by Keith Bassham, Editor of the Baptist Bible Tribune (2002-2015)
The beginning of the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount is one of the best-known and best-loved sections of the Bible. I think, though, the wide approval this text gets, especially from those outside Christianity, is because it is not understood perfectly. On the surface, the words are beautiful and simple, almost like a poem. But to make sense of the words, we have to do a little digging. First of all, consider the words. “Blessed are …” or “You are blessed.” What do those words mean?
Blessed is not a new word for these listeners. And it’s not a new concept. It stems from the Creation texts:
So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Then God BLESSED THEM, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. (Genesis 1:27-28).
You don’t get older than that.
And then you have the other blessing texts in the Old Testament. God speaks to Abraham: “I will bless you, and you will be a blessing to others, and you shall be an instrument of my blessing for all the families of the earth.” And in the stories of Abraham’s descendants, the blessing gets traded, shifted around, talked about, fought over. It is a common idea in those stories.
When the priesthood began under Moses and Aaron, and as the nation of Israel established themselves on their way out of Egypt to the Promised Land, Aaron and his sons are commanded to speak a blessing to the people each day: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.”
Israel’s hymnbook, what we now call the Book of Psalms, opens with these words, “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers.”
What could be more basic and more woven into the thinking and theology of Israel than the idea of the blessing of God? But in what way is that blessing meant to extend to the apparently unblessed — the poor, hungry, mournful, and hated?
In Israel, a world where a man’s religion was worn literally on his sleeve, appearances were everything. What this means is that people thought you could just look at a person and tell whether he or she was blessed or not blessed. Poor people were definitely out. Sick people ditto. The underclasses were not blessed. They were in the wrong families, and the wrong professions, and they lived in the wrong parts of town. And what’s more, people had come to believe this was the way things were because God made it that way.
You don’t have to read very far into the New Testament before you discover what the general attitude was toward these people. “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” the disciples of Jesus asked (John 9:2). Matthew tells us:
And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people … sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatick, and those that had the palsy; and he healed them.
And so many of these people had been viewed and treated as everything except blessed.
These were the walking wounded, the not-blessed, and one thing they surely must have begun to suspect, “Whoever God is blessing, it sure ain’t us.”
And they, of course, are only partly right, as they begin to realize with the words of Jesus ringing in their ears. Rather, they learn they are actually blessed because of the inexhaustible resources of heaven that God, in his fathomless grace, extends to all, even those on the margins of society.
One fact helps us make sense of this, and that is the meaning of the words “poor in spirit.” The word implies a cringing or cowering kind of a poverty. It speaks of a total emptiness to the point of having no hope. It is no fun, of course, to be in that condition, but that condition does make a blessing possible. God can never fill a clenched fist as He can an empty hand.
And so, as we approach a season of thanks, and the celebration of the coming of Jesus Christ in the next month, may we consider how we may be used of God to fulfill His promise of a blessing to those on the margins.
Let us be thankful to God and generous to others.
Let us be careful that we not judge too much on the basis of appearance. One may be blessed in ways unknown to us, and we would be wise to learn those ways.
May we consider that with all our possessions and comfort we may be guilty of an ingratitude that closes our spirit off to the blessings of God. Open your grasp on things so God may fill it with something better.