Thoughts on the Beatitudes, Part 2

Thirty years ago a famous (or infamous, as you might prefer) author penned a highly (alas) influential commentary that he called The Be (Happy) Attitudes. Even from the title, you can infer the kind of content you were likely to encounter if you were brave enough to read the book. Perhaps my favorite line comes from the Introduction, where we discover that the Beatitudes are “a therapeutic exercise in replacing negative attitudes with positive attitudes.”

I’m not going to say that being biblically happy doesn’t affect our attitudes, but it’s pretty safe to say that Jesus would find the characterization of his words as a venture in therapeutic thought control to be profoundly silly, even foolish. Instead, Scripture presents a picture of happiness that comes entirely from without – from God himself. In Psalms 1, the signature happiness verse from the Old Testament, the blessed human becomes so through taking in God’s word through a continual act of meditation. In our passage from Matthew 5, the foundation for being happy is faith and trust in the power and person of Jesus, who is the beatitudinal pattern. And, as we will see next week, the entry into happiness is the singular confession that – contrary to the aforementioned author’s belief in affirmative thinking – we are incapable of generating any blessing of our own making.

Before I set out on the content of the Beatitudes, I think it would be helpful to look a bit at their structure and what that says about their meaning. As we do so, we will see that Jesus beautifully and purposefully builds eight statements into a comprehensive portrayal of the disciple’s life in the Messiah. Eight declarations of happiness, each one flowing from the other, and, as a group, divided into two parallel sections.

We can see this construction best by breaking it down into its four twins:

1. Blessed are the poor in spirit.

          5. Blessed are the merciful.

2. Blessed are those who mourn.

          6. Blessed are the pure in heart.

3. Blessed are the meek.

          7. Blessed are the peacemakers

4. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness

          8. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake (and who are thus treated in the way that people treated the prophets).

Setting out the verses this way helps us realize that there are two ways to look at the connections among the Beatitudes. The first one is to consider how they follow on each other from first to eighth. The progression is clearly important, and non-random. This is clear from the beginning: If we are rich, rather than poor in spirit, we are more than unlikely to mourn our condition of sin and need. Mourning, in turn, engenders meekness, which is that special quality of trust that allows the Lord to determine the contours of our lives. Likewise, only the meek can truly hunger and thirst for God’s righteousness. The same goes for each of the “steps” along the way, a set of relationships that I hope to make clearer throughout the next number of weeks.

The second set of associations is that between each parallel saying. On the surface, these pairings are quite logical. For example, mourning (#2) has an intrinsic connection to purity of heart (#6), as does meekness (#3) and being a peacemaker (#7). But the profound nature of the correlations among the character traits merits much more than a mention that they exist, and I think each weekly discussion will reveal how important it is that Jesus put the discourse together the way he did.

All this might seem technical or even unnecessary. If that’s your initial thought, I believe you will see that the symmetry and progression of the verses are not just a cool rhetorical device, but are keys to understanding how God fulfills his purpose for human beings whom he is re-making in the image of his son.

So for now we can look forward to the richness of these remarkable sayings, and enjoy the fact that today’s post is about 400 words shorter than normal.

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Above all, I pray that you will find God in his good word.

PB