The Sermon on the Mount – The Seven Blessings
5.1 The Blessing – The High Status of Man
The blessing of God has come to us in Jesus Christ. It tells us that our identity is secure and that it is waiting for us in Christ. The blessing protects man from all that would diminish him. It is the arming and equipping of man, so he can tell the difference between truth and falsehood, and between true authority and false, and so defend himself from evil. It is the sword of the Spirit that cuts through confusion and distinguishes truth from falsehood.
The gospel celebrates the blessedness of the poor. As a result, its impact over many generations has been to limit the disparity of wealth. It emphatically and repeatedly celebrates the poor, and those who are disparaged and disregarded, and those who are regarded as of no account. The gospel warns the arrogant and so makes it more difficult for the wealthy to consider themselves above everyone else. It gives the poor and the uneducated the means by which to withhold their approval of the rich and withdraw their consent to their rule. There is no permanently subhuman caste in any society in which the gospel has been heard.
He has put down the mighty from their seat and has exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things and the rich he hath sent empty away…
Has raised up the humble and meek.
The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.
Christianity gives a society the skill set of reconciliation, by which torn social fabric can be repaired. When that society is able to respond to each rip in the fabric by taking steps to achieve reconciliation and so to make good damage to its fabric, it will continue, and can prosper.
Reconciliation involves accusation, investigation, judgment and discovery of the truth, perhaps through a public trial. It requires an attempt to encourage confession from antagonists, involving expression of remorse and penitence. It requires discussion of penalty, criminal sentence and recompense perhaps through the payment of compensation.
These steps require a degree of public revelation, and so depend on news media. They require public consent. Though the victim may not concede this, the public has to concede that the punishment is adequate to the crime, and that justice has been done. When these steps are taken, reconciliation is achieved, damaged social capital is repaired, and confidence and trust are restored.
But when they fear that there will no justice, people begin to withdraw from public participation and stop taking risks. When they fear that their property or their lives are in danger, because government and justice system do not do enough to keep them secure, they will take fewer economic initiatives. When there is long-term failure to implement enough of these steps to enable reconciliation, there is a long-term loss of public trust and morale. Relationships are allowed to lapse, contracts are not honoured, new contracts not made, and that society drifts towards long-term economic decline. When the environment in which people are willing to take risk is not maintained by public practices of reconciliation, that society becomes poor.
What is the trick that makes a society prosperous? What is it that restores trust when it is broken? What is the mechanism that repairs damaged social fabric? How can people continue to trust one another when so much social capital has been destroyed?
There are three procedural parts to this moral faculty of reconciliation. The first is acknowledgement of continuing generosity, the second is judgment, the third is forgiveness. Grace is the gospel term for this generosity of God. This means that that reconciliation is not a mechanism or technique, but is the function of a person. It relies on Christ, the one person who, having mastered self-mastery, has the power to endure, and so will not let us down. He is indeed able to bring judgment, and forgiveness, and to supply the grace which will enable a new start. God will establish the truth, and enable a society to investigate so that the truth of any loss or crime is adequately made public, so that that society is satisfied, and the process of reconciliation can start. These processes of judgment and reconciliation are begun, but they are not made complete. What that judgment will be, and what is eventually required to bring justice and reconciliation, is not yet known. We look forward to Christ’s coming to reveal the truth and establish complete justice. But the society that is convinced that the process has begun and that it will be completed, is able to endure the present injustice, make good the losses and live in expectation.
The culture formed by the gospel assumes an unlimited supply of good will. Christ can make good what is missing and will be able to satisfy all those who have been betrayed. God is provider and guarantor of the generosity available to any society that asks for it.
To bless someone is to give them an opening. You give them the opportunity they want. You tell them what you are giving them, and you give it to them in the moment that you tell them so. You bless me when you admit me to the firm, by telling me, and all other members of your firm that I am from this moment a member of it. We say, ‘Your application has been successful. We give you the job and we look forward to sharing a successful future with you.’ You employ them, or give them pay increase, or a loan or a place to live. You give them some new responsibility and larger budget. If they take this opportunity as it is given, they may grow a step towards maturity and self-mastery. Through it they may learn how to receive and pass on the generosity that comes from God, and which enables future opportunities and greater self-mastery. God blesses us, and calls us to receive, learn, practice and pass on the blessing we have received from him and so grow to maturity.
