Beatitudes II

Beatitudes 4 through 7

In the fourth beatitude we encounter a word of almost fabled status in the Christian lexicon, "righteousness"! Paul's use of it, especially in Romans, provides a bottomless well for interpretation and is at the heart of all Reform theology. The beatitude on righteousness is the last in the first set of four, and because the theme of righteousness is repeated in the eighth it suggests a division into two halves, each concluded with the same theme. In which case "righteousness" appears crucial to the whole scheme.

The Hebrew Old Testament term behind the Greek is sedekah. This is frequently paired with another word mishpatim meaning justice. In other words righteousness and justice overlap and belong to the same range of covenant virtue and behavior required by God. At this level there is no rigid formal distinction between the two. At Isaiah 1:21-27 we can see how the two are intimately intertwined. But in late biblical Judaism there was a move away from the "moral" sense of the practice of justice to a feeling that this had become virtually impossible for God's people. There had been so many failures experienced in the practice of covenant righteousness it was now something only God could provide. This is the beginning of the apocalyptic attitude, the idea that God must take direct action in order to break through the impasse of human wickedness. See Daniel 9:1-19, for example v. 7: "Righteousness is on your side, O Lord, but open shame...falls on us..."

So "hungering and thirsting for righteousness" is again an attitude of poverty, of lack, and therefore a longing for the in-breaking of the kingdom. Jesus in his preaching claims this breakthrough has now taken place (cf. 6:33). At the same time this new righteousness is no "imputed" justification (if indeed Paul ever thought that). For Matthew it remains a practical and concrete "ethic". See 5:13-20, where Christians are to be as visible and public as the Pharisees!

"Blessed are the merciful" is the first beatitude in the second quartet, where there is a shift from more passive or receptive states to more active responses or relationships engaged with the world. This first one is also perhaps the best example of the Wisdom thinking that runs throughout the Sermon on the Mount. Deed-consequence reasoning in Proverbs, for example, is perfectly instanced here: you reap what you sow, if you put in mercy you will get it back!

The O.T. word behind mercy is hesed. It has a much wider range of meaning than "mercy" as we would understand it, and as such is impossible to translate consistently. (In the LXX Greek it is normally rendered with the root eleos, i.e. mercy.) At Genesis 40:14 the NRSV has it as "kindness," at 2 Sam. 3: 8 it is "loyalty". When it is applied to God it is often represented in modern English translation as "steadfast love." It is also twinned with a word more regularly associated with mercy, from the word rehem meaning a woman's womb, and accurately translated in English as "compassion." At Exodus 34:6 you can see both terms used in the classic confession of Israel's God. At Psalm 103:4 hesed and r'hamim are together and rendered in the NRSV as "steadfast love and mercy." At Zechariah 7:9 these twinned terms are proposed to Israelites as the attitude they should have for one another.

In other words the "merciful"of the fifth beatitude has a range of inflections behind it, suggesting a rich relationship of commitment and favorable action. John McKenzie defines it as "a broad and embracing benevolence, a will to do good to another rather than evil." A contemporary word for it perhaps is "human solidarity." So...blessed are those who show solidarity, for they will receive solidarity!

The sixth beatitude seems to break from the scheme of active response or relationship in the world. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God..." But the only thing that takes this out of the world is the Greek tradition. In a Greek mindset it is impossible "to see God" except via the immortal intellectual soul transported to the heavenly otherworld. At every point this is not the sense of Jesus' beatitude.

The "heart" in Hebrew anthropology is not the same thing as "mind." The heart is the seat of the will and thus action in the world. At Jeremiah 31:33 God famously promises "I will write my law on their heart..." In other words, the fount of choice and action will be inscribed with God's law of justice.

"Pure" of course refers to readiness or fitness to come before God or in relation to holy things. Psalm 24:3-6 gives us a clear pattern and uses the term found in the beatitude. " Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place? Those who have clean hands and pure hearts, who do not lift up their souls to what is false, and do not swear deceitfully..." Purity here is truth and honesty in relationships, including avoiding relationship with idols. Approaching God "in his holy place," therefore, is a result of concrete relationships in this world, not intellectual sight.

One of the great texts on seeing God is in the Book of Job, the place where he cries out for a redeemer. It tells us the place where his prayer will be answered is on earth: "I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth...then in my flesh I shall see God" (Job 19: 25-26). This is the kind of seeing envisaged by the beatitude, one that flows directly from concrete relationships on this earth. The goal is fulfilled in the Book of Revelation in the New Jerusalem come down to earth. Then it will be relationship with God and with the Lamb which gives sight to the city, not sight itself (Rev. 21:22-23). We could say, therefore, that the heart has its own way of seeing, that it is the only organ than can see God, and that the whole range of the beatitudes and the relationships they offer result in this seeing.

The seventh beatitude has two notable effects. On the one hand it is the statement which most forcefully ties the beatitudes, and the whole Sermon on the Mount, to the world. On the other it is the statement which most forcefully ties the character of God to the beatitudes' overall program of nonviolence. Being a "peacemaker" is something associated with rulers and emperors after their successful use of force has brought order and tranquility to the earth. In the year 13BC the Roman Senate commissioned an altar to be erected and named "Ara Pacis Augustae" (Altar of Augustan Peace) to celebrate the peace and prosperity created by the emperor Augustus who had taken power in Rome in 27BC. It survives today and is considered a masterpiece, testifying to the military, political, ideological and religious triumph of Augustus Caesar, a man who ruled for forty one years and initiated a period of 200 years of generally unbroken peace throughout the Roman Empire. When Augustus first proclaimed himself emperor before the Senate he named himself "Son of the divine Caesar" (Julius Caesar). Jesus lived all his early life under Augustus' supreme authority (he was about twenty when Augustus died), and when he names "peacemakers" as "children of God" he is saying that it is his disciples who are the true authors and children of divine peace on earth, not Roman Emperors.

In Israel peace came from the Lord and resulted in fruitfulness and life (see Micah 4:1-4, Psalms 122 & 128). Its crucial character as the righteousness that comes with God's kingdom is illustrated in the "six antitheses" that follow very soon after the beatitudes. Here Jesus explicitly contrasts his teaching with the torah that came before, and in each instance the difference turns on peacemaking as opposed to violence. Particularly the first ("do not be angry") and the fifth and sixth ("do not resist the evil" and "love your enemy") show the absolute centrality of peacemaking to Jesus' preaching of kingdom justice. The last antithesis repeats the beatitude itself, in imperative rather than indicative form: "I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven" (5:44-45).

The consequence in the nature of God cannot be exaggerated. You cannot be a peacemaking child of a violent God. And the God of Israel would not have the right to claim any difference from the gods of the Romans if s/he were in fact violent. In this teaching of the beatitudes God has been shown conclusively as nonviolent. And that nonviolence in fact underpins the whole of Jesus' abolition of purity distinctions, and then, after his death, the outreach of the Christian movement to the Gentile world. A nonviolent God has no enemies, draws no distinction between Jew and Gentile. By the same token Paul's description of righteousness communicated by faith (not race) cannot have a hidden remainder of violence in it, whereby God simply decides not to inflict violence on those who are saved all the while maintaining the attitude of divine violence toward the world. The sixth beatitude radically critiques all attempts to make Paul's theology a legal change in the mind of God and a nonchange in the (supposed) violence of God's relationship to the world. The kingdom of the heavens is a radical breakthrough of divine nonviolence into a human history of violence.