When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he began to speak and taught them, saying:
Matthew 5:1-12
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people 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 in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
So, I’ve got a confession to make. And we’re in a place where we do that sort of thing, so I’m going to just share it with you all: I have no interest in the Super Bowl. It makes me feel a little un-American to say it, but it’s true. There’s only one reason that I watch the Super Bowl, and that is—you got it—the commercials. They’re just funny and thought-provoking and there’s a few good celebrity appearances. It’s all about the commercials.
But honestly, that’s a little crazy. Especially when you think about what commercials do: they sell us stuff. But they do more than that. Commercials don’t just sell us stuff; they sell us a life. Commercials send messages about the kind of life that is desirable, the kind of life that, when other people have it, we want it. And so the Bud Light ad isn’t just about the beer, it’s about the friends that are certain to come along with it. The Mercedes ad isn’t just selling you on the power of the engine; it’s selling you on the power of the prestige of having a Mercedes. We want the lives that are represented in these advertisements: the friends and the respect and the control that these lives offer. And what’s very clever about the commercials is that they convince us that these very desirable lives can be ours if only we buy the beer, the car, the detergent. They sell us on the life, and the stuff that makes that life possible, and they hope we’ll buy in, literally.
Now, this might seem like it’s coming from left field, but I think that our gospel text for this morning does something similar: it shows us the kind of life that is valuable. This is the first Sunday of four weeks on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. And here’s how Jesus starts the whole thing: with a vision of the kinds of lives that we should value.
The Greek word that’s translated as “blessed,” μακάριος, which we hear over and over again in the Beatitudes, doesn’t mean holy or saintly, but something more like happy, as Justin rightly pointed out to us last year when he preached on Luke’s account of the Beatitudes. In fact, an even better translation of this word is enviable. Jesus is telling us about the lives that we should see and think, wow—lucky her. I wish I could live that life. And what kind of people live such enviable lives, according to Jesus? The spiritually impoverished, the mourners, the gentle ones, the ones who hunger for justice, the merciful, those whose hearts are pure, the ones who make peace, and the ones who suffer persecution. These are the kinds of people who appear in Jesus’ vision of a valuable, enviable life. And he wants us to share that vision with him, to find value in such a life.
But really, why would we? There’s a reason that the commercials we’ll all see tonight on TV work so well: they show us things that it would be normal for anyone to find valuable. Time spent with friends, social standing, a tidy house. But what is so valuable about the lives Jesus talks about in the Beatitudes? I don’t want to mourn. I don’t want to suffer persecution. I don’t want to be spiritually poor. Do you? Why would anyone find those lives valuable, desirable, enviable? It reminds me of the epistle reading for this morning: St. Paul says it’s easy to think all this gospel stuff is a bunch of folly. The vision Jesus shares here is pretty upside down.
But maybe that’s because it’s us who are upside down. What has the world of our Super Bowl commercials gotten us? We’re just more and more consumed by our desires for companionship, status, control, you name it, and we pursue that to the detriment of so many other of God’s children.
And this, I think, is the issue Jesus wants to confront in the Beatitudes. We are so loath to mourn that we keep death far from us, in nursing homes and hospitals. We are so loath to be persecuted—even for Jesus’ sake—that we fear putting others off when, maybe, we should be more forthcoming about our faith commitments. And even then, we still sure aren’t so great at making peace. Are we eager to be gentle? Nope. To be merciful? Definitely not. It’s agonizing for us to forgive others—even those we love the most, even for something silly—much less the person who cuts you off in the parking lot. Even when it comes to spirituality, we want to be rich: to have it all worked out, to feel gratified, to be secure.
But that is not God’s call for our lives. That’s not the life that Jesus is encouraging us to pursue this morning. He’s inviting us to be a little less reluctant to mourn, to be a little more willing to make peace, to do those things that are difficult and costly. (And by the way, I don’t think this means that Jesus wants us to mourn. After all, he’s the one who crosses into death so that none of us have to. But I think Jesus is rightly concerned by the degree to which we are all so unwilling to mourn with him.) In these Beatitudes, Jesus is deepening and expanding the life that God calls us to in the Old Testament through Moses and the prophets—to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. It’s not a coincidence, after all, that Jesus looks so much like Moses in the Sermon on the Mount. He’s up on a mountain, right after spending some time in the wilderness, sharing with the rest of his people a revelation about the way God wants us to live. Matthew, whose gospel we’ll read through this year, really wanted us to see Jesus as an extension of Moses and the prophets. But notice that Jesus takes Moses’ laws even further. He doesn’t overturn them, but instead outdoes them. Jesus’ vision is even more radical. But it’s one that he wants us to buy into—one that’s so much better and more Godly than any of the visions we’ll see on our TV screens this evening.
Because here’s the thing to top all of that. It’s important to note that we read this text during Epiphany, the season in whi(ch we celebrate how God reveals himself in Jesus. And yes, one of the ways we receive God’s revelation in this text is that we learn what kind of life God thinks is worthy of a Christian. But it’s also the life that God himself chose to take up in the person of Jesus. In the Beatitudes, Jesus doesn’t just tell us about what kind of life we should value, he also tells us about himself. There’s not one thing Jesus mentions that he didn’t himself undergo or undertake. Jesus himself was spiritually poor (Matthew 26:38); he mourned (John 11:35, Luke 19:41); he described himself as meek (Matthew 11:29); he hungered for righteousness even more than for food (Matthew 4:4); he showed mercy (John 8:11); his heart was pure (1 Peter 2:22); he made peace (John 14:27, Ephesians 2:14-16); and he suffered persecution (John 15:18-20). The life Jesus commends to us is not one that he himself avoided. And he does all of that for us. So it’s not just that we should agree with Jesus that living a life of gentleness and mercy and peacemaking and mourning is valuable. But we should think, when we sing that we want to be like Jesus in our hearts, that we are willing to mourn, to make peace, to be poor in spirit. And we should also know that, when we take up that valuable life, our Savior and friend will be right there alongside us. There’s no more blessed life than that.