Hope…
What actually is a ‘blessing’?
And is a blessing in the eye of the beholder?
The very idea of being blessed feels a long way from the hopelessness many feel right now. Some of us face illnesses that seem intractable. Some of us face families that seem to be at war. Our government has warned us to stockpile food, drink, radios and torches while world leaders seem willing to light the blue touch papers and step back while the world burns. And into that mix, the church is called to step with a message of hope. And that’s something we can and should do. But it’s not easy, which is why today is special because today is All Saints Sunday, a celebration of our spiritual ancestors, not just the ones who have ‘Saint’ before their name, because that is a title of all of the people of God, not just an honorific bestowed by the church.
And the key to everything that I am going to say is simply that however things look now, this is not a permanent state of affairs. Yes we should be willing to complain and lament before God, but we also need to look for hope, and help others find that hope too. This message of hope is underlined by the writer of the first letter of John where, at the beginning of the third chapter the author declares:
‘Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.’
We are already beloved of God, right here and right now, and even though in itself that is already more than enough, there is far more to this story yet to come. This idea of looking ahead is not, for a moment, intended to ignore how things are now. Nor is it intended as an encouragement to sit back and do nothing. When we pray in the Lord’s prayer, ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven’, we are expected to be a part of the way in which that prayer is answered. But looking forward is vital in terms of being blessed.
So let’s explore this through the beatitudes of Jesus:
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Matthew 5:1–12
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:
‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
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As ever, we need a little context. Matthew begins telling this part of his story of Jesus with a very clear allusion to the Old Testament. A crowd is there. Jesus goes up the side of a mountain and sits down. They gather around him. He begins to teach. Every Jew who read Matthew’s account, and this Gospel was written with a Jewish audience in mind, would have understood that this was meant to emulate Moses and the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. But Matthew goes further. Jesus is more than simply the new Moses, and Jesus will soon make it clear that he hadn’t come to do away with the law but to fulfil it, and that’s what we find in this teaching.
The beatitudes are not a comfortable set of teachings from a comfortable Jesus. There are no promises to keep us safe in these words. What we find instead is that a certain series of characteristics, and the difficult times ahead for most people, and especially those who follow Christ, are tied to the idea of receiving blessing.
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So this is definitely not a case of Jesus saying ‘Come to me and everything will be fine.’
But let me first underline once again that this, one of the most important set of teachings from Jesus, is entirely about living right. There is nothing in here about what we have to believe. So if you are reading this with many doubts, don’t worry. Hope in Christ doesn’t require adopting a certain dogma.
Now if we read these through the eyes of hope for the future, we can see that several of these beatitudes are clearly about hardship;, difficult times that either are a part of life or sometimes they come directly as a result of taking the importance of the Gospel seriously. They don’t, in themselves, look like ‘Good News’. So when Jesus says ‘Blessed are…’ it rather suggests we need a better understanding of blessing.
The Greek word, makarioi, which we translate as ‘blessing’, is another example of the Old Testament being our touchstone. The word appears sixty eight times in the Hebrew Bible, being especially prevalent in the Psalms. That’s the foundation on which Jesus is building, and much of what he’s teaching can be found there.
So what does it mean?
While this word tends to get translated as ‘blessed’, in other contexts it also means fortunate or happy. Yet those alternatives don’t really seem to get to the heart of it; none of them quite build a working definition. If you have a really good day you might say, “I feel really blessed today.” What do you mean by that? Is it a sense of having been given something you didn’t feel you deserved? Is that a blessing; to receive an unexpected favour? Well yes, there is something in that. It is as if God has extended something to us; enlarged it if you like. It is a gift of grace. God has taken something and made it greater for you so that you should benefit from it.
But, and this is the key, what makes it important, what makes it an actual blessing, is in some ways our grateful acknowledgement of its source. Some people might say, “Luck was on my side today.” Another might say, “Thank you Lord for the good things that happened today.” So, yes, in answer to one of the questions I posed at the beginning, there is a real sense here that blessedness is in the eye of the beholder. I think, that is a part of what Jesus is getting at. So there are no commands here. Jesus doesn’t tell us to be poor in spirit, for example. But he observes that some are and then gives them reassurance of God’s favour towards them within it.
However, there are some shortcomings with this working definition.
