Blessed Are... Series

Good morning. How many of you are old enough to remember a group duo by the name of Simon and Garfunkel? They were a group in the 60s and 70s. A rock duo group known for a lot of great hits. Sounds of Silence. Mrs. Robinson. Bridge Over Troubled Water. Boxer. Although some of you remember the group Simon and Garfunkel and some of their greatest hits, do you remember the hit called Blessed? Very few of you. Just because some of you might not be familiar with the group and some of you may not be familiar with the song Blessed, I thought it would be an appropriate opening to the sermon today because it is kind of a spiritual song. (Song played here.) Anybody remember that song? Anybody wondering why I would play such a song? I bet some of you had a problem with it because it is a little bit edgy. I had never heard that song before but was familiar with the group. When I heard it last week, I said this is the perfect opening for this particular sermon because the core message of the song is really the core message of the passage we are going to look at called the Beatitudes. The idea that no matter what your condition in life, you are blessed because Jesus Christ stands there with an open invitation to come into the kingdom of God. That is where we are going with it. Last week, we started a sermon series called Learning to Live Like Jesus. It is a follow-up of our series in the fall on discipleship. This series is based on the Sermon on the Mount. As I talked about last week, the Sermon on the Mount is kind of like a manual for discipleship. It is a curriculum for Christ-likeness. We are going to look today at the first 12 verses of chapter 5, which would be summarized by the word beatitudes. Beatitudes is simply a fancy word that means blessed but blessed doesn’t necessarily mean a state of happiness. It has more of an idea of a state of being well off. The word blessed, before it was given a Christian link, it was actually a word that would be applied to the Greek gods and goddesses. They would be considered blessed. They would be considered very well off. I would like somebody to read chapter 5, verses 1-12. (Matthew 5:1-12 read here.)

When you listen to those words, they kind of sound a little bit comforting, but if you are honest with yourself, sometimes those words are a little bit confusing. They cause you to scratch your head. We don’t know exactly what Jesus is trying to say here. The traditional school of thought is that some people suggest that these conditions in life should be pursued because they lead to the virtuous life, a good life. If we want to be blessed, we should pursue these types of things also. In other words, we should go out and try to be poor in spirit. We should try to mourn. We should try to be meek. Many of you probably come from a church where you have heard that these are the virtues that should be pursued. Maybe you heard it in a small group setting in a classroom or maybe in your own person reading through your Bible study. The only thing that is possible is that this interpretation that we are so used to may actually be incorrect. Incorrect in the sense that what Jesus is saying here is not that we should pursue these types of conditions in life so that we may be blessed. He is saying that in spite of these conditions in life, we are blessed. That is a different angle on things. I would ask that the people here who are used to seeing it the other way would put off any resistance to this type of teaching and just hear me out.

In order to understand the interpretation I want to give, we have to revisit a little bit of background. What we have here is Jesus coming onto the scene in ancient Palestine 2,000 years ago or so. The central theme of Jesus Christ was the kingdom of heaven. Jesus came proclaiming that the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven is here. The people are to repent and believe the message. When Jesus says that the kingdom is here, what he is saying is that through my coming, God is doing something special. God is about to break into our reality and reestablish his kingdom on earth. In doing so may be able to free the people of their oppressive enemies, particularly the Romans whom they seem to be oppressed a lot by. That is good news for the Jewish people that have been waiting for this new king to come. Really it is bad news for the people that were non-Jews because the Jewish people saw the kingdom of heaven as some sort of an exclusive club that was limited based on certain criteria. For one, there were some Jewish people who felt that the kingdom of heaven was reserved only for males. If you were a woman, you could not get into the kingdom of heaven. In many ways, women were very low on the totem pole. They were treated like livestock in many different ways. Also, you had to be a good Jew. A Jew that followed all the law. You didn’t have any sin in your life. A Jew that followed the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. You also had to be somebody that was very physically fit. If you had a sickness or illness or you were crippled or blind or whatever, you would be considered unclean, so you are not going to be welcome into the kingdom of God. You couldn’t be poor. To the Jewish people, being poor was a sign of abandonment by God. If you are familiar with the gospels, you know that these types of people are the very type of people that Jesus went out to reach. As we visited some of the stories and went through the series called The Story, we saw that Jesus would be found hanging out with the tax collectors and the sinners and the prostitutes and the wine drinkers and that sort of thing. Not only would Jesus be attracting the Jewish people who were interested in the coming kingdom of God, but would be attracting the marginal people. The people on the fringes of life. Also, the curiosity seekers who were just thrilled to death when they began to see all the miracles and the demonstrations of power that Jesus did throughout those first couple years there. Jesus was very good about attracting crowds of people. People who wanted to know more about this kingdom of God and really wanted to know whether or not they were a part of the in crowd or the out crowd.