The Sermon on the Mount, starts with seven Blessings, the Beatitudes, which are then enlarged on by the teaching that follows. So the first blessing, Blessed are the poor in spirit…love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…’ (Matt 5.44) is amplified by You have heard it said, Love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…’(Matt 5.44). In the heresy of modernity this has been taken to mean we should abandon and despise your nearest and dearest, and promote over them those who seem new and exotic. But the blessings are the amplification and fulfilment of all teaching, not its abandonment. The Law of Israel tells us to pay your debts, return to them whatever they give you, respect for respect, scorn for scorn.
Some Christians have attempted taken the second line away from its basis in the first line and so altered and evacuated this elementary and foundational understanding. The Lord universalizes the law of love, so that we must return not only love for love, but also love for hate. This has meant that our post-Christian societies are unable to allow public expressions of what they hate, that is, they are unable to reject the cult and the society that opposes them and which repudiates our high account of human dignity, our citizenship and our freedom and secularity, and the open civil society. Instead, our political class directs its hatred at those who express their revulsion at the crime and the criminal, and so they hate anyone who honestly expresses the horror of evil.
Love and truth are foundational teaching of our Christianity and society. Love of a person allows that person to be free. They are not bound to love the one who loves them. True love allows them to be themselves and so be free.
The gospel does not consider ‘belonging’ or ‘community’ as solely fundamental, and it does not consider that ‘freedom’ or ‘autonomy’ as solely fundamental either. It does not define community and freedom as opposites. It is not a flight from belonging or into it. Other people can demand that we give up freedom and individuality.
5.2 Seven Blessings
The blessing of self-mastery is set out in seven statements. They understand that self-mastery become available to us in Christ and through an apprenticeship with him.
Blessed are…
the poor in spirit
those who mourn
the meek
those who hunger and thirst
the merciful
the pure in heart
the peacemakers
those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake
Blessed are the poor in spirit…
The blessing is to be humble. To be arrogant is a curse. The humble man is open to the world, and so he can learn and he has a future. The proud and self-assertive man is closed: he has decided that he is sufficient to himself, and is unprepared to receive new challenges or experience. The humble self-deprecating man is content to take the least conspicuous role. He may be promoted, but he does not elevate himself.
- Blessed are those who mourn…
The man who mourns waits and remains alone, without support and is content to do so. He builds himself no political support and so appears unvindicated.
- Blessed are the meek…
The man who is meek is modest and self-restrained. He does not try to throw off those constraints and discipline of the apprenticeship. They are not pushing a political agenda or looking for political solutions. They forgive the debts and trespasses committed against them. They do not want revenge or retribution for the robbery and aggression directed against them.
- Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…
The man who hungers for righteousness looks for what is right, just, fair, straight, pure and simple. He avoids whatever is bent, twisted, unclear, ambiguous or contradictory.
- Blessed are the merciful
The merciful man is the generous man. Blessed are those who are generous. The generous bless those they meet and pass on to them the blessing they have received.
They have worked and saved and so have provisions to share with those who need them.
- Blessed are the pure in heart
The man who is pure is single-minded. He is undivided and unadulterated. He does not envy anyone. He wants just one thing, which is the kingdom of God, so he is not tugged this way and that.
- Blessed are the peace-makers
The man who makes peace reconciles those who are at war. There is no envy, resentment or rage in him. He is not driven by desire for revenge. He can absorb the aggression of others.
One more blessing tells us what follows from these seven blessings
5.3 Persecution – the eighth blessing
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven …
In summary of these blessings, what are these humble, mourning, meek, justice-seeking, merciful people going to receive?
They will receive suffering and persecution and martyrdom.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me… in the same way they persecuted the prophets before you
As you become a Christian, you learn that you are going to be hurt. People want to transfer their hurt to you, making you carry as much pain as they can inflict on you. They do this in the belief that this will transfer their pain away from themselves so that they no longer feel it.
This realisation, that you are going to suffer for this, occurs at the moment you become a Christian, and it is this that makes you Christian. You realise that Christ has taken your pain so that you are free of it. Christ has it, so you don’t. Your injuries, your fury and distress have been taken on by him. By this discovery moment you are born anew, so your baptism is the moment of this realisation.
