"Blessed"

2-2-14 (Ordinary Time 4A/5A)

Sermon Text: Matthew 5:1-20

Blessed

What does it mean to you when you hear the word “blessed?”  What does it mean to say that a person is blessed?  According to Webster, to be blessed means “Having a sacred nature: connected with God; very welcome, pleasant, or appreciated; held in reverence, honored in worship; of or enjoying happiness.”  We talk about “counting our blessings” time and time again; we tell people about events in our lives, describing this thing or that thing as a “blessing.”  We consider ourselves “Blessed” when something good happens to us, or when we avoid something bad.  You hit a patch of ice on the road and your car spins out of control?  We were blessed that there wasn’t anyone else on the road when i t happened.  We were blessed that we had our seat belts on.  We were blessed that the car wasn’t damaged.

In the Greek the word is makarios, which is typically translated as “blessed,” but also as “happy, fortunate, favored, or privileged.”  While some translations have chosen the word “happy,” it really should give us pause to think of Jesus saying that, don’t you think?  How can people who are mourning be happy?  How can you be truly happy in being persecuted, poor, or hungry? 

The Greek word, as Matthew uses it, seems to describe a state of being favored by God - these are the people to whom God blesses, whom God will lift up.  Further, Jesus says in this passage: “these are the people to whom I was sent.  This is my ministry.”  And this is actually one of the central themes of Matthew’s Gospel.  The Beatitudes, as we familiarly call this first movement of Jesus’ sermon on the mount, are at the very core of who Jesus is in Matthew.  They’re behind the parables he tells, the miracles he performs, the people he encounters - they’re present with him at the cross, and fulfilled in his resurrection. They shape our entire understanding of Matthew.

But what is it about these statements of blessing that makes them so central to Matthew’s Gospel?  We’ve looked at the definition of blessing from our own perspective, and even from the Greek language, but Matthew’s audience isn’t just Greek; he writes to a church that is primarily made up of people who converted from Judaism.  Much of the Old Testament takes a very different view of what being “blessed” looks like - for the people of Jesus’ time, and for the people in the community to whom Jesus writes, if you were blessed by God, then it showed.  The person who had a healthy flock, a full belly, fertile land and plentiful crops was the person who was favored by God.  The person who was in good health, who had a happy healthy family, who wanted for nothing in this world - that was the person who was blessed by God.  And they were blessed by God because they were faithful.  The person who was blessed by God was supposed to be the same person that you saw day after day at the synagogue and at the temple, giving their offering, saying their daily prayer, and following God's laws to the letter.  The view of that time was that God had made it clear in the Torah that this was the way it works: Keep my commandments and you will be blessed.  Fail to keep my commandments, and I will take those blessings away.

So when Jesus starts describing all these different people, saying that these are the ones whom God favors, it’s a bit shocking - perhaps this is also why Matthew and Luke differ in their telling of the beatitudes, why Matthew’s telling seems to soften the blow a little and make it more approachable to people who have a different understanding of blessedness - Matthew has people who are poor “in spirit” and who hunger and thirst “for righteousness,” while Luke just lists the poor and the hungry, period.  And still, these are people whom we don’t typically think of as being blessed.  We don't see the loss of loved ones as a blessing, typically.  We don't see being persecuted and reviled as being favored by God.  And yet these are the very people to whom Jesus says that God will show God’s favor!

Perhaps the key to understanding this sense of blessing is in realizing that Jesus isn’t necessarily telling the people “this is what you must be to be blessed.”  It doesn’t make sense for Jesus to tell people that they can only be blessed if they are mourning, if they put themselves at the bottom of the heap just to be sure they’re considered meek, or deliberately seek out persecution and trial for the sake of knowing that they are going to be “blessed.”  For Matthew’s Gospel, in particular, these statements of blessing encourage a very deliberate way of life that looks ever to the coming Kingdom of God.  When we are poor in spirit, we are also made empty of all the things that would keep us from experiencing the abundant life that is offered to us in Christ.  If we are too concerned with competing, with being the best, with making sure that we’re safe from “the other guy” or that we have everything we could possibly want, then we push ourselves away from the lifestyle of the Kingdom.  And as we live to the standards of the world, we become “like salt that has lost its flavor” and hide the light of Christ under bushels when it wants instead for us to be like a city on a hill, shining brightly for all to see.

The world says one thing, but Christ says another.  The world equates blessing with success and material wealth; Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit."  The world tells us that we have to compete, to be the best at what we do, to defeat the competition wherever they may be because they are the enemy.  Jesus says “Blessed are the meek” and “Blessed are the peacemakers.”  We see blessing as a bestowing of success and rewards; Jesus shows us the blessing of being known, loved, and chosen by God.  This is the fulfillment of the law, that we love God and love one another.  This is the kind of life that lends itself naturally to evangelism - because when we live this life of blessing, we can’t help but shine out.  Jesus even makes this incredible statement, that “No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house.”

And yet, somehow, we are so often still a people who put our lights under the bushel basket… we decide that we should be the ones who determine who is blessed and who is not.  We hold people to our earthly standards and hide the light of Christ for fear that those people will see it and become like us.  Or sometimes, even worse, we hold ourselves to unfair standards.  We think that our light isn’t good enough to let shine, that we don't know enough about God, or the Bible, or about the church.  We fear that if we let our light shine, people will see that it’s not as good as others’ or as the church on the other side of town.  We figure it’d be better to wait until we’ve got a better light to shine, and then spend the rest of our lives waiting for that better light, then never shining to anyone at all.  And all the while, we forget that it’s not our light to shine in the first place; it’s the light of Christ that shines through us.  And Christ’s light needs no improvement; it only needs to shine. Without Christ, no one has a place in the Kingdom.  And so we must constantly be asking ourselves, even as we enjoy the life lived in the blessings of Christ - what are the bushels in our own lives?  What are those things in our church and in our world that threaten us, that make us want to hide that light and keep it to ourselves?  What are the things that threaten to keep us from giving flavor to this life?  Where are the bushel baskets that we need to remove so that Christ’s light can shine brightly and unhindered, wherever we go?  Let us cast them off together, that through us, Christ’s light can shine as it is meant to, that in Christ, we too, can proclaim the good news of the Kingdom.  To God be the Glory.  Amen.