Mennonite Weekly Review

Early in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus has been drawing crowds as he heals people and proclaims the good news that God’s kingdom is at hand. One day, Jesus sees them, goes up a hillside and begins teaching what this kingdom is like — and what folks look like who live in it.

Andres

And it isn’t what the crowds expect.

An upside-down beginning

Folks expect God’s Messiah to turn the tables on the Romans and usher in an undefeatable once-and-for-all kingdom of Israel. Consequently, it’s understandable that they’d consider the “blessed” to be the strong, wealthy and powerful.

But the kingdom Jesus talks about “points to an inverted, upside-down way of life that challenges the prevailing social order,” says Donald Kraybill in The Upside Down Kingdom. “If it does anything, the kingdom of God shatters the assumptions which govern our lives.”

And assumptions are definitely challenged. Jesus begins with a list of people generally categorized as cursed, weak or annoyances and calls them blessed (Matt. 5:1-12). Why? While some scholars believe there’s value in the conditions themselves, others suggest the point Jesus is making is that the God-who-blesses is making available to these broken, wounded, discounted or full-of-longing folks a kingdom full of comfort, fulfillment, peace, mercy, revelation, love and promise. And that has profound implications.

For the crowds, many on that list are viewed as beyond God’s blessings. But Jesus says different. The Beatitudes “single out cases that provide proof that, in him, the rule of God from the heavens truly is available in life circumstances that are beyond all human hope,” says Dallas Willard in The Divine Conspiracy.

Jesus tells them it doesn’t matter their circumstances because God meets them there: They are blessed. It is you, Jesus tells them, who were created to be the salt, light and beacon on a hill that will draw glory to the Father.

More kingdom life

Jesus goes on to lay out what kingdom people and kingdom life look like (5:17-7:28). “The aim of the sermon,” suggests Willard, “is to help people come to hopeful realistic terms with their lives here on Earth by clarifying in concrete terms the nature of the kingdom into which they are now invited by Jesus’ call: ‘Repent, for life in the kingdom of the heavens is now one of your options.’ ”