To be a Christian is to know that you are in line to be persecuted by other people. You will be persecuted undeservedly, while knowing that all this time you have been persecuting Christ, and persecuting the people sent to you by Christ, undeservedly. You were the persecutor. You were deceived, but you were also vicious and deliberate. At the moment you realise this, you cease to be that persecutor and become one of the persecuted. Now you are in the queue for punishment by people who hate you without cause, just as you hated Christ without cause. Your tormentors are waiting for you. They are going to try to punish you, but though you may fear them, you also feel pity for them. You see that are doing terrible damage to themselves for no good reason. You may tell them that it will not help them to inflict their pain on you. Yet you also know that only you, Christ’s servant, can take their pain. Only your steadfastness could convince them that their pain is caused by their own viciousness, and convince them that Christ can help them escape this viciousness. Your endurance of their rage and your self-mastery all through this passion is the one constructive you can do. If you love them, you must remain unmoved. For their shake, you cannot not be shaken or broken by them. You must not give in to their fear, or their fury. You must remain unyielding in the face of their accusations and threats. You feel fear, of course, but you know that under this onslaught your Lord is standing just ahead of you, and taking the brunt of it, and his strength is sufficient to hold you there, just behind him.
Christians attract the hostility of those who do not exercise self-control and do not wish to. Those who do not seek self-mastery, do not learn how to endure and be content. Those who cannot endure can only lash out at those who do. They believe only that they have a mandate to punish those who do not share their passions. They punish those who do not conform, who do not express the same rage they do, and who do not lash out as they do at whoever seems easy prey. They believe that Christians are moral delinquents: those who stick out must be brought back in line. Those who challenge the authority of those in power must be belittled, ostracized, silenced, and have their livelihood taken away from them. Rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward in heaven…
5.4 Seven Warnings
Blessing comes to those who are disciples of the Lord, who take up the discipline and discipleship and follow him. Their happiness is in that apprenticeship in the self-mastery of Christ.
But there is no blessing for who only want to express their present tantrum, who want to avoid the persecution that could teach us to endure and so gain mastery over ourselves. The cult of modernity we pursue autonomy by imposing our mastery on other people, express our resentment, find scapegoats and inflict our rage on them. It widens the gulf between those who freely take up service and apparent powerlessness and find their contentment in that service, and those who want to evade that service, hold on to power, and exert their power to increase their autonomy.
In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus reinforces the blessings by contrasting them with seven warnings, traditionally called ‘curses.’ The seven blessings, now expressed as seven warnings, call us away from the narcissism given expression by the cult of modernity. They hope to turn us from arrogance to humility, from superiority to humility, from violence to peace.
They are exclamations of pity for those who reject these blessings, each woe describing the unhappiness that would result from this rejection. These are the curses that the leaders of our society want to inflict on us, but will only succeed in inflicting on themselves. Only misery can come from rejecting the blessing of God. The warnings mirror the blessings
- Those who are not humble and poor in spirit exalt themselves.
- Those who are not content to lament and mourn now, build little kingdoms for themselves.
- Those who are not meek and self-controlled, imagine that they are the source of their own power and authority
- Those who do not hunger and thirst for righteousness, neglect justice, mercy, and faithfulness
- Those who are not merciful and generous are full of greed and self-indulgence
- Those who are not pure in heart are full of hypocrisy and wickedness
- Those who do not bring peace, are violent in the same way as those who killed the prophets. They suppress the witnesses God sends and are prepared to be violent against us.Woe to you… who exalt yourself
You shut the kingdom of heaven in man’s faces. You do not go in and you stop other people from going in. (Matt 23.12-13)
You assert yourself, and have no wish to learn humility. You promote yourself over those around you. You climb over them and tread on as you go. You shut the kingdom in men’s faces: you don’t enter that kingdom and you won’t let them do so either.
But it is the humble who are blessed, for Blessed are the poor in spirit. For whoever exalts himself will be humbled. Whoever humbles himself will be exalted…
- Woe to you… who when you make a convert make him twice as much a son of hell as you are…
You seek supporters and make converts to your cause. You demand that they obey you and call you master. You have a reputation to build. You want glory and renown. You grow your power by rent-seeking and confiscation. You tie up heavy loads to put them on other men’s shoulders (Matt 23.4).Woe to those who convince others to do the same, climbing over others, and keeping them out of the kingdom.
You encourage your converts to become more extreme and destructive than yourself. Each generation becomes more uninhibitedly power-seeking, departs further from the sources, resorts to more extreme self-invention, and is less willing to acknowledge any limit to their power.
But blessed are those who mourn. Blessed is the man who seeks no glory for himself. He is on his own, and has to be content to remain alone. He mourns, laments, waits and endures. Blessed is he who gathers no supporters, builds no power base, and seeks no empire of his own.
- Woe to you who say that temple means nothing, but only the gold in it is what counts …
Woe to those who try to recruit God to their purposes. Look out, you who claim to act with the authority of God. You claim to lend your authority to our culture, to the education of our children and to our national life. You want the status and the income that you think that your association with church and culture will bring you.
