Since this usage appears both in earlier and later letters, including some that many scholars call “deutero- pauline,” the meaning must have been present not only in Paul’s own mind, but also in his communities. He does not claim it as his original idea (as he sometimes does on other subjects).
2
The Moral Axioms of the Kingdom’s Coming1
It is customary to designate as “Sermon on the Mount” chapters 5–7 of Matthew’s Gospel, which appear as one uninterrupted discourse. This is the first such block of such material to be reported at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry; it is also the longest. Luke 6:17–49, a briefer passage containing parallel material, is sometimes designated “Sermon on the Plain.” It too stands (in addition to 4:16–21) as a kind of “platform” statement at the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry.
I shall be analyzing five fragments of this material, looking at both the Matthean and the Lucan versions. My concern shall not be to lift from them a catalogue of sample statements about proper behavior, although such specimens are given. My intention is rather to see these examples as representing the mentality and the world vision within which Jesus calls his disciples to a new style of life.
The entire text of the “Sermon” has come to be taken as the most dramatic specimen of the way in which the presence of Jesus reverses all the otherwise dominant value patterns of society. For the past century, the understanding of this text in the West has been under the impact of the simple literal argument of Leo Tolstoy, whose intellectual and spiritual conversion came about by taking this text seriously and seeing in it a condemnation of the moral laxity and betrayal of Christendom. In a host of ways, interpreters since Tolstoy2 have circled around the text, proposing alternative ways to understand its simplicity. We cannot, in this connection, even survey the variety of reinterpretations3 that make the meaning more spiritual and more distant, more idealist, or more symbolic; but when we see all this reinterpretation going on, we can be warned.
This text being neither parabolic nor poetic, our goal should be the most straightforward interpretation possible. We need therefore to direct a special suspicion to traditions of interpretation whose intent or effect is to divert our attention from taking these words of Jesus as a call to us, here and now.
A text we know is most likely to speak to us tomorrow if it says something it did not say yesterday. So it is the interpreter’s task to turn a suspicious eye to any well-established convention of interpretation, even the best-intentioned. For this reason I shall phrase the following subtitles in a tone of critical disengagement.4
The Beatitudes and Woes (Matt 5:3–11; Luke 6:20–26)
What Jesus does not mean when he says that the poor are blessed
The hearer’s first mental reflex is to transpose “Blessed are those who . . .” into some form of “You ought to be. . . .” So Jesus would be promising us God’s reward if we would do the right kinds of things and be the right kind of people. Then the Beatitudes would be simply a back-handed oriental way of saying, “These are eight basic virtues” or, “These are eight kinds of good deeds.” Many sermon series use our passage that way.
But that will not work. The things of which Jesus says “Blessed are those who . . .” are not all things that one can by an act of will set out to do. One does not make oneself poor or make oneself thirsty for righteousness, or make oneself mourn, or even make oneself pure in heart. Jesus is describing a set of ways of being, or states, or conditions in which people already find themselves. He is not saying, “If you become thus, you will get a reward for it.” He is saying, “There are some people who are already thus: good for them.”
The Greek term makarios, which is translated “blessed,” does not apply first to people who are praised or people who get a reward for achievement, but to people who are fortunate, even “lucky.” So the reversal of values that God’s new regime brings is described in terms of the reversal of the categories of people who will be well off when the Kingdom comes. Those who are poor will be well off, because in the Great Reversal5 they shall be provided for. Those who mourn will be consoled. To fill in the contrasts from Luke’s version, those who are rich will lose their wealth.
The presupposition of all this is that the coming of the Kingdom whose approach Jesus has just announced (Matt 4:17, “Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand”) is socially real. To “repent,” as the exchanges between John the Baptist and his listeners had already made clear, means not only to confess one’s sinfulness, or to be remorseful about one’s failures, but to change one’s pattern of life in order to reflect a change of worlds or of lords. So the presupposition of the Beatitudes is the proclaiming of the Kingdom. The Beatitudes are good news because of the Kingdom. They are the Gospel.
Some people are poor: good for them, for the Kingdom is coming and they shall receive it as their inheritance;
Some people are peacemakers: good for them, because in the coming Kingdom it will be manifest that they are like God their Father.
Some people are meek: good for them, for in the coming Kingdom their kind will be in charge;
Some of you are rich: too bad for you; you have had all you will get.
The counter-cultural newness and the concrete realism of the good news of the coming new regime inaugurate a new age in which things are true that were not true before. Jesus is not merely raising by a degree or two the intensity of the general moral idealism with which all good people try, when they can, to be a little more loving. Nor is he escalating the divine demand in an intentionally unrealistic way in order to make us all recognize that we are sinners. For none of these was a Messiah needed.
Jesus is bringing to pass in his person the newness of the age in which God’s righteousness is operative among those who hear it proclaimed. The reversal of values is not first of all new information or new potential or new motivation on the moral level; it is first of all a whole new world, in which this radically different style of relating to others “comes naturally.”
The “social theme” with which we are to begin is not new information about the good society, nor new motivation to set about building it, but rather the Word that the Kingdom is upon us. Is it thinkable that we might take guidance in daily life from another social system than the one we see in place?
Love of the Enemy (Matt 5:38–48; Luke 6:27–36)
What Jesus does not mean when he says, “But I say to you”
Some views of the Sermon have taken it as the central expression of a fundamental contradiction between the morality of the Old Testament and that of the New. Such an interpretation is understandable, since there are differences between the two Testaments, and since some of them have to do partly with the structures of social justice: with nationhood and the state, violence and the offender.6 But it would be a mistake to read these six contrasts between the “Old” and the “New,” the last two of which are on the theme of violence and the enemy, as if they were meant to dramatize a polarity between the two Testaments.
Jesus says explicitly in the introductory paragraph (Matt 5:17ff.) that his intent is “not to destroy but to fulfill” the real meaning of the law. Each of the six specimens, in
