[Machine transcription]
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints,
and especially to you who will
stand up here in a few minutes and
give your confession in the name
of Jesus, before His altar
and before His people.
Grace to you and peace from God the
Father and from our Lord Jesus
Christ. Jesus
sits His
disciples down and the
followers, they’re on the mountain
in Galilee and He opens
his mouth and he begins to teach them, and the first word out of his mouth is, blessed.
It’s the first word of the psalm.
We had it earlier in the intro, from Psalm 1, the very first word of that book, blessed
is the man.
So Jesus starts his preaching with the same word, with the same gift, with the same judgment.
This is blessed.
And he unfolds for us the nine blessings we call the Beatitudes.
I’d like to maybe do three things in the sermon today.
The first is I just want to give you a little outline of the Beatitudes with the hope that
tomorrow, later today, tomorrow, and the next day, and the next week, and the next year
you’ll be studying these every day.
So I just want to give you a head start on that meditation.
And then I want to think a little bit about what Jesus is doing with the Beatitudes, and
then I want to dig in on a couple of them.
The first thing we notice is that there are nine of them, nine blessings that Jesus gives.
The first one and the eighth one refer to the present tense, while the middle ones refer
to the future.
So, for example, Jesus starts, blessed are the poor in spirit, theirs is the kingdom
of heaven.
And then towards the end, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
The kingdom is here, it’s present, but in the middle the blessings are offered to the
future.
Blessed are those who mourn, they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, they will be satisfied and so forth.
Those middle blessings refer to the future.
The other thing to notice is that the very last of these blessings, Jesus switches from
talking about those who mourn and those who are poor in spirit in the abstract and he
turns and he talks to each one of us.
It’s second person, he says, blessed are you.
And it’s a bit of a surprise.
Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you.
They utter all kinds of evil against you.
That, Jesus says, is blessed.
The other thing to notice is that,
like the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments,
you saw the Lord’s Prayer and Ten Commandments
both start out with the things of God
and then they end with the things of this life.
So the first three commandments have to do with God
and the last seven have to do with a neighbor
or the first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer
have to do with the heavenly gifts and the last four have to do with earthly
blessings. The Beatitudes have the same structure, maybe it’s twofold or
maybe threefold. The first four Beatitudes have to do with God and in
most especially they have to do with faith and then the next three have to do
with love and the last two have to do with hope. It’s in describing how we
stand before God as Christians that the Lord sets us to be poor, to be mourning,
to be meek, to hunger and thirst for righteousness.
And then he sets us before the neighbor to be merciful, to be pure in heart, and to be
peacemakers.
But the surprising thing happens, and it’s not what you would expect, at least just looking
at it.
If we were merciful and pure in heart and peacemakers, it seems like things would go
well for us.
But Jesus says, no, that’s in fact not how it’ll be.
You’ll be persecuted for righteousness’ sake.
You’ll be slandered.
Word, people will utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
That has to do with our suffering in this world and our hopefulness.
So Jesus in these nine blessings outlines for us the whole Christian life.
And if you would, He gives us a perspective on how He sees the world.
This is what I think is going on in the Beatitudes.
I don’t know, I heard someone say last week
that people were asking about their hobbies.
It was in our ASL class, they were talking about hobbies.
And one person said that their hobby was people watching.
Have you heard of that before?
Just sitting and watching people?
I don’t, I think it would kind of freak me out to do it,
like if I was just sitting on a park bench
looking at people, and then you get caught
and you try to look away real quick.
I guess I’m looking at you all right now,
so that might count as people watching.
But if you, I think that if you could think of,
Okay, so if you could imagine this.
Imagine that you’re sitting on a park bench with Jesus
and you’re just watching people.
And you’re trying to evaluate where it’s going well
and where it’s not.
If you’re trying to identify where, or maybe this,
if you’re trying to identify who’s blessed and who’s not.
And you’re sitting there and you’re watching the people
and you’re gonna take a stab at it
And so you point to the person who’s,
seems like they’ve got it all together.
They’re confident, kind of gregarious.
You say, hey look, Jesus, blessed.
And Jesus says, no, no.
And he points to the person over there who’s very meek,
humble, and lowly.
And he says, blessed are the meek.
They’re gonna inherit the earth.
Or you look over there and you see someone
who’s happy and laughing, and they say,
Well, look, they look like they’re blessed, and Jesus says, no, no, you see that person
in the back who’s mourning?
