The Beatitudes Revisited: Always More To See

Matthew 5:1-3
Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them.
He said:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
    for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Luke 6:17-20 (abridged)
[Jesus] went down... and stood on a level place. A large crowd of his disciples was there and a great number of people from all over... who had come to hear him...
Looking at his disciples, he said:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
    for yours is the kingdom of God.

So begin the two accounts of Jesus' Sermon On The Mount. And anyone who reads them side by side carefully will notice something that has occupied commentators for centuries: they're not the same. Not the same at all. Similar? Very much so. Different? Very much so.

There are three basic solutions to these textual discrepancies. I'd like to dispose of the first two quickly.

1. The Unbeliever's Response: It's all fiction anyway.

Nope. Not gonna fight that battle here. People don't usually come to Jesus through fact-finding missions or scholarly debate, but rather because they cannot resist him or his words. I assume here that we already love Jesus and/or want to understand his words. Moving on.

2. The Inerrantist's Response: There are no discrepancies.

This solution insists that either (1) Matthew and Luke recorded two different sermons, or (2) the sermons were in perfect accord when Matthew and Luke wrote them down, but over the centuries diverged due to transcription errors. Yeah. Someone else can fight that battle. Abandoning hills nobody should have died on in the first place is one of my favorite activities these days.

3. My Response: We might have a problem here...

It never bothered me that the sermons weren't quite the same. As has been pointed out by all rational observers, if you ever find two 50-page historical accounts written by two different people about the same topic, you're not looking at history. You're looking at either plagiarism or a conspiracy.

I'm glad that Luke and Matthew are not in verbatim agreement. They're reconstructing (imperfectly) a real sermon that Jesus really did preach several decades earlier — and not inventing a new one.

No, my problem begins with the fact that the sermons were different.

Here too, if both meanings were easy... that wouldn't be a problem.

"Those who love God will care for the poor."
"Those who love God will be kind to their enemies."

These two statements differ in both word and intent... but since neither statement is controversial, it's less vital to determine which one really came from the sermon as quoted.

But Matthew and Luke give us no such luxury. For Luke, it's the poor who are blessed. For Matthew, it's the poor in spirit who are blessed.

Those are two entirely different kettles of fish, and neither claim is the sort of truism we can pass over with the wave of a hand. Why?

Because the blessing promised is heaven itself.

Ahhh... Therein lies the problem.

Christians get their underwear bunched up in a very big wad on that "Who gets into heaven?" question. To be sure, it is indeed a very important question, though I would never phrase it that way.

So now, depending upon what baggage we bring to the table, we might have an awful lot riding on which version of the beatitudes is right.

Luckily for me, and for the length of this blog, I don't. Why?

Because today I discovered something new about these beatitudes that I had not noticed before. This gem comes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost Of Discipleship but no doubt has been discussed elsewhere for centuries. For me, however, it's new stuff.

The obvious part I had not notice for three or four decades is this: Jesus didn't preach the beatitudes to just anyone, but rather to his disciples. Go see for yourself! Reread the above passages carefully!

To be sure, there is a crowd nearby. But Jesus speaks the beatitudes to a much more limited audience. His disciples. And it's a truism that all of Jesus' disciples are saved.

If Jesus addressed the beatitudes specifically to his disciples...

The beatitudes are promises given to followers of Christ.

That unwinds not a few complications for me!

A true disciple of Christ can expect to experience poverty. That same disciple can also expect to experience poverty of spirit. Jesus assured his disciples that they'd endure hardships.

But neither flavor of poverty is the true source of the blessing. Nor mourning. Nor hunger. Or thirst, figuratively or otherwise.

The blessing comes to them because they belong to Jesus.

I wanted to end this blog with the above sentence, but Luke throws us a twist that demands further reflection. The woes.

Luke 6:24-26
“But woe to you who are rich,
    for you have already received your comfort.
Woe to you who are well fed now,
    for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
    for you will mourn and weep.
Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,
    for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.

Someone playing the devil's advocate (a game I play all the time) might point out that these woes hardly make sense if also preached to the disciples directly. How does one square that problem away? That's a perfectly fair question, but notice the next verse.

Luke 6:27
“But to you who are listening I say...

Verse 27 indicates that Jesus is no longer addressing solely his disciples. He's now addressing the entire surrounding crowd, and it only makes sense that he's been addressing them ever since he began to speak about woes. It makes no sense at all for Jesus to preach damning woes to his own select disciples.

So Luke's careful wording ushers us out cleanly of that conundrum.

Thank you, Matthew, Luke, and Dietrich. I'm much obliged.