BY RYAN J. BELL

LL MY LIFE I HAVE been trying to make sense out of Jesus. This is, of course, what any serious student of Jesus must do. But in a sincere desire to follow Jesus, I have found myself trying to make the teachings of Jesus make a certain respectable twenty-first-century kind of sense. I want Jesus to fit into my understanding of the world.

What is finally beginning to dawn on me is that the teachings of Jesus were never intended to make sense in our modern world. The effort to make them do so has resulted in many distortions of Jesus' teaching--a sort of secular gospel that is a way to improve on life as we know it. But Jesus invites us, as we will see, to completely discard "life as we know it" and step into the kingdom of the heavens. In order to understand Jesus, we need a different framework for what is sensible. Much of Jesus' teaching confronts us with that new framework--the new "sense" of the kingdom.

This is what the Sermon on the Mount does to us--it thrusts a new reality upon us. The Beatitudes headline this sermon and introduce us to the nature of reality in the kingdom of God.

At first glance Jesus' teaching in this sermon, and specifically the Beatitudes, strikes us as quaint, naive, and . . . well, impractical. Clearly Jesus knew nothing about modern life, full of mortgage payments, traffic jams, and unwanted telemarketing calls.

So how are we to consider the Beatitudes? Can we chalk them up to rhetorical excess, homiletic hyperbole, or evangelistic overstatement? I mean, Jesus didn't really mean all that stuff, did He? Didn't He know that people who live like that get hurt, abused, taken advantage of--maybe even killed?

The Place of the Beatitudes in Jesus' Teaching
The statements in the Sermon on the Mount lie at the heart of Jesus' teaching. One cannot spend much time with Jesus and His teachings in the sermon and fail to come to the conclusion that they are crucial. We are compelled to concur with Philip Yancey: "If I fail to understand this teaching, I fail to understand Him."¹

In pursuit of this understanding let's briefly look at the context. Jesus entered His public ministry through baptism (Matt. 3:13-17) and was immediately led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil for 40 days (Matt. 4:1-11). Then He began to preach, sharing His message with the world. His words were full of significance for the Hebrew listener: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near" (verse 17).* The response Jesus was apparently looking for was action. We know this because that is what happened when Jesus' message went to the heart of His listeners. He called His listeners to become His apprentices in the typical rabbi-apprentice arrangement of the day: to drop their work and follow.

Matthew wanted us to know unmistakably that this man was the Messiah. He was clearly announced by John the Baptist to be the Messiah. His baptism and the subsequent declaration from heaven that He was God's Son, the Anointed One, emphasized again His Messiahship. The message of this Messiah was the present availability of God's kingdom reign and the invitation to become disciples, or apprentices, and to enter into the kingdom.

A brief note about who His listeners were is crucial. The first were a group of fishermen. After this initial group began to follow Jesus, He continued "preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people" (4:23). As a result, crowds naturally began to gather around Jesus. Notice what kind of people this crowd was composed of--sick, diseased, paralyzed, and demon-possessed people! These were the outcasts and misfits of society. No one expected anything remarkable from these people. Society had written them off. This was the crowd that followed Jesus--loudmouthed fishermen and diseased outcasts. They followed Him initially because He healed them. He forever changed their lives. The presence of the Father's kingdom had already had a tangible effect in their lives, and now Jesus took them aside to teach them about the nature of life under God's loving reign.

Whether this sermon was given by Jesus as it is presented in Matthew 5-7 or whether Matthew collected these sayings from throughout Jesus' ministry (more as we have it in Mark and Luke) is debatable. For Matthew's purpose, however, the Beatitudes fall at the beginning of this body of teaching because they highlight one of the first questions one would ask about the nature of the kingdom of God--who is well-off?²

Who's Really Well-off?
We live in a world in which the strong, powerful, and wealthy are blessed, not the poor, weak, and marginalized. If twenty-first-century North Americans were penning the Beatitudes today, we might write:

"Blessed are the upper classes, who can afford a home in the suburbs and two new cars in the driveway, for theirs is the American dream.

"Blessed are they who have a well-paying job with ample vacation time, for the good life is within their reach.

"Blessed are the thin, strong, and athletic, for the future is in their hands.

