When I was in college back in another century, I studied the Sermon on the Mount for the first time, and it sent me into depression. I was depressed because I misunderstood what Jesus meant. I misunderstood it because I filtered the good news of Jesus through a worldly understanding of the Scriptures.
I have since realized that you can’t understand the Bible if you filter it through flawed thinking. To some degree, we all do this. We read 21st-century assumptions into a first-century document. We filter a narrative for ancient Hebrew and Greek cultures through the presumptions of our current cultural backgrounds. We tend to ignore the train of thought. We pull verses out of context and completely miss the point. We don’t hear the good news.
We can’t hear the Lord’s answers if we ask the wrong questions. And in my experience, the biggest obstacle to understanding the gospel of salvation is that we assume it is a religious answer to religious question: What must I do to deserve eternal life? Christ’s death for the undeserving is the obstacle we can’t get around.
“Religion” is about doing what gains the deity’s favor. It’s about self-righteousness. Regardless of culture, the whole world presumes you must act in a certain way to reap reward. We see God, or the idol we beseech, as a spectator who grants outcomes based on our self-righteous actions. In short, you get what you deserve. When we believe that, we fall for the lie that we have whatever good we have because we deserve it.
And this leads to the distortion that people who don’t have what we have are willfully rejecting something that is easy to obtain. We think that others should exchange their self-righteousness for our self-righteousness so they can identify with our religion. But the Lord of the Bible doesn’t call us to self-righteousness or to identify with “religion”—which is a Roman term and a Roman concept, not a Biblical world view.
The Romans thought followers of Jesus were atheists because they didn’t worship the Roman deities—or worship at all according to Roman ways of worshiping. Jews who rejected Jesus also argued that those following Jesus were not real Jews because they didn’t all worship in the ways the Jews worshiped. They considered the followers of Jesus to be irreligious.
Christians over the last 17 centuries or so have added so many layers of religion onto the words of God that we tend to assume Christianity is a religion. But Jesus never called us to a religion. He called us to a love relationship with God and our neighbors. When we think of that relationship as a religion we think in categories of self-righteous superiority that looks down on people—rather than in categories of a love relationship with the Lord and sharing his love for the neighbors and the nations.
So, when my self-righteous mind read Matthew 5, I didn’t hear the good news for a demeaned people living under the dominations of a pagan empire, or an inferior working class under the arrogant elitism of the wealthy ruling party. But I did share with them a hopeless religiosity in which self-righteous rule-keeping would never be perfect enough to deserve God’s love. On their own they were truly helpless to change any of this, and so was I. Without seeing what the world’s false religious narratives have done to people, I could NOT hear the good news Jesus was speaking. My own self-centeredness kept me from hearing Jesus.
But let’s try NOT ignoring that context. Let’s consider that Jews of Galilee had a long heritage as a marginalized culture living always under the dominance of Rome, Greece, Persia, Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, all the way back to the time Abraham was called out of the great civilization of Sumeria. Let’s imagine what common villagers of Capernaum felt when the culture said that health and wealth means God favors you and illness or disability means you’re being punished by an angry deity.
Let’s imagine how it would have felt to hear Jesus’s opening words, the New Testament’s introduction to Good News from Heaven. Matthew spends 4 chapters showing how the Old Testament is the backstory for Jesus—in the list of famous names linking Abraham all the way to Jesus; in the way God brings his people through the perils of Herods and Pharaohs; in the prophetic ministry that calls people to repent, to think differently about the Lord; in the efforts of Satan to seduce God’s chosen away from Heaven’s mission.
Then Matthew 5 gives us the grand introduction of Heaven’s Good News. What was Jesus saying with love and assurance for the people he had spent his 30 years getting to know and care about? What would they have heard?
He looked at the faces of those who had left their livelihoods to join his movement, something he called the “Kingdom of Heaven.” Jesus knew it would involve a more fundamental change than any of them would understand for years to come. He says,
Matthew 5, verse 3: Good news if you’re a spiritual beggar: The Kingdom of Heaven is for those who know they need it.
The way of Jesus begins when you confess your spiritual desperation. Heaven is not for people who think they deserve it; Heaven is for the spiritually poor, those who know they can’t get it on their own. Heaven is for those who know they desperately need the Life-Giver’s presence. That is the beginning of loving our Life-Giver.