For the mourning, the poor in spirit and the persecuted, if we try to define blessing as God enlarging something for our benefit, well I don’t know about you but I find mourning is hard enough without God making it any bigger!
So there must be something more to the concept of blessing here. I think we can find it in the idea of being willing to accept that there is more going on than meets the eye; that how it looks may not be the reality of how it is which brings us back to the idea of hoping for something that is beyond what we see in the current moment.
We can find a really good example of this by considering Mary, the mother of Jesus. In a few weeks time we going to be remembering how she is visited by Gabriel who tells her she’s going to be the mother of the Messiah. She’s perplexed. She’s not even married. She’s still a virgin, and these country girls looked after animals. She knew how babies were made.
In response to her questions, Gabriel tells her that the Holy Spirit will overshadow her. Now Mary is no fool. She knows only too well that if she becomes pregnant outside marriage she will be humiliated and will bring shame on her family and shame on her fiance, Joseph. So she goes running to see her older cousin, Elizabeth, perhaps someone who was a bit of a slightly removed maternal figure. I know in many families there have been instances when you need to talk about something but you don’t want to talk to your parents. Some of us have a crazy aunt somewhere, or an older cousin, or a friend who fits that role. So Mary goes off into the hills and tells Elizabeth what’s happened.
Elizabeth, meanwhile, is in the throws of her own miracle, being pregnant in what was perhaps late middle age, thinking she’d never have a child of her own. I can almost imagine Mary bursting through the door to ask for help and then being brought up short with her mouth wide open when she sees Elizabeth nursing a huge bump that has just turned somersaults on Mary’s arrival. So Elizabeth puts her at ease and Mary sings out her joy in the words of the Magnificat, and right at the start she says, “For he (that is God), has looked with favour on my humiliation (which is a good alternative translation of ‘lowliness’), he has looked on my humiliation with favour. From now all generations shall call me blessed”, and yes, the word in the Greek is the same makarios word.
Can you see how the event has been reframed by hope in Mary’s mind?
She is looking forward. Generations to come will understand this even if it seems wrong to her own people. Being pregnant out of wedlock was a shameful thing in her society — even if it’s a divine gift, because, yeah, who’s going to believe that?! But now she sees it as a blessing because she is heartened that something amazing is going to come out of it.
She’s looking ahead; she’s looking beyond.
In other words, she believes what the angel told her. Her faith has given birth to hope, so even though it doesn’t feel like it, she can see that her circumstances will be a blessing, not just for her but for everyone. I think she is illustrating that you are blessed when you look to see God working in the midst of difficult circumstances, whatever caused them.
This is not an easy path, and that’s why Mary is an icon of what faith can look like when it matures although most of us have a way to go before we get to that level of faith. We need to remember what John was saying, that whatever we feel now, there is more to be revealed. Whatever our circumstances, we are already children of God, but more will be revealed.
So let me draw this to a close with something that the 19th century Danish theologian and philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, said. He explained that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.
In other words, we can understand things better in retrospect, but we can’t live like that. But when we look back, we can often see how God was at work even though we didn’t know it. St. Paul writes something very interesting in Romans 8:28 where he says that all things work for good for those who love God. What he means by that is not that God causes illness and disaster, but that when they come, God will work behind the scenes to try and pull something good from it. This is how faith gives birth to hope. Without going into details, I have seen and known the truth of this in my own family and amongst close friends. That is not to say for a minute that our tragedies were of God’s doing, but looking backwards I can see how blessings were pulled from the rubble. And looking back at Mary’s story, her humiliation at being pregnant before she was married would have been seen as a curse, yet she had a remarkable faith in being able to see the blessing that would come on her name because of what her son would accomplish.
This not an easy message. Personally, I think hope is a spiritual discipline. It certainly doesn’t come naturally to me, but it flows out from recognising that we live in the love of God. Hope looks forward. And sometimes we need our friends to weep with us, and then help us to find hope again.
Being blessed is about recognising that whatever you or I may be going through now, this is not the end of our stories, and God intends to work within our lives to drag something good out of what is happening to us.
God doesn’t cause the tragedies, and I recognise there’s a great lengthy discussion to be had about freewill here, but we’ll save that for another time. What I am certain of is that God’s love compels God to try and pull something good from the ashes for us.
And that’s why Jesus can affirm these blessings. However things may look now, there is more to be revealed ahead for those who are already counted as children of God.
Peace be with you.
