Happiness is What
Sermon on the Mount # 2
Rev. Denn Guptill, BCC Sept. 22 1996
Last week as we started to discuss the Sermon on the Mount we mentioned several things that bear repeating. The first is that these are the words of Jesus for today, not for yesterday or tomorrow but for September 22 1996. We also mentioned that the Sermon on the Mount is not the sum total of everything that Jesus taught. There is much more in the theology of Jesus Christ then what is incorporated in these one hundred and eleven verses. If you were to glean all of your doctrinal knowledge from the Sermon on the Mount you would miss teaching on the resurrection, the Holy Spirit, Baptism, the church and the greatest commandment.
We discovered that the Sermon on the Mount was for Christians, it was addressed to the disciples and not to the multitudes, it has no relevance for the pre-Christian. And lastly the Sermon on the Mount relates to the Kingdom of God which is present in all believers. The Sermon on the Mount is God’s manual for His partners who seek to see His Kingdom grow and expand.
Matthew 5:1 (NIV) Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. From the geography of Palestine we know that Christ would have been travelling along the road from Tiberias to Metula, which skirts the sea of Galilee. The road branches off at Tabgha here and the church of loaves and fishes was built here in the fourth century, Capernium is just two miles further down the road. Across the road about two and a half miles North east of Tabgha is a hill that is approximately 330 ft high, or around a hundred metres. It is commonly referred to as the "Hill of the Beatitudes".
It was on this hill that Luke records that Christ called the 12 apostles. And no doubt it was here that Christ delivered the Sermon on the Mount, although if it had of been in a country less flat then Israel it would have been the sermon on the mound. A little humour there that I enjoyed immensely.
Matthew tells us that Christ sat as he began to teach. Now that is a Jewish custom that when the Rabbi was about to give official teaching he always sat. That’s why we still talk about a professor who has a chair in a certain department of a university, for that matter it’s the reason the Pope gives his official teachings ex cathedral he does it sitting down. A rabbi might teach as he stood or strolled along but the serious teaching came only when he was seated. This would indicate the importance that Jesus placed on what he was about to say.
And as he sat Matthew tells us that the disciples came to him. Not the crowds, not the multitudes but his disciples. Again confirming what we already know and that was that the Sermon on the Mount was meant for the already saved portion of society. Matthew continues by saying And He began to teach them the NKJV tells us that He opened His mouth and taught them. Now you might think that opened his mouth might just be a fancy way of saying "He said" but in the Greek it literally meant he spoke from the heart.
A little grammar lesson here, the Greek language uses two tenses when speaking of things which happened in the past. The first was the aorist tense which described a completed action, for example, "He shut the door." The action was done, tut fini, complete. The other tense was referred to as the imperfect tense, you paying attention? We’re going to test you on this later, OK? The imperfect tense suggests a continuing action, "He loved his wife" "She went to work" Christ’s teaching here was described using the imperfect tense, suggesting that it was ongoing, and this was just a part of his teaching, and didn’t conclude at this point.
Now Christ is about to embark on a voyage into a subject that is just as relevant today as it was 2000 years ago and that is the question "What is happiness?" Which if you were to look into last weeks edition of Macleans magazine on page 54 you would see an article entitled "Get Happy"
The term that Christ uses in his teaching which we commonly refer to as the beatitudes, is blessed, and in the original language it was the word Makarious, and it literally meant to be "supremely blest, well-off, fortunate or happy" But the question still begs to be asked, "What is happy?" A number of years ago the magazine "Psychology Today" did a survey of 5200 readers to determine what constituted happiness. I love the response of one man who wrote "I think I’m happy please verify" The editors of psychology Today didn’t discover what happiness was but they did discover a couple of other things. Firstly they ruled out some attributes that are thought to contribute to happiness. It didn’t seem to matter if the people were rich, or poor, a believer or an atheist, married or single, or where they lives. Instead happiness appeared to be related to an inward attitude, or the way we regard our circumstances. Those same findings were borne out in the recent Macleans article.
Secondly while the editors of Psychology Today couldn’t pin down happiness they did discover what unhappiness is. Listen to this, "Unhappiness is what I don’t have but think you do have" And so the stay at home mom thinks that she is deprived of the independence that the woman who works outside enjoys, while the working mom figures that the stay at home mom gets the freedom to do what she wants all day long. And so we gauge our happiness by what we perceive somebody else’s happiness to be.