Our political class wants us to believe that we receive our authority from them. But the authority of this generation cannot come from this present generation. The source of its authority must be much deeper. Authority comes to us across many generations. Our nation has received its identity and its authority from the gospel and from the many generations of Christian witnesses who have shared that gospel and that discipleship with us. Through their efforts we have inherited a more or less politically mature society and learned a level of civility and humanity. All authority comes from God to the people formed by the gospel through all the various forms of discipline, enquiry and science that have developed out of it. Authority does not originate in our current political class, that mistakenly believes that it can lend or withhold authority from the Christian witness, worship and culture. It is not the present regime that has formed this nation. The gospel, and the Church created and sustained by it, are the origin on the nation and the source of authority within it.
They claim too much. They take the name of the Lord in vain. They do not give God credit for the generosity that they have received. They should look out. All that they have has come to them as gift, that belongs to God, and which comes from God, and will return to God again, leaving them without authority.
Look out, you who do not acknowledge that God is the source of generosity. Look out, you who make out that you yourself are the source of all that you have. Our people received grace from God and acknowledged him and gave thanks to him. But you want to cut them off from God and so from all grace and generosity. God is the source of the life of every society and nation. You now wish to cut us, as you have cut yourself, off from the source of life and so hold us captive, so we are hostages in your campaign against life itself. Look out, you who do not worship God. You want to be honoured and respected; you want that worship for yourself, but we will not give it to you.
It is not any globalising elite that lends legitimacy to our nation or our culture or our history. It is that faith, that public worship and discipleship, that culture and history that has given our leaders and institutions the authority they have. This authority is lent to them, so that they may invest it in those who would most benefit from it. It is not a piece of their property, which they can keep, bury, sell or exchange for something else. If it is not theirs, they cannot dispense with it. It is God only who gives authority: he gives it first to the community of his witnesses, the Church, and then through the Church, to each people and nation and the world.
Look out, you globalists. Look out, you who set out to eradicate every particular local, regional and national identity. You have appointed yourself the dissolver of all national identity. You have made yourself priests in the cult of the universal identity. You want to start, of course, with the particular identity of the Christians. You want to push us out, hound us and silence us so that we are no longer able to speak up for all the other particular identities. Totalitarians always, and rightly, identify the Church as their first opponent. You want to dissolve and homogenise. But you will be dissolved and homogenised in your turn.
He who swears by the temple swears by the One who dwells in it…. Whoever looks to the church, and to Christian worship, Christian discipleship and culture, looks to God from whom that church, worship and culture come, and by whom that culture is supported and renewed. Any appeal to our culture is a reference to Christianity and so, however faint, it is an acknowledgement of God. God made us what we once were, what we are now, and what we always could be if we turned around. Our nation and our culture are not so moribund that a single appeal to the Lord would not at once revive and restore them.
But blessed are the meek. Blessed are they who submit themselves to the authority of the Lord. Meekness is self-mastery. Self-mastery comes from Christ who learned it and perfected it. He did not flinch; he took on the anguish and fury of the whole world. He did not attempt to escape it, but bore it, alone. And he bears this fury still, for us, who continue to fight him, by our hostility to all, and particular to those whom he sends us. Christ mastered his passions. He withstood and overcame the forces that we used against him, and so he mastered our passions. We have not been able to break him. We cannot make him give in to the fury that moves us, rules us and destroying us. His strength is revealed in his limitless ability to endure. We cannot break him. His restraint and patience are perfect. Christ has perfected self-control. The truly meek one, from whom all meekness comes.
Christ offers his own self-control to us. Through his companionship and discipling we may gain the same meekness and participate in his self-mastery. Meekness comes through submitting yourself to the discipline that will make you independent and mature. It will give you self-restraint and so make you civil, and able to receive all others without attempting to recruit them or dominate them, and so you can be members together of an open liberal society. Meekness and self-restraint are fundamental to a secular society.
- Woe to you who… neglect justice, mercy and faithfulness.
Whose image is this? And whose inscription? Caesars. Then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s (Matthew 22.20-1) .
Give back to the dictator what he offers you. Return it. Refuse it. Don’t touch it. Have nothing to do with the works of darkness.
You pay your taxes, and so you support the state which wants to expand its powers over us, becoming unstoppably idolatrous and tyrannical. It is your failure to bring justice locally in your own community that encourages this endless resort to state power, intervention and centralisation. As you feed the tyrant so he grows, devouring the powerless, enforcing compliance, destroying resistance. You find yourself doing homage to him, giving assurances of your obedience, ever more extravagant displays of worship in his personality cult, until you discover that you have become powerless too. The tyrant is intent on making himself divine. He is the product of our own faithlessness and failure of courage. He is the result of your complicity. It is your worship of him that has created this monstrous world-devouring idol.
