Blessing Comes First: SALT's Commentary for All Saints' Day
All Saints’ Day (Year A): Matthew 5:1-12
Big Picture:
1) For those celebrating this Sunday as All Saints’ Day (traditionally celebrated on the first Sunday of November), the lectionary’s Gospel reading is from Matthew’s version of Jesus’ most famous sermon, often called the “Sermon on the Mount.” Having just launched his public ministry, declaring that the “reign of heaven” has come near, he now begins to color in what this “reign of heaven” is all about.
2) Matthew presents Jesus as a kind of “New Moses,” a prophet and teacher who will shepherd God’s people from enslavement to freedom. For example, Jesus’ birth story in Matthew includes a tyrant (Herod) who, in an attempt to kill Jesus, orders all infant boys in the region to be executed — a pattern vividly reminiscent of Moses’ birth story, in which another tyrant (Pharaoh) does the same (Mt 2:13-18; Ex 1:15-22). Likewise, in Matthew, Jesus delivers five major discourses (5:1-7:27; 10:5-42; 13:1-52; 18:1-35; 24:3-25:46), a likely allusion to the five books of the Torah (then attributed to Moses). Moreover, just as Moses delivered divine teaching to the Israelites at Mount Sinai, so Jesus delivers his inaugural sermon “on the mount.”
3) Who’s the audience? Jesus is addressing his disciples in a kind of inner circle, but at the same time, wider circles of “the crowds” are looking on and listening in. At the sermon’s end, Matthew reports that “the crowds were astonished at his teaching”; and just before the sermon’s beginning, Matthew makes clear that the crowds were made up primarily of people who were sick and afflicted, together with those who care for them: “So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he cured them. And great crowds followed him…” (Mt 7:28; 4:24-5).
4) In the biggest picture, theistic “religion” — both in the ancient world and in our own — is often centrally concerned with divine blessing: how to get it, how to keep it, what to do in order to deserve it, and so on. And so when a religious figure outlines his or her key teachings, we might well expect the heart of the presentation to address this fundamental topic — and sure enough, right out of the gates, Jesus begins his first major sermon with a teaching on “blessing.”
Scripture:
1) To the extent that his listeners are expecting Jesus to lay out an account of divine blessing that reveals how to get it and keep it, the Beatitudes come as a confounding surprise. In the first place, Jesus paints an utterly counterintuitive picture of blessedness: looking around the world, then and now, it’s easy to conclude that the “blessed” are the rich, happy, strong, satisfied, ruthless, deceptive, aggressive, safe, and well-liked — and yet here’s Jesus, saying that despite appearances, the truly “blessed” are actually the poor, mourning, gentle, hungry, merciful, pure in heart, peacemaking, persecuted, and reviled.
2) Second, Jesus’ list of blessings frustrates any attempt to turn it into a “how to” manual. Many Christian interpreters distort the Beatitudes into a litany of religious “shoulds,” when in fact it’s essentially a litany of “congratulations,” a map of who is truly blessed, not a set of instructions about how to acquire God’s blessing in the first place. Items in the list like “those who mourn” and “those who are persecuted” help make this clear: Jesus is hardly recommending that his listeners go and create conditions of mourning or persecution for themselves! Rather, he’s delivering good news of consolation and assurance to those already in mourning or persecution, or those who, through no efforts of their own, find themselves in such circumstances later on. Remember: Jesus is preaching to crowds primarily constituted by the sick, the afflicted, and those who care for them. He’s saying, in effect, The world may not regard you as blessed (quite the contrary!), but in truth, you are the blessed ones! God’s reign of heaven turns the world upside down — and that world-turning reign is at hand!
3) Accordingly (for all you grammar nerds), the grammatical mood of Jesus’ language here is indicative, not imperative: he’s describing how the world actually is, not issuing instructions. This is all the more striking because we might expect Jesus, precisely as a “New Moses,” to deliver a list of “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” akin to the commandments Moses delivers at Mount Sinai. And yet that is precisely what Jesus does not do.
4) Instead, he begins with blessing, with good news for the poor, the downtrodden, the ridiculed, the supposedly “weak” — and only then, later in the sermon, does he move on to instructions for living. This way of beginning rejects at the outset the idea that what’s most important about God’s blessing is how to get it and keep it. On the contrary, for Jesus, the most important thing about divine blessing is that it’s already graciously given; indeed, it’s already all over the place, just not where we might conventionally expect it to be. Jesus will get to instructions later — but he begins with God’s blessing, and so with the idea that blessing isn’t a reactive reward for following commands, but rather a proactive, unearned gift to which we may properly respond with gratitude and joy. Blessing comes first!