Once you see our true need, you begin to see the need for Heaven all around you. Not only are you in need, but so are the other people of this world. That is the beginning of loving your neighbor as you yourself need to be loved. Without being poor in spirit, we don’t think in Heaven’s ways.
4 Good news if you’re mourning the suffering of this world: Comfort is for those who see the need for it.
The good news is for those who mourn. When you mourn, you grieve the way things are, as Jesus did. People who wanted to keep things they way they were didn’t want Jesus. When you deny the needs of this world, you deny the purpose for which Jesus came.
Jesus offers something better than the way things are this world. His comfort is for those who mourn the suffering, the injustice, the needs. His comfort is for those who ache for things to be better.
5 Good news if you desire better things for others: The earth is the inheritance of those who are eager to share it.
Inheriting land means three things. (1) It means you receive something not by earning it but by being in a relationship. (2) It means you belong in a family. (3) It means you have a home.
This promise is for the meek. “Meek” does not mean you think you’re humble. “Meek” means you think not only about yourself; you think about what the other person needs. Jesus was bold AND meek. Meek is not the opposite of bold; meek is the opposite of selfish. Not only do you need God’s grace, but you know others need grace too. To be meek is to empathize with those who need grace. To be meek is to want to see others share in the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus promises a permanent homeland for those who want to share it.
In my youthful depression, I was expressing my struggle to my wiser older brother who said, “There’s no limit to the good you can do for others if you don’t care who gets credit for it.” That statement was a game changer for me.
6 Good news if you hunger and thirst for justice for those in need: God’s justice will go to those who ache for it.
In the Bible, the same word (the Greek word “dikaios”) can be translated as both “justice” and “righteousness.” Sometimes we wrongly assume that “righteousness” means self-righteous superiority. But Jesus means the opposite.
In the Bible, the goal of God’s justice is to replace hostility with peace, to replace brokenness with health, and to replace oppression with fair opportunity for all. Its not self-help; it’s desiring less hate and more of Heaven in our world. Jesus promises that kind of fulfillment to those who hunger for it.
7 Good news if you see others through eyes of mercy: God’s mercy is for those who believe in it.
Mercy is for people who believe in the power of mercy. They want to replace hate with forgiveness, to replace suffering with compassion. Jesus promises grace to those who believe in the life-giving power of Heaven’s grace.
8 Good news if you have unselfish motives: You’ll see the Life-Giver active around you.
The good news is for the “pure in heart.” How do you know if your heart is pure? Not by seeing yourself as superior and deserving, but by desiring benefit to others even if it is costly for you. Purity of heart isn’t about moral perfection and superiority. It’s about unselfish motives.
What is more heavenly? To see yourself as “pure,” or to be gracious and generous toward others? Those who gaze at their own virtue will never be satisfied. Those who want what is good for others will see the goodness of God at work.
How can we “see God” in this way? “We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14 NIV). Those words introduce the Savior who cares not only for himself, but for his people. He didn’t beat people down; he humbled himself and paid the cost to raise people up. John saw God’s glory in the heavenly truth and generous grace of Jesus.
9 Good news if you choose God’s peace rather than hostility: You will be recognized as one of his people.
What identifies someone as a child of God? They seek wholeness not only in themselves but also in their relationships and in our world. The good news is for people who choose peace over hatred.
At the end of a school year I asked international students what they would remember about being together. One of them said, “I always thought believing the Bible makes you weak, so you don’t do good work. But now I can see that believing the Bible makes you unselfish, so you care about others and not only about yourself. And that’s what I experienced here.”
Matthew 5 ends with the instruction to love your enemies. Loving only those who are with you makes you no different from the lost world. But the Father gives what what we need before we deserve it—sunshine, rain, life itself—and he gives it graciously to good people and bad people alike. If we want more of Heaven in this hurting world, be complete as our Father is complete—not with the incomplete love for friends only, but with a complete love that includes those who aren’t friendly.
In Jesus, Heaven invaded earth with a more heavenly way of thinking. His good news begins not with our superiority, but with our longing for Heaven’s comfort, Heaven’s grace, Heaven’s justice, Heaven’s mercy, Heaven’s generosity, and Heaven’s peace. We saw complete love in His forgiveness for those who who put him on the cross. As religious people mocked and thieves cursed, we saw Heaven deliver a radically different message. We saw Heaven’s good news personified. That’s what Jesus was talking about from the start.
(C) copyright 2023 David Shelley, jackofalltribes.com and International Students, Inc