of the most significant speech in history shows us the heart of Jesus to bring bless- ing to people who were most broken. I have a friend who was present at the civil-rights march on Washington, D.C., in 1963, and heard Dr. Martin Luther King deliver his famous “I have a dream” speech. It’s hard for me to imagine what it must have been like to hear a message that changed history. And that was just a man! In Matthew 5, we’re talking about God standing up on a hill to teach. Imag- ine the hush across the crowd . . . the elec- tricity in the air. People could hear their hearts beating; angels watched, still as
describes the exchange that takes place between the life of brokenness with the life of God. The Greek word (markarioi) describes a moment when heaven and earth collide—when the hand of God touches a person and transforms him or her to embody the kind of life that God intended. By using this word, Jesus sig- nals that He will let everyone know how to put themselves in a position to get blessed, how to find life as God himself created and intended it to be. Everybody finally exhaled, the jaws of the angels dropped, and in that moment of anticipation and tension that had to be
In Jesus’ most famous “campaign speech”—the Sermon on the Mount— it’s not hard to see why the political tide eventually turned against Him.
He’s not talking about a city in the sky with pearly gates. He wasn’t talking about the afterlife. It’s not a kingdom in heaven, it’s a kingdom of heaven. This was a com- mon term in Jesus’ day referring to the full reign of God.
To everyone who was listening to Jesus that day, the kingdom of heaven represented the kind of life they always dreamed of for their nation and for them- selves: a life of wholeness, peace, purpose, and provision under the oversight not of Rome, but of God. The other rabbis reserved life under God’s reign for those Jews who perfectly followed the Torah.
stones. What would God encased in human flesh would say to His creation? Jesus looked out at the crowd whom He loved with all of His heart and the creation that God intended for good but had all gone bad somehow, and He began the most important words ever spoken. “Blessed,” he began. The people inhaled a big breath and held it in, because they were dying to be blessed. We have to work to get a sense for why Jesus starts the sermon with this word, because blessed has been relegated to religious language for us. But for them, it was perhaps the most important word in the Hebrew vocabulary. Blessed
indescribable, no one could believe what Jesus said next.
“Blessed are the unblessed, the spiritually poor, and the spiritually handi- capped,” He said, in effect. “Blessed are the spiritually empty. Blessed are those who stink at the spiritual life. Blessed are those who feel too tired and too unspiri- tual, too inadequate, and too sinful to serve and please God. Blessed are those who keep trying to walk with God and keep failing. Blessed are those who try to love God yet somehow don’t feel like they can. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Those are the ones,” Christ says, “to whom I am giving the kingdom of heaven.”
They started their sermons saying things like, “Blessed are those who adhere to the Law.” In fact, they blamed the kind of peo- ple Jesus hung out with for their nation’s oppression. Jesus brings the Kingdom to those whom everyone else excludes. He says to those at the bottom of the bar- rel, “You can loot God’s treasury to your heart’s content. I’ve come to bring all of the resources and blessings of God’s reign into your life.”
Grace is always bad politics.
Josh Rice is a staff pastor for Mount Paran Church of God in Atlanta.
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