The good life
Matthew 5
I've written before about how I appreciate and enjoy the First Nations Version. I particularly appreciate that it gives very vivid expression to the Biblical text, and can bring out aspects that have grown stale in more traditional translation traditions.
And today I want to revisit the Beatitudes, so let's have a look at this text. Before you read over the translation, it's helpful to know that the FNV regularly uses 'good road' to talk about the Kingdom. Parts in italics are imaginative implied statements;
Gift From Creator Tells the Good Story (Matthew 5:1-13)
1 When Creator Sets Free (Jesus) saw this great crowd, he went back up into the mountainside and sat down to teach the people. His followers came to him there, 2 so he took a deep breath, opened his mouth, and began to share his wisdom with them and teach them how to see Creator’s good road.
BLESSINGS OF THE GOOD ROAD
3 “Creator’s blessing rests on the poor, the ones with broken spirits. The good road from above is theirs to walk.
4 “Creator’s blessing rests on the ones who walk a trail of tears, for he will wipe the tears from their eyes and comfort them.
5 “Creator’s blessing rests on the ones who walk softly and in a humble manner. The earth, land, and sky will welcome them and always be their home.
6 “Creator’s blessing rests on the ones who hunger and thirst for wrongs to be made right again. They will eat and drink until they are full.
7 “Creator’s blessing rests on the ones who are merciful and kind to others. Their kindness will find its way back to them—full circle.
8 “Creator’s blessing rests on the pure of heart. They are the ones who will see the Great Spirit.
9 “Creator’s blessing rests on the ones who make peace. It will be said of them, ‘They are the children of the Great Spirit!’
10 “Creator’s blessing rests on the ones who are hunted down and mistreated for doing what is right, for they are walking the good road from above.
11 “Others will lie about you, speak against you, and look down on you with scorn and contempt, all because you walk the road with me. This is a sign that Creator’s blessing is resting on you. 12 So let your hearts be glad and jump for joy, for you will be honored in the spirit-world above. You are like the prophets of old, who were treated in the same way by your ancestors.
What are the beatitudes doing? What's their function? Why does Jesus' discourse open with them?
Firstly, Jesus is tapping into wisdom traditions to open up his discourse. One way we can see this is to consider how Matthew 5 connects to Psalm 1. The first psalm provides a description of the ‘blessed’ person as someone whose way of life is ultimately grounded in Torah (1:3) and lives that out, a blueprint for the same theme through the whole Psalter. In opening this way, Jesus connects his teaching to the question of ‘what is the good human life?’
That’s really what ‘blessed’ is getting at here. There are two sets of words, in Greek and Hebrew, that usually get translated as ‘blessed’. In Greek they are makarios vs. eulogētos and related terms.1 The eulogētos set has more to do with the idea of “God pronouncing his favour upon this person or thing or act”, which is often how we default to hearing the beatitudes, “Oh, God looks with especial favour on these type of people, and sets a seal of approval on them and rewards them”. But the makarios language is different in tone. Its other translation-glosses include happy, fortunate, lucky, prosperous, rich. It depicts “the good life”, or a picture of human flourishing.
One way we can get at this is by comparison. In my Greek classes our introductory textbook gives us some adapted Herodotus very late in the second volume, where we read about King Croesus of Lydia, including his interactions with Solon. Solon is one of those Greek philosophers that makes you understand why people want to kill them. Croesus asks Solon who the most makarios person he’s ever seen is, thinking that it will be himself (because he’s just shown him all his fabulous wealth). Solon replies immediately with his first place, and then when pressed gives his second place answer as well, and the stories of both are very on-trend for Solon.
You see, Solon considers that you can’t judge anyone makarios before they die, because you don’t know how Fortune might intervene in their life. So first off, being dead is a pre-requisite. Then, the people he describes are (were), young, fit, healthy, honoured the gods, served their polis, did some great deeds, and died young. Because actually Solon thinks you’re better off dead anyway(!) Solon’s view of ‘the good life’ is just so: have children, honour the gods, don’t see too much suffering, serve your polis, and die for the common good. Jesus’ answer on “what does a life of human flourishing look like?” is the Sermon on the Mount.2
But there’s a larger question here, and it’s the question of how the Sermon on the Mount fits into Matthew’s Gospel as a whole, and the New Testament. I think a way to frame this question, and the problem, is this: Matthew seems to most (protestant) readers to be a very ‘worksy’ book. Where’s the “gospel” i.e. ‘believe in Jesus to be saved’? Why doesn’t Matthew tell you that? There’s an old (by the internet’s standards!) blog post by the always-worth-listening-to Fred Sanders that discusses this briefly. He sums up Matthew’s language as this:
God fulfilled his promises to Israel by rescuing believers from the broken covenant, saving both Jew and Gentile from our sins by being God with us in Jesus, whose death was the blood of the covenant poured out for the forgiveness of sins.
