of these was a Messiah needed.
Jesus is bringing to pass in his person the newness of the age in which God’s righteousness is operative among those who hear it proclaimed. The reversal of values is not first of all new information or new potential or new motivation on the moral level; it is first of all a whole new world, in which this radically different style of relating to others “comes naturally.”
The “social theme” with which we are to begin is not new information about the good society, nor new motivation to set about building it, but rather the Word that the Kingdom is upon us. Is it thinkable that we might take guidance in daily life from another social system than the one we see in place?
Love of the Enemy (Matt 5:38–48; Luke 6:27–36)
What Jesus does not mean when he says, “But I say to you”
Some views of the Sermon have taken it as the central expression of a fundamental contradiction between the morality of the Old Testament and that of the New. Such an interpretation is understandable, since there are differences between the two Testaments, and since some of them have to do partly with the structures of social justice: with nationhood and the state, violence and the offender.6 But it would be a mistake to read these six contrasts between the “Old” and the “New,” the last two of which are on the theme of violence and the enemy, as if they were meant to dramatize a polarity between the two Testaments.
Jesus says explicitly in the introductory paragraph (Matt 5:17ff.) that his intent is “not to destroy but to fulfill” the real meaning of the law. Each of the six specimens, in a different way, exemplifies how the Old is not rejected but radicalized or deepened or clarified in the application made by Jesus. The prescription of the former law, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” had not meant so much that vengeance is divinely demanded as that such retaliation as is demanded by the aggrieved and permitted by law must be limited to the measure of the offense and no more. It is this restraining intent that Jesus “fills full” as he sets aside all vengeance and illustrates the abandonment of that kind of response to conflict with the counter strategy of the other cheek and the second mile.
Similarly the commandment to love the neighbor is in no way done away with by the Sermon. Jesus universalizes its meaning by including even the enemy in the definition of the “neighbor” to be loved. “Neighbor” here, as in most other languages than English, means anyone with whom we have to do, the representative “other” person with whom we are dealing, and not a person especially close to us. There is no person to whom neighbor love does not apply. Specifically the enemy becomes the test of whether our love for neighbor is authentic. Loving those who are close to us (“neighbors” in the English sense) is characterized by Jesus as the morality of “sinners” or “gentiles.”
The life-style that Jesus rejects is thus not selfishness in the sense of a failure to love anyone, so that the devotion of someone who makes a sacrifice on behalf of posterity or client or nation should be praised as virtuous. The most destructive kinds of selfishness, especially on the level of institutional injustice, are those that have their root in the claim to be altruistic. They claim to need, in the name of some cause, some human solidarity, some bearer of rights, to exclude another person or category of people from their loving concern. The more clear we are that our own intentions are “just,” that they constitute “rights,” or that the hostilities in which we are involved are on behalf of some legitimate beneficiary, the more unquestioning we become about the unworthy means we are ready to use for that higher cause.
It would take little moral profundity to reject purely personal selfishness. What Jesus rejects is every ground for dealing with a fellow human being as if he or she were an exception to the obligation to love. This does not mean, in some idealistic way, saying that we have no enemies, or refusing to recognize them as such. It means the opposite: we are to name the relationship as one of enmity and then to express love within it.
Imitating the Father (Matt 5:45–48, Luke 6:35–36)
What Jesus does not mean by “Be perfect”
The thought that we might be like God the Father is not a frequent one in the New Testament. Small wonder that it has seemed shocking or frightening, so that efforts to interpret such a simple and sweeping phrase have gone in several directions.
One meaning of “Christian perfection” has seen it as a distant target, an “ideal,” to be achieved only at the end of a lengthy process of growth and self-discipline whereby the seeker after perfection develops character, sets aside lesser values, and lives only for God and God’s cause in a growing wholeness of consecration. Such understandings of perfection have been at home especially in the religious life, in mysticism, and in the literature of devotion, both Catholic and Protestant.
Another view, more widely represented in middle America, sees “perfection” not as the end of a long process of human effort but as a unique gift of divine grace offered to those who will accept it in faith. This view is represented in those evangelical denominations called “Wesleyan,”