Another source of unhappiness is wanting what I can’t have, for example, Ron a new Saab convertible. Unhappiness is also not wanting what I can have like a fifteen year old Lebaron convertible. If we were to go south of the Border where Sajonna is from we would discover that the constitution of the United States guaranties the rights of a life of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Notice that even though the constitution assure people that they will be free to pursue happiness there is no one in the world who can guarantee that they will actually catch it.
And so in an attempt to find this elusive state we read books on how to be happy, we take happy pills, and wear happy faces and put on happy buttons and go to the happy hour and sing happy songs. Without any real success we have allowed the ad men and television men to define happiness for us.
What is happiness then? Good question. It is possessions, a feeling, unencumbered leisure, absence of all restraint, uninterrupted ecstasy a sense of purpose and freedom from threats. Hmmm, maybe the problem is that we only thin we know what happiness is. We have allowed the world to define happiness and then we reach for it and pouf it disappears.
Remember what William Lyons Phelps said? No? Phelps stated "If happiness truly consisted in physical ease and freedom from care then the happiest individual would not be either a man or a woman; it would be I think, an American cow."
Jesus states his views on happiness in these eight poetic sayings. They are rated X because they have little to do with the pursuit of happiness as we know it. Let’s not a couple of things, 1) happiness is a result not a goal. Is not something we search for and find, instead it is something we find while we are searching for something else. You ever do that? How many of you lose your keys. Sound familiar? Had a guy in my church in Truro who finally bought a key tag that beeped when you clapped your hands, worked great until he brought it to an evening service where we were singing choruses and . . . When I try to find my missing keys I find the neatest things.
2) The something else that we are supposed to be pursuing is the Kingdom of God. Matthew 6:33 (NIV) But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Christ is not telling us to pursue happiness and if that is why we embrace God then we’ve done it for the wrong reasons. We tend to forget that the pursuit of happiness is as idolatrous as the pursuit of mansions, careers or Saab convertibles.
Alexander Solzhetsyn said "If humanism was right in declaring that man is born to be happy then man wouldn’t be born to die" There is nothing wrong with the desire to be happy, there is everything wrong with the way we often go seeking it.
And so Christ begins the beatitudes, which by the way means a state of blessedness, by making this remarkable statement found in Matthew 5:3 (NIV) "Blessed are the poor in spirit, Kind of a strange way to start off a series about happiness, talking about the poor in spirit. A more accurate translation might be, those not inflated in spirit. And so Christ says happy are those who are unspoiled who don’t get ruined by delusions of deserving the Kingdom of God.
In the classic movie Quo Valdis, the Roman Emperor is returning after his great victory and is in the midst of the equivalent of a ticker tape parade, and as the people are cheering there is a slave standing next to his master whispering in his ear, "remember thou art only a man"
In our culture happiness is reserved for those who exceed human limitations. In other words it is for the athlete who breaks records, the parent who raises three perfect kids, the writer who produces a best-seller, the preacher with the biggest church, the politician with the biggest majority. From day one we are told that happiness is gained by exceeding our humanness.
"Are you content now?" the caterpillar asked Alice in wonderland. "Well, I should like to be a little larger," she said "three inches is such a wretched height to be . . . I’m not used to it." Everybody wants to be a little bigger, maybe not physically but every other way. In our work, in our play. I saw a no fear T-shirt that summed it up when it stated, "Finishing second means you’re the first to lose."
Happiness will never find us as long as we see ourselves as good enough to make it on our own. All of our lives we are told how great we are. In humanism we are taught that Man is the ultimate good and he can make it on his own. But he isn’t the ultimate good and he can’t make it on his own. If a man realize his own helplessness and can then put his whole trust in God two things will happen. The first is that he will become completely detached from things and completely attached to God.
And so Christ says Blessed are the poor in spirit. Why? For theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
Until we become poor in spirit we can’t accept Christ, and until we accept Christ we can’t gain the kingdom of heaven.
Until we accept our depravity and the futility of our works we will never see the need of Salvation. Christ spelled it out for us in Luke 19:10 (NIV) For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost." Is that because those who aren’t lost don’t need to be save, no because the Bible tells us that everyone is lost. But until you admit that you’re lost your aren’t going to ask for help.