The word for mourning here is to be spilling out tears, to be moaning with sorrow.
Jesus says, you see that person who’s groaning under their sorrow?
They’re blessed.
They’ll be comforted.
Or maybe we’re sitting there and there are some Pharisees and they’re, as you’re looking
at them, very righteous.
They’ve got it all together and they’re keeping the law, and you say, look at the righteousness.
of that guy, he must be blessed. And Jesus points to the tax collector, to the sinner,
who doesn’t have righteousness but who hungers and thirsts for it, and he says, they’re blessed.
Jesus is, he’s flipping on its head our idea of the good life. He’s turning around what
our idea of blessing is.
He’s humbling us and he’s doing this for the purpose of filling us up.
Because there’s a danger, and I suppose this is the prime danger that Jesus is getting
after, there’s a danger that we think that we can achieve this blessed life, this good
life on our own, by our own efforts, by our own striving, by our own doing, by our own
whatever.
And Jesus says, no, it comes only through repentance, only through faith in me.
There’s a guy in the crowd as you and Jesus are sitting there looking, there’s a guy in
the crowd who’s being beat up because he’s a Christian.
And you look at him and you say, now that guy, he’s not blessed.
And Jesus says, you’re wrong again.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.
He’s flipping it all around.
Now there’s a story, I don’t know if you know this, that when Martin Luther died, they found
a scrap of paper in his pocket.
It was, as far as we can tell, the last thing that he wrote, and it’s kind of a funny thing
that he said.
He’s talking about reading the Scriptures and how to understand St. Paul’s epistle,
And he says to understand the pastorals, to understand like the poems about being a shepherd,
you have to be a shepherd for three years or something.
I don’t remember the exactâ¦
This is my paraphrase of the note, okay?
You have to understand those poems, you have to be a shepherd for three years.
And then he says to understand Cicero, you have to rule and be a governor in the city
for thirty years.
And to understand St. Paul’s letter, you have to be a pastor in the church for three
hundred years.
Something like that.
And then he says this.
This is the main point.
He says, Wiesentbetler, we are beggars.
This is true.
This is how we come to stand before God.
This is how the beatitude, this sermon of Jesus is shaping us up to be.
That we come before the Lord, not with all of these lavish gifts to offer, but simply
with an empty bag.
We come to the throne of God, not with the evidence of our own righteousness, but rather
with empty hands and a prayer for mercy.
When Jesus says that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied,
He’s talking about those who do not have righteousness.
When you have food and you have drink, you are not hungry.
But for those of us who recognize that this is the thing that we need most of all, the
Lord’s righteousness, and that we don’t have it, that we’ve broken the
commandments, that we’ve offended God in every way, and who long for that
righteousness. Jesus says to those, Jesus says to you, you will be satisfied. So we
come to the Lord, not because we’ve got it all together,
not because we’ve managed our own life in such a way that we have some
impressive resume to post on the gate to heaven, no. We come before the Lord poor
in spirit, mourning our sin, meek, hungering and thirsting for his
righteousness and Jesus says yours is the kingdom of heaven. My comfort is on
the way. Satisfaction is on the way. Inheriting the earth is on the way. You
belong to me, he says. There’s one last beatitude here, the very last one, and I
think that this is, this is when you’re sitting with Jesus on the bench and
you’ve been, you’ve kind of looked at everyone and you said, blessed, not
blessed. And then, and then you point to yourself, well Jesus what do you
about me? I’m, how does it say here, reviled, evil is uttered against me, I’m
suffering in this life, dragged down by my own sinful flesh in the world that’s
oppressing me. I’m really not that impressive at all. And Jesus says to you
that you are blessed. Rejoice, he says. Be glad. Your reward is great in heaven.
This is, if you can imagine it, the Lord’s evaluation of us. He looks at us and
smiles, not because we deserve it, but because he has suffered for all of our
sins. He’s died for us. He’s covered us with his blood. He’s absorbed us and so
he delights in us and Jesus has called you blessed for all those who hunger and
thirst for righteousness he set a table for you of his own body and blood so
that you might be satisfied so God be praised that the Lord is pleased with
you and he delights to have you at his table may God grant us this faith this
love and this hope in the name of Jesus. Amen. The peace of God which passes all
understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