5) Does this mean that Jesus breaks away from Moses here, superseding the old religion of commandment with a new religion of blessing? Not at all: precisely as a rabbi and a student of Moses, Jesus is helping his listeners (including us!) recover the essence of what Moses originally taught. Remember, the Torah (in those days attributed to Moses) begins not with Mount Sinai but with the creation stories in Genesis; the Torah, in other words, begins with blessing. And so do the Ten Commandments! The encounter at Sinai culminates the story of God’s gracious liberation of the Israelites from enslavement, and so the commandments themselves begin, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery…” (Ex 20:2). Properly understood, then, the Ten Commandments are not a means of acquiring divine blessing, but rather a means of living together and responding to the blessings of God that have already been graciously, wondrously given.
6) Matthew is sometimes understood to “spiritualize” the first beatitude, using the phrase “the poor in spirit” instead of “you who are poor,” as Luke puts it (Mt 5:3; Luke 6:20). But it could be that “poor in spirit” is meant to broaden or deepen the category of “poor” to include emotional and psychological dimensions, along with material ones. After all, elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus criticizes wealth as a potential obstacle to discipleship — so it may well be that, in Matthew as well as in Luke, the first beatitude includes reference to material poverty (for example, Mt 6:19-34; 10:9-10).
7) Moses is traditionally considered the first prophet, and the Hebrew prophets consistently return to the critique that too much Israelite religion (and we might add, too much Christianity today!) comes before God with “sacrifices” and “offerings” as if God will “be pleased” with our gifts — whereas in fact, God is the giver of all good things, the font of every blessing (see, for example, Micah 6:7). The proper human role, then, is not to pretend to be God’s benefactor, or to attempt to earn or maneuver into God’s good graces, but rather to be God’s continual beneficiary, gratefully living out responsive, fully human lives of justice, kindness, and humility.
Takeaways:
1) For Matthew, Jesus is a kind of “New Moses” — and like the original Moses, Jesus delivers life-giving teaching from a mountainside. Just as the Torah begins with the divine blessings of creation and exodus from enslavement, Jesus begins with a surprising, counterintuitive map of divine blessing in everyday life. To borrow a formulation Jesus uses later in the sermon, it’s as if he says, You have heard it said, “Blessed are the rich, happy, strong, satisfied, ruthless, deceptive, aggressive, safe, and well-liked” — but I say to you, blessed are the poor, mourning, gentle, hungry, merciful, pure in heart, peacemaking, persecuted, and reviled for righteousness’ sake. Rejoice and be glad, for the reign of heaven is and will be yours!
2) First and foremost, these are words of consolation and encouragement, good news for the poor, mourning, gentle, and so on, so many of whom are among those initial crowds, and so many of whom, too, are among Matthew’s readers and listeners, then and now. But these are also words of declaration for all to hear, announcing the fact that the dawning “reign of heaven” involves an overturning of the world’s hierarchies of status, privilege, and prestige. Some of the very ones conventionally considered cursed or foolish are actually the ones who are truly blessed, the ones who, in the dawning era of Jubilee, will be redeemed and restored. The rich, strong, satisfied, and so on are invited to repent, to celebrate God’s world-turning salvation, and to join the movement following Jesus, building lives of doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God (Micah 6:8).
3) In any case, the Beatitudes are not imperatives. They are not commandments. They are not “ethics.” They are declarations of divine blessing, and as such, they are cause for consolation, gratitude, and joy. The time for instruction comes later; indeed, Jesus will turn to instruction for most of the rest of this famous sermon. But blessing comes first! Think of it this way: if we distort the beatitudes into duties, or worse, into a supposed method for acquiring divine blessing, we’ll miss Jesus’ primary point. God’s blessings are already among us, surprising and counterintuitive, gracious and undeserved, world-turning and beautiful, and we’re called to live lives that are responsive to those blessings at every turn. That’s what “all saints” do: they live as if the reign of heaven is at hand — because it is! As the great preacher and scholar Fred Craddock once put it, when it comes to divine blessing, our lives are to be lived “because of” such blessing, not “in order to” acquire it — and that’s only possible, after all, if blessing comes first.