It’s true that Matthew lacks the explicit language of Paul, or even of John. I wonder, however, if James doesn’t give us the right way to bring all these elements into the right tension. James as a letter seems to rely directly upon, if not quote, the Sermon on the Mount at a number of points (James 5:11, 5:12 for example), but also to operate in a similar framework. I want to focus in on James 2:14-25 though.
In this passage again many protestants feel a tension with how they’ve been taught a very Pauline presentation. I do not think Paul and James are in opposition, precisely because I don’t think Paul and James (i) use the same terms in the same way, (ii) are actually discussing the same issues. For that reason 2:24 is not a rebuttal of Paul’s Ephesians 2:8-9 and Romans 3:28.
What James is critiquing may be a pseudo-Pauline view, or an offshoot of Paul’s message, and that is an idea that faith is an alternative to works, or that certain ‘types’ of faith are salvific. Primarily the idea that one can have a doctrinal faith (James 2:19 puts paid to that idea) or faith that doesn’t involve obedience (2:18). James knows no such gospel. 2:17 and 22 make the case that saving faith organically results in obedience so that where there is no obedience, there can be no saving faith.
This, I think, is the logical key to understanding the relationship of faith and works. It’s modus tollens:
If A, then B. Not B, therefore not A.
If saving faith, then there will be works. If there are no works, then there is no saving faith.
So, let’s go back to the Sermon on the Mount then. The Sermon on the surface of it ‘raises the bar’ for discipleship and obedience and works to an incredibly high level. But this is simply consistent with Matthew’s gospel as a whole. Matthew’s gospel is teaching you how to be a disciple of Jesus, and that is an extremely demanding call. He does not speak the language of Paul or John or contemporary Protestantism. For Matthew, repentance and discipleship of the crucified messiah is exhibited by a life of obedience to Jesus’ messianic exposition of Torah.
And that’s what the Sermon on the Mount is. It’s not “entry requirements” despite what Matthew 5:20 sounds like. It’s a depiction of the flourishing life of Torah obedience for Messiah Jesus followers. Which is why the clearest picture of a person who fits that profile is Jesus himself. Do you want to see what it looks like to be poor with a broken spirit, walk a trail of tears, walk softly in a humble manner, hunger and thirst for wrongs to be made right again, merciful, pure in heart, a maker of peace, and hunted down for doing what is right? That’s the Jesus of Matthew’s Gospel.
Which, again, is an interpretive clue to how to fit the whole picture together. It is our failure to be such people that characterises our sin. It’s his death on the cross that redeems people like us. It’s his resurrection from the dead that initiates a new way of being. It’s the coming of the Spirit that initiates us into such a new way of being, that makes such virtues grow in his disciples.
My last point, today anyway, is to ask this question: what would it look like to live in a community of ‘thick’ relational connections that fostered such virtues? On the one hand, I think local churches are supposed to be just such a form of redemptive communities; on the other, so often they are not. I am confident that if you did some surveys of perceptions of Christians and churches, “humble, meek, compassionate, peace-loving, merciful, justice-oriented, simplicity-practicing” wouldn’t come out as chart-toppers. Not to say that some churches and some Christians aren’t like this, but the failure of so-called disciples to exhibit such fruit of the Spirit, such virtues as the organic result of their obedience, is an indictment. It suggests “not B”, which logically implies “not A”.
What’s coming up next:
Instead of going on to tackle the rest of the Sermon of the Mount again (which I may do, but I’m conscious I wrote a whole series about it about 2.5 years’ ago), I think I’m going to take some time to stop and meditate on the beatitudes one by one. Also, I have some book reviews lined up for the next few weeks!
μακάριος, εὐλογητός. One of the difficulties is that there’s no really good way to translate μακάριος in English without being caught in a translation dilemma. ‘Blessed’ is misleading, but ‘happy’ is too weak, but ‘fortunate’ is too luck orientated, and ‘experiencing human flourishing’ is too weird.
This is why I do think that Pennington’s description of the Sermon as a ‘Christocentric, flourishing-oriented, kingdom-awaiting, eschatological wisdom exhortation’, answering the question of ‘how can we experience true human flourishing?’ is a pretty good overall summation