It is curious: almost everyone thinks the Sermon on the Mount is real Christianity, but few take it really seriously.
"It's an ideal - a wonderful ideal," folk say, "but an impossible one, of course." You read it, and it makes you wistful. "Wouldn't it be nice if we all lived like that; but nobody really imagines we could." So we damn it with faint praise and ignore it - until, perhaps, we want to criticise some Christian for his failure really to be a Christian; then we rebuke him for not living 'by the Sermon on the Mount'! But is it really an impossible dream? Would Jesus have wasted His breath preaching it if He thought that? Surely He meant it to be taken seriously. He was telling us how He really expected Kingdom men and women to live. Matthew says that when He preached it, "He was teaching His disciples." If you like, He was saying to them, "This is how it's going to be, brothers. This is how we are going to live now that we are in the Kingdom."
This is the King of that Kingdom speaking: and this is His Manifesto. He has introduced the Reign of God, and this is how He expects those who receive it to live.
Both Matthew and Luke, when they introduce it, use language which shows they regarded it as one of the great utterances of Jesus' life. "He sat down, and His disciples came to Him," says Matthew. (5:1) Sitting was the posture of authority in that society. Today a man stands to teach, and those who are taught sit to listen, but then it was different: you sat to teach and stood to be taught. Matthew went on to say that this was one of those big and important occasions when the Great Teacher delivered Himself of all that was on His heart. "He opened His mouth and taught them" is an idiomatic phrase to describe a memorable utterance; it means Jesus gave to it everything there was in Him to give. Luke says, "He lifted up His eyes on His disciples," another idiom meaning He wanted them to receive what He said with total seriousness.
Matthew's use of another phrase "He was teaching them" (imperfect tense, meaning "He used to do this," not once but often) means, I think, that Matthew has concentrated into his report of that day's utterance the essence of the teaching Jesus gave on many occasions; though of them all, this was the outstanding one. It was one of those gripping utterances you never ever forget. Jesus held them spellbound that day.
If then in these three chapters 5-7 of Matthew's Gospel Jesus laid bare His heart, this is what we had better lay to heart if we seriously mean to be Christians. In the language of the American armed forces, Jesus was saying, "Now hear this!" It was something you dared not ignore, not if you were serious at all about being a disciple. Certainly it can be taken seriously only by those who have received the forgiveness of God and the Spirit of God, and in that experience been given 'the mind of Christ.' But that is what Christians are. If we have been reconciled to God in the blood of the Saviour's Cross, these are our marching orders.
The sermon began with the Beatitudes (the 'Beautiful Attitudes' they have been called). They are like limpid pools of water: they look so clear on the surface you think you can see to the bottom of them easily. But the harder you look, in fact, the deeper you realise the pool is, until you begin to wonder if you will ever find how deep these sayings go.
One more thing by way of general introduction needs to be said (and repeated many times! ... for it is of the utmost importance if we are to hear the Beatitudes rightly): it is from the lips of Jesus we have to hear them. They are not philosophical maxims, statements distilled out of some philosophy of life, which stand by themselves - true (it may be) but as cold and lifeless as mathematical formulae. They have the force of truth because it is Jesus who said them, and they become truth with truth's inherent power to convince and motivate us only as we hear them from His lips. We have to mingle in the company that heard Him that day, and hear Him ourselves as they did, with total immediacy. We have to be there, knowing as they did that He Who says these things Himself sits among us, sharing our poverty with us, bearing our griefs and carrying our sorrows so He mourns with us. While He speaks, He is stricken for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities. That is why He can heal and make us righteous. Only as we realise that can we hear truly the things He says.
Said Jesus, "O the bliss of the poor! for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."
What a way to begin! It surely got the crowd's attention. It is an astonishing thing to say. It is a flat contradiction of the way we think. "O the misery of the poor! for the kingdom of this world is lost to them" is nearer to what we think. "Give me a Porsche and a spacious home and landscaped gardens with a heated swimming pool and enough staff and an income to maintain it all, and leisure to travel ..." That, or something like it, is the way most folk think. Some have all that. Even in the first century society our Lord lived in, there were those who had it - or what amounted then to the same thing; you have only to see Herod's palace on Masada and his Herodium near Bethlehem to realise that. And for them, Jesus felt a genuine compassion. "How hard it is," He said, "for those who trust in riches to enter the Kingdom of God." (Mark 10:24) "You poor, unfortunate fellows who have nothing to meet life with but money. How impoverished you are!"
