The Beatitudes

Both in sermons and in commentaries, people so often seem to see the Beatitudes - & much of the Sermon on the Mount - as a puzzle to be solved. How is it to be understood as a practical guide to life, as a sort of New Testament Ten Commandments, when so much of it is so “difficult”?

I am not going to add to the gallons of ink and the millions of spoken words that have been expended in commenting in detail upon the Beatitudes and the Sermon. Instead I am going to accept them as they are: if you want to be polite, paradoxical. If you want to be honest, they are crazy, unreal, even incomprehensible.

Yet they are central to Jesus’ teaching, to who Jesus was and to who we are.

No, Jesus was not saying that it is jolly to be poor, hungry and sorrowful. He did not expect you to cut off your hand, literally, if you are tempted to sin with it. He is trying to make us stop, rebel, and think. The impossible, the absurd, the contradictory, the apparently untrue, were his delight. They were his stock in trade.

The best way to make people listen is to startle them (remember Haydn’s Surprise Symphony?). And the best way to make them think is to make them rebel. As Kierkegaard rightly said, it’s no good telling people things; they have to get there themselves; to make them get there themselves, not to tell them, is your job...my job...what Jesus was doing.

So often, he is not trying to tell you about money, or mustard-seeds. He is trying to get you to see something. “O foolish and slow of heart!” “How long must I be with you? How long must I suffer you?” “Have I been with you so long, Philip, and still you do not know me?” How is it that you can’t see?

The Beatitudes are not like the Ten Commandments, to be learned by heart and carried out in detail. They are there, like so much of Jesus’ teaching - & his life - to be shocked by, nonplussed by; at the most, directed by. The Sermon on the Mount does not set out a law. It shows you an ideal you cannot achieve and possibly can’t even understand. “Be ye perfect(repeat, incredulously), as your Heavenly Father is perfect”? (repeat, incredulously)
It is, I think, quite likely that Luke’s version of the Beatitudes - which also includes the parallel Woes - is what Jesus actually said. It is certainly the more shocking. Matthew’s version seems to have been smoothed over, made, if you like, more ‘religious’. I suspect that what Jesus said was “Blessed are the poor, blessed are those who hunger and thirst...” It is an answer to the problem of pain, but not an immediately comprehensible one. It is not nice to be poor, to mourn, to hunger and thirst, to be persecuted. It is generally not a good idea, in this world, to be meek. And it is not unknown for peacemakers to struggle through life and meet a violent end.

My favourite childhood book was called “The Phantom Tollbooth”. It tells an Alice-like story of Milo, a small boy who entered a strange world by travelling, in his toy car, through a toy tollbooth. After many adventures he succeeds in reconciling two brothers who have been at war for as long as anyone could remember. At the start he was told there was a secret about his mission which he could only be told at its successful conclusion. What was it? he asks at the end. The reply is: “It was impossible.”

Well, it clearly was not impossible, because it was done: and yet it was impossible, and that was the magic of it. It was because it was impossible, rather than just difficult, that the story exists at all. Remember all those fairy tales and folk songs where the impossible is demanded: “Tell her to find me an acre of land (Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme) Between the salt water and the sea strand; Then she'll be a true love of mine. ...”
There is magic in the impossible.
Didn’t Tertullian suggest something of the kind when he said:
The Son of God was crucified: it does not make me ashamed, precisely because it is shameful.
The Son of God died: it is credible, precisely because it is absurd.
He was buried, and rose again: there is no doubt about it, precisely because it is impossible.

That is usually condensed as “Credo quia impossibile” - “I believe it because it is impossible”.
Or, as Jesus said, “With humans it is impossible. But with God all things are possible.” Of course they are. But they have to be impossible - and acknowledged as impossible - with humans first.

When things are clear, but very difficult, (some of the Ten Commandments or St. Paul’s lists of do’s and don’t’s) the result is discouragement. When they are impossible or absurd, there is space for magic - or for divine power.
Over and over in the Christmas liturgy, from the oldest Roman texts to the newest carols, you find this effort to express the shockingness, the absurdity, the sheer impossibility of the Christmas story - of Christianity, then, as it gets more impossible as the story progresses. Have you read the Athanasian Creed? Try it sometime. Three Persons in one God is absurd. True God born as true man while still remaining true God is absurd. The death of the Son of God is absurd. God cannot die. Come to that, creation from nothing is absurd. It cannot be. And there, where we come to a stop, is the space for the divine.

People talk about “fruitful tension”. To me the effect of these absurdities, these apparent untruths, these contradictory statements, is not so much a fruitful tension as an explosion in my brain. In the familiar phrase, it blows your mind. It must blow your mind. God - is - mind-blowing.

It is when we realise that we can’t do it, that we haven’t even begun, that divine power is let loose. That is what Jesus is trying to do.

So often we object to his parable in which the master orders his servants about & then does not thank them, & Jesus adds: “So you also, when you have done all these things that are commanded you, say: “We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which we ought to do.”
Why do we object? Do we think we are already perfect, when even St. Paul knew otherwise?

Kierkegaard remarks that it is always the stupid pupil who puts his hand up after ten minutes and says he has completed the assignment. He thinks he has completed it because he has not even understood what was required.
The point is that you have never finished. There is never a moment at which you have done it all. Like young Milo’s mission to reconcile King Azaz the Unabridged & his brother the Mathemagician, it is impossible.

But, you know, that is the Good News. It is absurd - but it is true. It is impossible - but it happened. We need no longer fear the incomprehensible, the vastness of the universe in comparison to our insignificance. We no longer need to fear anything at all. For God has overcome the world. He has led captivity, and our limitations, captive. In those frightening things, the absurd, the impossible, the apparently untrue, all we need see is his magic, his divine power; his resurrection - and ours.