Recognize blessedness
Recognize blessedness

Recognize blessedness

Dear Friends

In this week’s reading Mathew 5:1-12 Jesus withdrawals to a mountain to teach all those who would follow him. And that’s an important characteristic of Jesus in Matthew’s story he is a teacher, an interpreter of God’s law, meeting with his disciples on the mountain like a new Moses training the twelve disciples/tribes in a new kind of righteousness.

And the first thing Jesus teaches them is how to recognize blessedness. Which I think is really interesting. Not how to become blessed, or even to bless each other, but rather to recognize who is already blessed by God. And the import of all this is that it’s not who we necessarily think are blessed.

Every community has its own definition of what constitutes blessedness. We may not always use such a pious word, preferring instead to call it “the good life” or “success.” But we all have definitions of what it means to have made it, and usually it’s not those who are poor in spirit, those who mourn, those who are meek or pure in heart or thirst for righteousness and all the rest. In our world, when we think of someone who is blessed we most often think of someone who is wealthy or powerful or famous or successful or beautiful or enviable. Blessing, at least according to the standards of this world, is most often of the material kind.

But Jesus teaches something different. Jesus teaches us to see how God calls blessed those who are down and out, distressed by their circumstances, passionate about promoting righteousness and working for peace, or persecuted for doing the right thing. I think it’s important for us to recognize that those we don’t often perceive as valuable to be precisely those God chooses to bless and honor and love.

Read or understood this way, I almost see Matthew’s version of the beatitudes as akin to Luke’s Magnificat, where Mary learns that God favours those in need. So also here in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus urges his disciples then and now to look at those around us differently than the culture does. Rather than measure persons by their possessions, we are invited nay, commanded to see their character. Rather than merely take pity on their losses, we are invited to enter into them. Rather than judge their failings, we are invited to forgive and remind them that they are blessed by God and born for more than they’ve settled for. And rather than despise weakness, we are invited to see in it the truest point of meeting between God’s children. For God reveals God’s self to us most clearly and consistently at our places of deepest need.

Recognize blessedness.

Solomzi

 

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