'Jesus came down with the twelve apostles and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.
Then he looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets."
But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets."'
Have you ever been to the grocery store, or a fast food place, and the person ringing you up finishes the transaction with something like, “Have a blessed day!”? Anyone else experience that. It’s a nice sentiment, isn’t it? Have a blessed day. But sometimes, if I’m really thinking about it in the moment, I feel this urge to ask them: What do you mean by blessed? Do you want me to be poor and hungry? To weep and be hated? I’m sure they don’t mean that. They’re just trying to be nice, after all. But that’s what happens when you wish blessedness on a priest.
Because it’s obvious that the biblical definition of blessedness differs from our contemporary culture, which is predominantly concerned with the safety and security of the self. This is achieved by way of upward mobility, namely the acquisition of possessions – money, housing, food, etc. To be blessed in our culture is to be among the haves, to pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps, to rise above being poor, hungry, weeping, or hated. We’ve all seen interviews with famous folks who say they’re just so blessed to have so much. I ask you: is this what it means to be blessed, according to the teachings of Jesus? Or is blessedness something else?
Most of you blog readers, I suspect, are familiar with the term ‘beatitude.’ It comes from the Latin word beatus and first shows up in Middle English. It means supreme or divine blessedness. I also suspect that most of you, when you hear that word, think immediately about Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. That sermon, which spans three chapters, starts out with a series of 10 pronouncements of supreme blessedness, which we have collectively given the title of The Beatitudes: blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those who are persecuted, those who are reviled, and those who are met with persecutions for Jesus’ sake.
What if I told you, though, that these are not the only Beatitudes that Jesus pronounced? Whereas in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus gives these pronouncements of blessedness on a mountainside – mirroring Moses giving the Law to the people on Mt. Sinai – the Gospel of Luke, which is written to a Gentile audience, brings Jesus down into the plain, among the people. And rather than 10, Luke reduces the list of beatitudes to four. This Sermon on the Plain is more condensed and harder to spiritualize than the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew’s pronouncements are amorphous, generalized statements – blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the merciful – as if Jesus were talking about people who exist “out there” somewhere. Luke, meanwhile, makes the pronouncements much more direct: blessed are YOU who are poor, the very people in the crowd, the very people who have been listening to and following Jesus. This message is for them. Blessed are you who are poor; you who are hungry; you who weep; and you who are hated. Blessed are you if you fall into these categories. Really?
How many of us would say to a wheelchair-bound panhandler at the intersection, “You’re so blessed!”? Not many, I’d reckon. But why would we? We measure blessedness by the standards of our culture, which are the standards of privilege. Blessedness means having money, it means a full belly, it means laughing and dancing, and being admired. We would never tell the panhandler that they are blessed because, I suspect, we don’t truly believe it. That’s our cultural standards, not Jesus’ standards.
After the four beatitudes Luke adds something that Matthew doesn’t include: four pronouncements of woe, on the rich, the full, the laughing, and the well regarded. These are the very ones that our culture would call blessed. These are the qualities, I believe, that the kid ringing me up at the grocery store is thinking of when he says he hopes I have a blessed day. Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking is made manifest in the heretical Prosperity Gospel, which says that God, actually, wants the poor to be rich, that your blessedness is measured in your material possessions, your prestige, your position of power. The Prosperity Gospel isn’t just preached among those of means, but also in poor communities, where the message is that upward mobility for the poor is, in fact, a sign of God’s favor. The goal, says the Prosperity Gospel, is for the poor to become rich. That’s supreme blessedness.
It is not the Gospel of Jesus. The goal is not for the poor to become rich but for the rich to become poor. Think of the rich young man whom Jesus tells to sell everything and redistribute the wealth, or the early Christian communities in Acts – also written by the author of Luke’s Gospel – in which the rich freely sold their land and possessions in order that everyone in the community had enough and no one could lord anything over anyone. The movement of the Gospel, of Jesus himself, is downward mobility, the emptying of oneself. The rich are to be sent away empty, as Mary sings in the Magnificat. Then they’ll know true blessedness
For those of us who know the privileges afforded by our station in life, the color of our skin, the money in our bank accounts, or the state of our health, this can feel downright insulting; or at best, we might feel guilty about it. Yet there is wisdom in Jesus’ words because those of us who are poor, hungry, weeping, and hated, know something that those who are rich, full, laughing, and admired do not. They know what it means to long, deeply, from their very soul for God. For the mercy, the peace, the love, and righteousness of God. There is no greater blessing, and most of us don’t know it. Saint Augustine of Hippo said that there is a hole in our very souls that we try to fill with all sorts of things, thinking that they will satisfy us, but that hole is shaped like God, and only God can fill it. When a person doesn’t have what the world would characterize as a blessing – money, food, health – there is nothing else left but God. This is a truth only the suffering know, which is why the privileged in our culture pity the suffering, rather than envy them. The suffering know real blessedness.
Father Gustavo Gutierrez, who died just this past October, coined the term liberation theology, the idea that God has a particular affinity for the poor. He and others like Dr, James Cone, preached that true justice and equality with God and one another does not come by convincing the poor that they are blessed when they have more, but by convincing the privileged that they are blessed when they have less. The aim is solidarity with the suffering by way of emptying oneself. It continues to be the work of organizations like the Poor Peoples Campaign, and truly, it is the call of Christians everywhere who seek to create authentic, equitable, and beloved community.
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How might we live into this call? It begins when all is stripped away and we know what it means to long for God on the deepest possible level, for there is no more supreme blessedness.
