READINGS

Matthew 5:1-12
Exodus 24:9-11
Psalm 37:11 (the meek)
Psalm 24:4 (purity of heart)

HOMILY

We now Begin The Sermon on the Mount, which is the major piece of Christian teaching in Matthew's Gospel (if of all Gospels) and will be continuous for several weeks.

Let's examine how it begins, because how it begins is going to give us a very clear hint of how it's going to work all the way through.

Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down.

He's in a mountain or in a hilly area, which looks out on both Jewish and Pagan areas.

Whatever is going to be given, is going to be given to a much wider public than only Israel.

His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them.

Now of course the references are to Sinai, where Moses went up the mountain to be given something.

Then there is an occasion which encapsulates all the goings up the mountain, that is when Moses and the elders go up and there they have a feast in the presence of the Lord - they eat and drink.

But here Jesus goes up the mountain and then he sits down.

He is now in the position of the Lord: not the one who's receiving the teaching, but one is going to do the teaching.

And the disciples come to him, so this is the elders coming to the Lord.

The indication is that the word is now not coming from an uppity outside the source, but from a human level of one seated visibly in our midst.

Every one of these words are the new oracles and my guess is that once heard, we tend to remember them - we can if not quote this whole passage by heart, at least remember a significant elements.

Jesus is not speaking as it were from a starting point but from a midpoint.

This is God in the middle of us speaking into the midst of all our lives and indicating something about equality of being alive.

The Greek μακάριοι Makarioi usually translates in blessed or happy.

Happy suggests a good mood and it's perfectly nonsense - many of the people in this situation are not happy in the normal sense.

Blessed suggests a kind of a fictional description of them that, although life is really awful, they're blessed; so it's kind of extrinsic and outside them.

The translation which I've chosen, which it's only a proposal, is radiant.

Why do I say that? Because each one of the groups described are people who are in the midst of the grind in one way.

They are precarious on the inside of the grind of being human, but they're beginning to turn up the right side.

There is something about going through the grind, in which they are being brought to radiance.

It indicates something of the quality of someone who's going through the grind and is beginning to come out with a sense that they're doing something real.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Why does it poor in spirit?

Obviously it doesn't mean those who are poor-spirited or mean-spirited.

Nor does it mean simply those who, having a lot, have given it all away, which would mean that there was good poverty for those who are rich and terrible and unredeemable poverty for those who find themselves in a situation of acute poverty, which is awful.

I'm very glad to have had conversations over the last couple of years with a friend who has found himself living in acute poverty; he has made it very clear to me what the difference is between voluntary poverty and finding yourself sucked into the survival of a system, being ground down by a system of poverty.

These are very different things, so for a white middle-class male like myself to be cavalier in how I describe this as would be really letting people down.

Active poor suggests that there is something about not having money or goods as an idol, even in the midst of great want and seeming nothingness: that means you have God as your king.

The opposite having God as your king is having money as your king, and this is the standard form of idolatry.

There is something about occupying a place of not enough generously that is a sign of something out of nothing, which is how you know that God is King, for only God can produce something out of nothing.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

People who are in the midst of the precariousness of loss, who have lost not only someone they love, but a sense of belonging...

Whatever the endless forms of mourning, but all of them are to do with the sense of death and facing nothingness, they will be comforted.

The one who brings into being will give them something.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

I learned something about this from a friend of mine who worked with indigenous groups in Colombia teaching them practices of non-violence when faced with terrible intrusions on their land by those drug cartels on the one hand and paramilitaries on the other (who could be the same people with different uniforms).

One's natural response in the face of terrible and much more powerful abuses of your land is to fight back, but the amazing thing is that he taught these groups not to resist.

Curiously enough, eventually the outsiders just gave up and went away: they didn't know how to cope with the non-resistance; it was an extraordinary example of meekness actually winning.

Moreover, it seems that originally meekness (rather than being a endeavor, the demeanor proper to a victorian young lady) meant something much more to do with actual property and land.

It's to do with those who are actually in the land that is theirs in the face of people who want to take it over.

At least in the Hebrew things, there's always something chunky and physical at the bottom.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

We're talking about precarious people.

Their regions comes even in the midst of situations of injustice, where they're having to actually fight for something.

They're hungry and thirsting, it's unbearable to be in the situation of such injustice.

The notion here is that they will be filled and that God is the filler of people from that space.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

It's first understanding would have been with relation to financial matters.

This is someone who is single-hearted in the way they conduct their business and their deals.

They're not trying to fool others or allowing themselves to be fooled.

If necessary, they allow themselves to be fooled by others rather than trying to fool others.

The singleness of heart obviously also has references to sexual matters.

Remember that this is a the only form of purity that is ever mentioned in Christianity, which is not a purity religion.

Singleness of heart is something much to be desired and is something only achieved in the midst of the various temptations to go after other gods, to become double-hearted, triple-hearted etc.

It refers to behavior in the midst of a people for whom purity was essentially a matter of various transgressions that needed ablutions to wash them off and various things to avoid touching and so forth.

So there's a certain push here for singleness of heart as opposed to sorting things out exteriorly.

That's something very striking and at least possibly new.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Peace of course didn't only mean trying to get people to stop war.

It meant peace in the broader sense of prosperity, well-being.

That's what Shalom is all about: a bigger sense than merely sensation of austerity.

For instance, I would think in some of our western countries in history union leaders and those who have pushed for workers rights to enable there to be better circumstances for production and living, these are contributing to shalom.

Those who contribute to this are called children of God, because they're doing exactly what God does, which is to try and create peaceful prosperity and security for people.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

In the world in which we live, it's always going to be much easier to go along with bad things than to blow the whistle.

If you blow the whistle, they'll come after you. That's the way things work.

Part of being radiant is learning when it's right to blow the whistle, to stand up for what is right and to face the consequences.

There is a certain radiance that comes with that.

God brings forth what is good even in the midst of them, despite all our attempts to close it down by grabbing false sources of security, false sources of togetherness.

Then Jesus turns to you (what are the disciples but all people?):

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.

In other words, your presence as you listen to me is going to be that of my presence in the world basically as someone who occupied the space of the victim without being run by it.

I'm not asking you to become a self-victim.

I'm asking you to realize that when you occupy that space, as I occupied it.

These things will happen to you.

Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

this is how you get onto the inside of the life of God.

These are not instructions from above.

These are indications of what really is from within.

That's going to be the extraordinary thing about what we're going to learn over the next few weeks.

It's all to do with patterns of desire in the midst of living with real things.

It's never a question of 'I give you an order and now you must fulfill it'.

It's always a question of 'this is what is going on and this is what desire looks like'.

Let's work out how to live this in such a way that it bears witness to God.

So radiance, the notion of God not coming down from above, but being in the midst and actually beginning to show forth what it's going to be like to be radiant with life alongside him, with him being alongside us and enabling us to inhabit and to discover the Kingship of God.