Christ next statement seems almost as absurd as the last one because he says, in Matthew 5:4 (NIV) Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. The word that Christ uses here is the strongest possible word in the Greek language for mourning. Five years ago my cousin and her husband rushed their four year old into the local hospital because he appeared to have a severe case of the flue. Twelve hours latter they had to sign consent to remove him from life support, and they lost their first born child. That is the type of grief that Jesus was talking about. And so is Christ saying that the true path to happiness is through grief? I don’t think so Tim. Anyone who has ever lost a loved one through death, divorce or rejection knows that there is no greater unhappiness. In our minds happiness and grief are at the far ends of the spectrum of human emotions and we spend most of our adult lives insulating ourselves from grief. And yet Jesus definitely links our happiness and our grief.
Some would say that the second beatitude is linked to the first one and so Christ begins by saying "Happy are those who know they are sinners" and continues by saying "and happy are those who grieve for their sinfulness." You know those people in the church who always seemed to be dressed in black, with long sorrowful faces, and there is never joy or celebration in their lives only guilt and self hatred. While the concept of grief over our sinfulness may be part of what Christ is saying I really can’t accept it as the sum total of his teaching here. So what do I think? Glad you asked.
1) We never live fully until we experience grief and overcome it. Part of being human is conquering grief in such a way that we come out of it as a better person not a bitter person. What would we be if we never experienced grief? A rock, a robot. It has been said that "All sunshine makes a desert" And it’s true the ground upon which the sun is always shining soon becomes arid and barren.
Without grief you could never fully comprehend joy. Without grief there would be no way to tell the difference between good and bad, between worse and better. Until we grieve we won’t be able to relate to others who grieve. When friends of ours lost their three year old in a traffic accident one Halloween night it was the Wesleyan pastor and his wife who were able to minister to them. Was it because of their great theological knowledge? No. Was it because of their great counselling techniques? No. It was because only a year before their three year old drowned in a back yard pool accident. The truth of the matter is that God never promise us a sorrow free environment.
2) When you grieve grieve for the right things. If I was to ask each of you to write down one thing which had recently cause you grief and hurt what would it be? What was the last thing you grieved over? I remember the grief I felt when my cousin’s little boy died. My heart broke, not so much for Sean as for the sorrow that Cherese and Tim were experiencing. And I think that was valid, and that Christ would have approved. After all the scriptures tell us that Jesus wept when Lazarus died. And because he knew that he could raise Lazarus from the dead he wasn’t weeping for him instead he was weeping for Lazarus’ sisters Mary and Martha.
The time before Sean’s death that I grieved was in May of 1990, it was just before we moved to Australia and it was the day I sold my motorcycle, we can laugh now but right then I didn’t find it all that funny. And I think if I could have choose on that day between a 550 Honda Nighthawk and moving to Australia that Australia would have come out second best. And to be truthful in a human sense that grief was valid too. I thought a lot of that bike. And when I lost her I grieved and even though it may have been valid in a human sense I don’t know that Christ would have approved. I’ve said this before but it bears repeating twice since we’ve been married we have sold everything and started over, and it is amazing how many things we own. And it’s even more amazing how many things own us.
I have discovered that unhappiness doesn’t come from grieving as much as it comes from grieving over the wrong things. happiness happens when we grieve over the right things, that’s Jesus message for us. But, what are the right things? good question. I think Jesus gives us a clue in the abrupt statement he made to the women who were weeping as they watched him carry the cross up Calvary, do you remember? Luke 23:28 (NIV) Jesus turned and said to them, "Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children.
And I think the message is this, if you’re going to weep, weep for the things that God weeps for, weep for the things that make Christ weep. Happy are those who mourn what God mourns. And what does God mourn? The lostness, the brokeness, the confusion of a world that he created so full of beauty and love. god weeps over those who refuse to acknowledge their sin and die and go to hell. God weeps over those who ignore the plight of their fellow man and their fellow Christians. God weeps over those things which stand in the way of the Kingdom of God. And so Christ doesn’t say that we will always be comforted when we grieve, but that we will always be comforted when we grieve for the right things. For as we learn to grieve we also learn to lean, and as we cry we find there is a god there to wipe away our tears.