He was not being smug or patronising when He said that, and He certainly did not say it out of frustrated envy. He meant it. He really believed that wealth is one of life's most crippling handicaps. There is something about wealth that blinds us somehow to the most elementary truths. Rich men hardly ever possess their wealth: their wealth possesses them.
"O the blessedness of you poor," Jesus said; "the real wealth is already yours."
Is He saying that poverty is a good thing, a necessary thing? According to Luke, Jesus said it is the poor who are blessed: but Matthew says it is the "poor in spirit." "There's a difference," it will be said. "Being poor in spirit isn't the same thing as simply being poor." That is true. Jesus was not blessing poverty, but the poor. It is people He had in mind, not their condition of life. Of course poverty is wretched - and the relief of it is a virtue the Bible consistently commends. That God relieves the poor and delivers the oppressed, that He champions the cause of the widow and defends the fatherless belongs to His glory as God; and we are bidden to be like Him in the doing of precisely those good works. No, Jesus was not making poverty itself a virtue. Where we find poverty, we should strive to relieve it; Jesus would be the first to agree.
So we must try for an understanding of what He said such that both Luke's word "you poor," and Matthew's phrase "the poor in spirit," are equally true.
The Greek word translated 'poor' is a word with a fascinating history. There are two Greek words Jesus could have used: one is "penes" and the other is "ptochos".
Penes describes the man who has only life's bare necessities; he can keep body and soul together, but no more. He has enough - just. He does not have to beg, but neither does he have anything to give.
But the word Jesus used (Matthew and Luke are both agreed on this) was the other word 'ptochos.' Ptochos describes the man who is destitute, having absolutely nothing at all. It is the word used of beggars, tramps and vagrants. It carried overtones of shame. It was a shameful thing to be ptochos: you could not meet even the most elementary obligations - to the state, to the church, to your family, even to yourself. It meant you had neither dignity nor power of any sort at all: you had not the means to protect yourself against insult or injury, or anything.
"O the bliss of such men!" Jesus said.
Astonishing! How are we to understand Him?
We should remember that He was speaking to Jewish folk who spoke, not Greek but Aramaic, a sort of updated Biblical Hebrew (much as our modern English is an update of Chaucer's English); and the Aramaic word behind the Greek word ptochos was 'ahnee' ... the 'poor man' who figures so largely in the literature of the Old Testament, especially in the Psalms; and that word had a fascinating history.
They were quite defenceless and wholly dependent on others, even to survive. The only world open to them was the world of charity - and the world of human charity can be a cold and demeaning one.
Amos, for example, lamented that the poor in his day were having to sell themselves into slavery just to buy a pair of sandals. (Amos 2:6, 8:6) To be in that situation can encourage in you either a craven attitude or a rebellious one, a beggar's mentality or a revolutionary's. But it does not have to. Down-trodden and defenceless though he might be, such a man might nonetheless keep both his dignity and his integrity.
For his very helplessness might beget in him a vigorous and vital trust in God. Having no human help, he might sincerely turn to God for it.
And so the word came to mean the man who, having nothing, cast himself wholly and trustingly upon God.
He turned his eyes away from the world altogether and fixed them on God. He ceased even to trust in the strength of his own arm, and rested his confidence in the strength of God's arm. He thereby surrendered neither his dignity nor his devotion. This is the 'poor man' of the psalms: "As for me, I am poor and needy, but the Lord takes thought for me" (40:17); or again: "This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and delivered him out of all his troubles." (34:6) The attitude is most beautifully and vividly expressed in the Psalm 123: "To Thee I lift up my eyes, O Thou Who art enthroned in the heavens. Behold, as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God, till He have mercy upon us." Do you see the picture - the maid, the servant, watching for any sign of favour? A maid's, a servant's entire life and welfare was wholly wrapped up in the good pleasure of their master; they had noone else to look to and nowhere else to turn. They had to say of their master, as the psalmist says of God in Psalm 16:1, "Thou art my lord; I have no good apart from Thee."
"O the bliss of such a man!" said Jesus; "the Reign of God is already his." The man who is so dependent on God he is independent of everything else in the world is the man who possesses treasure without end; for "no good thing will the Lord with-hold from them that fear Him." (Psalm 84:11)
Now we have found the blend we have been looking for that will make the 'poor in spirit' and the 'poor' mean the same thing, and give to both a reason to regard them as blessed.
