John 15:4
Expectations. We all have them. Many of us live with high expectations; expectations define our world. For some, those expectations are a positive motivator. For others, they are a profound burden. Jesus too lived in a world of great expectations. His extraordinary birth raised great hopes as well as created profound fear. Was He the One who would, in the phrase of N. T. Wright, “set the world to rights?” And perhaps the unasked and even more weighty question behind that question is, “What will that world look like?” Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount by resetting the expectations of His listeners. Perhaps a stronger and more accurate verb is “reverse.” Jesus reverses the expectations about what the world looks like when it is made right. What is striking is how backward it all seems. In the opening beatitude, Jesus blesses those who are poor in spirit. That’s not exactly a category for people to aspire to, either in the first century or in the twenty-first. In doing so, Jesus raises the disturbing possibility that our expectation ladders are leaned up against the wrong building. Or, consider the medical condition called anorexia. Anorexia is “an eating disorder characterized by an abnormally low body weight, an intense fear of gaining weight, and a distorted perception of weight” (Mayo Clinic). It is a strange disease. You may be surprised that, for the anorexic, much of life works backward. When encouraged to eat more as they lose weight, they chose instead to eat less even more resolutely, thereby losing more weight. The reason is that their self-perception is reversed from reality. When they look in the mirror, instead of seeing someone losing weight, they see a person gaining weight. Their perception is diametrically opposed to what the rest of us saw to be true. Jesus’ Beatitudes attempt to address something similar. Like an anorexic looking in a mirror, our views and expectations for God’s rule (and for us as human beings) are deeply distorted. Instead of seeing what God intends for us, we see something quite the opposite. So, when Jesus declares God’s actual expectations, we come away disoriented and disturbed. Everything seems backward from what we thought was true. Jesus begins by calling the poor in spirit blessed. How can that be? For both the secular and religious person, “being blessed” is usually an indication of flourishing. For those familiar with God’s work in the history of Israel, a blessing is associated with God’s goodness as it is expressed in the bounty of creation, in God’s faithfulness to deliver His people from their enemies, and in God’s affirmation of those who are faithful to God’s instructions. Economic poverty in ancient Israel (as to some Christians today) was a sign of the lack of God’s blessing. Spiritual poverty suffered much the same assessment. Even if the causes of such poverty were debatable, the effects could hardly be described as “being blessed.” What was Jesus talking about? Jesus’ Beatitudes have been with us for two millennia and it is easy to become too comfortable with them. There have been many explanations offered for what Jesus meant. It’s easy for Jesus’ words to lose their edginess. I think it’s worth letting the shock of Jesus’ words disorient and disturb us for a while. In the words of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, we suffer the “consequence of the film of familiarity” where “we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.” We will delve further into the Beatitudes next week. Comments are closed.
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