From whom do the kings of earth collect tax and duties? From their own sons, or from others? From others (Matthew 17.25-6)
You neglect justice, mercy and faithfulness. You have no appetite for justice. You have given away your own powers. You should have provided justice, quickly and locally. But, instead, you delegated that responsibility to far-away authorities, from whom no justice is forthcoming.
But blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…
- Woe to you who clean the outside, while the inside is full of greed and self-indulgence ….
Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are the generous.
But you have shown no generosity. You feel no pity for them and show them no mercy. You do not provide people with the resources they need, do not relieve them of their burdens or cancel or pay their debts. You maintain the appearances, but inside all remains filthy.
But blessed are the merciful. They are generous, who share what they have received and what they themselves have worked for, who, when the poor ask, bring out of their storeroom provisions that they have long saved and what they have just grown, inherited resources and new ones.
They show no mercy. They are ungenerous. They do not share with the poor. But blessed are the merciful…
- Woe to you who…appear righteous, but inside are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.
You use one measure for outsiders and opponents, and another for your own people. You conceal what you are doing, so you claim to be what you appear, consistent and fair, but you are not. You employ two different standards, and are divided and double-minded, so you are unknowable and unpredictable. You can only create confusion. Without an intrinsic unity and integrity, you cannot be reliable or trusted.
The hypocrite wears a mask. The appearance is not the reality. Under the surface they are devious and malevolent. They are not pure, since they are not the same on the inside as on the outside. The outside is all pleasantness and reason, but the inside is all vindictiveness. They want to get back at whoever they imagine opposes them, or has slighted them, or who would refuse them. They are two irreconcilable things, goodness and evil. They discriminate against the poor, and against those who refuse to obey and pay them tribute. They impose a harsh law and penalty on them.
You stay compliant in order to keep in with the present regime. You make accusations against others, and turn them into the scapegoats that the regime wants. You insist that others obey the regulation of the current regime and conform to current thinking in the hope that you will not be persecuted. You will not hear the call of Christ to follow him through suffering into the long apprenticeship in self-mastery. Wickedness is malice, that wants to destroy whatever is independent and good.
But blessed are the undivided and single-minded. Blessed are the pure in heart…
- Woe to you who…. are descendants of the those who killed the prophets…
Woe to those who take up arms against God. Word to you who do not welcome the gospel of peace. Woe to those who raises their voices, hurl insults widen divisions, threaten punishment, and seek no reconciliation. Woe to those through whom violence comes.
If you allow violence to start, you may be drawn in, and will be unable to escape when the blood-letting starts. Violence will become your master, and your violence will be returned to you. Though you are violent, violence owes you no loyalty, and you will be destroyed as easily as you destroyed others.
Those who do not follow them, turn against the prophets that God has sent us. They may find themselves drawn into the persecution and murder of the servants of God. They do not want to hear that it is God whom they are fighting, and it is God who will end that fight.
You are on the same path as those killers. Woe to you who express contempt, bring division and encourage sectarianism. Woe to you who want to see our resentments grow. Every generation has its psychopaths. If you do not actively attempt to reconcile opposing parties while they are still able to listen to one another, you may find that that the psychopaths are in control and you are no longer listened to. If you insist on following the same path you will end up in the same orgy of violence as they did. They murdered those who brought you the gospel, the news about the peace that God has brought us. You say that you would not have rejected and killed the prophets as your forefathers did. But you are about to reject and kill the prophets sent to you now, the Son of Man and his disciples, and by turning away from the gospel, this nation exposes itself to the same violence.
Our cultural leaders today celebrate just a few of the best-known figures of our national history, who were regarded by their contemporaries as Christian prophets. With their heritage industry and by replacing education with indoctrination in schools they sanitize and control our national memory. But they suppress the history and witness because these prophets were Christians, and suggest that, apart from a small selection of exceptional figures, all previous generations were fools and bigots.
Many want to win the approval of our tyrants, in the belief that they will be rewarded. So they reject most of the prophets given to us today and suppress anyone who does not affirm the claims the regime makes for itself. They decide who is an opponent and dissident and prevent their message from reaching the public, just as their ancestors did in their time. In this way the present regime is the heir of the regime that killed the prophets, punished the missionaries who brought the gospel and so turned the people of Britain from violence to peace. They are not peacemakers, but create the tensions that bring conflict. But blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be called sons of God