The man who is poor that way is neither proud nor self-sufficient, and that is what it means that he is poor in spirit. To be poor in spirit does not mean to be poor-spirited, to be a whinger. It means you have replaced your self-confidence with God-confidence. The man who is poor in spirit is the man who is content for Another to take full responsibility for him, a man happily relying on God, and more than willing for his whole life to lie at God's disposal. He is in fact a man who is willing to be governed ... so he is himself already a 'kingdom,' so to speak, where God rules. When Jesus said of the poor, the poor in spirit, "Theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven," therefore, He said of them what is quite precisely true. The Kingdom of Heaven - the Reign of God - is theirs. Such a man may later make money and acquire possessions, even rise in the world to a place of power and prestige. But if in his heart he is not wrapped up in these things, if they do not steal away his trust in God, that man is 'poor' still. To use a phrase of Paul's in I Cor. 7:30, "he buys as those who have no goods, and he deals with the world as though he had no dealings with it." His possessions do not possess him. He can sustain the loss of them all at a stroke, and yet in the quiet, trusting centre of his heart be undismayed. He is inwardly detached from things; he is attached rather to the Maker and Giver of things. Whatever enjoyment he has of the good gifts God is pleased to bless him with (and it is no way to express your gratitude to God for the good things He gives you to pretend that you find no enjoyment in them), yet his enjoyment is compounded of such gratitude and dependence on God that the loss of them changes nothing. "The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away," he says; "Blessed be the Name of the Lord." (Job 1:21)
He is poor; but having God, he is blessed.
He is poor in spirit; but because he is carefree in his reliance on God, he is blessed. He has learned, like Paul, "in whatever state he is therewith to be content." (Phil. 4:11)
It is, remember ... and this needs emphasis ... to the poor who came to Jesus that day that He said this. What He says is not true at all until, coming to Him, we hear Him say it to us. Then it is true.
All this leads to two conclusions at least.
Not independent, but dependent - altogether
dependent on God.
Only faith can give meaning and worth to our life.
Whatever powers of mind and body and spirit we have are God's gifts to us. We have no right to take pride in them: they are not our achievement, they are God's gift. So we shall never come to a right exercise or enjoyment of them until we are content for them to lie at His disposal. If we are not, then we will not possess these things, they will possess us. They will take the place of God to our soul. They will rule us as only God is fit to do. And because they are unworthy substitutes for God, they will acquire in the end what can only be described as a devilish power over our life. What was meant to be a blessing to us will become a curse.
"O the bliss of the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."
"O the misery of the self-reliant and the proud (the 'some tough babies'), for theirs is the Kingdom of Hell." For the man who is mastered by things shrivels up by reason of the life-draining demands they make on him. Within the shell they build around him he becomes emptier and emptier and nearer to nothing all the time.
Wealth is not the possession of things. That, says Jesus, is poverty. The man who has nothing to meet life with but money and goods is a poverty-stricken man. To be healthy, wealthy and wise, do not aim to be rich; aim to be a man of faith.
We have only two choices open to us: we look to the world and our own power to get what we want out of it, or we look to God. The world or God: we have to choose. In fact we are choosing all the time, whether we know it or not. What are we choosing? "You cannot serve God and Mammon." Jesus said so (Matt. 6:24) ... He said it that same day in fact! So a simple question confronts us: "Who is my 'god'? The world, or God?"
The one is the mind of the flesh, the other is the mind of Christ. "To set the mind on the flesh is death. To set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace." (Rom. 8:6) There is where true 'being' and 'wellbeing' (life and peace) await us. In Him.
A beautiful expression of what Jesus here commended is a Christmas card sent to his friends one year by a highly successful American business-man who travelled much and handled large affairs and costly enterprises. He had been struck down with paralysis so as even to lose the power of speech for a while:
He prayed for strength that he might achieve;
he was made weak that he might obey.
He prayed for health that he might do great things;
he was given infirmity that he might do better things.
He prayed for riches that he might be happy;
he was given poverty that he might be wise.
He prayed for power that he might have the praise of men;
he was given weakness that he might find the power of God.
He prayed for all things that he might enjoy life;
he was given life that he might enjoy all things.He received nothing that he asked for,
but everything he hoped for.
His prayer was answered! He was most blessed.
II Cor. 6:10, "... as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything."
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