"Blessed are they who hunger and thirst to have a party, for a vast menu of chemical enhancements are at their disposal."

But to our consternation, this is not what Jesus said. He said virtually the opposite.

After years and years of trying to make Jesus say anything except "The poor are truly well-off," I finally came to realize that this teaching will never fit with my modern notion of common sense. "Perhaps what Jesus was trying to say," I mused to myself a couple of years ago, "is that the poor are well-off because the kingdom of heaven is open to them." Could it be? Is it possible that Jesus meant exactly what He said? Could it be that the Beatitudes are a declaration of who is well-off in Jesus' kingdom of the heavens?

Scholars believe that Jesus was adopting a teaching style common in His day. Any teacher that was worth listening to answered the basic question "Who is well-off?" The answer to that question frequently took the homiletic formula "Blessed are you . . . "

The English word "blessed" barely captures the impact of what Jesus was saying in these cryptic statements. In its secular usage the Greek word we translate "blessed" or "happy" means "fortunate" or "lucky." Think of how you would react if you got a call from a friend who reported that she just won the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes--$10 million over 30 years. Your response? Lucky dog! That's the tenor of it. Add to this the Hebrew notion of blessing (barak), which means wholistic and complete well-being, reaching to the whole person. This is the picture of the perfectly well-off individual.

So these statements come to us as promises. They are, more than anything else, expressions of reality--of how things really are. Jesus says to the poor and weak and suffering, "The kingdom of God is open to you--both now and in eternity. In this kingdom the Father's blessing is upon those whom the world regards as cursed." This is the good news!

It is important, in this context, to remember that the Beatitudes are about grace, not works. They are not, first and foremost, goals to strive for in order to live the blessed life. Neither are they descriptions of rewards for those who can manage to live their lives as poor, mourning, persecuted individuals. Several modern translations of "poor in spirit," for example, seek to make spiritual poverty a good thing to which we should aspire.³ But the clear meaning of the text is that God's kingdom is available to those with no spiritual qualifications. The point is that the blessing comes not because of the condition cited but precisely in spite of it. These blessings are descriptive rather than prescriptive. They are Jesus' description of who is blessed in the kingdom. So rather than turn the Beatitudes into one more legalism--requirements to be attained in order to enter the kingdom of heaven--we should see them as the pinnacle of grace. The kingdom is present and available, even to the likes of those who sat at Jesus' feet that afternoon--the sick, the losers, the misfits. "They are," as Dallas Willard says, "'mere laypeople,' who at best can fill a pew or perhaps an offering plate. No one calls on them to lead a service or even to lead in prayer, and they might faint if anyone did."⁴

The gospel of Jesus Christ is that the Father's reign over all the world has begun and all are invited to be citizens of the new kingdom. The Beatitudes begin Jesus' broader teaching of what life is like in this newly available kingdom. The first unquestioned reality that Jesus turns on its head is the teaching about who is well-off. This is the point of Jesus' teaching. The door is wide open to every individual who heeds the call to come.

A New Community
Our world tells us that the wealthy and beautiful and successful are blessed. Christians, if they are not careful, can find themselves uncritically accepting our culture's estimation of who is well-off. So we need to remind each other about these things, which is why God created the church.

The church is a new community--an alternative society--called by Jesus to embody His kingdom and live by its principles. As this new community we must learn to evaluate things as Jesus would, to embrace a new framework for what is sensible. In our world it doesn't make sense that those who are spiritual weaklings are blessed. We see too much evidence to the contrary. But Jesus invites us to see with new eyes--when we do, we will see that the blessings of the kingdom of God are actually open to every person, regardless of how society esteems them. There may even be a sense in which the poor and marginalized have an advantage over the wealthy and popular, but that's another story for another time.

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*All Scripture texts in this article are from the New International Version.

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¹ Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 105.
² I am in debt to Dallas Willard for this understanding of the Beatitudes. For a fuller treatment of this idea, please see The Divine Conspiracy (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998), chap. 3.
³ See, for example, the Berkeley version or the recent New Living Translation.
⁴ Willard, p. 101.

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Ryan Bell, who graduated from Andrews University with a Master of Divinity in 2000, is pastor of the Bucks County Seventh-day Adventist church in suburban Philadelphia.