The world has some clear ideas about what blessing looks like and what it means to live the good life, but Jesus offers us a very different picture.  As I said a couple weeks ago, the key thing we need to understand about the Beatitudes is that they aren’t commands and they aren’t promises, they’re descriptions.  The Sermon on the Mount is not a collection of laws, and these are not a list of things to do.  Rather, they give us a picture of the blessed life, which is in stark contrast to this world’s expectations and desires.  As Jesus says elsewhere, those who strive to save their lives will lose them, while those who lay down their lives for his sake and the sake of the gospel will find them.

Now, that doesn’t just mean those who die for Christ.  That’s certainly part of his meaning, but only part.  The broader sense is what we might call a divine self-forgetful­ness, letting go of our lives in the day-to-day to follow Jesus.  It means releasing control over our lives and living life with open hands—not clenching hard to our prerogatives, our rights, our desires, our position, but letting go and trusting that if we follow Jesus, he will provide for us and we will be satisfied in him.  Indeed, it means letting go because we understand that what he has for us is better than anything we can provide for ourselves, even if it doesn’t seem that way to the world around us.

This is what it means to be poor in spirit; and I think we can call this the blessing that opens up the rest of the Lord’s blessings, because it enables us to see blessing where the world doesn’t.  To the world, the statement “Blessed are those who mourn” is an immediate turnoff—and in our society more than most.  As we’ve noted before, we live in a death-denying culture; we sequester the sick, the infirm and the dying away from the rest of our society, and we spend billions every year to make ourselves look younger than we are.  We don’t want to face the pain of the world, and so as much as possible, we don’t.

It’s understandable that we don’t like suffering; it’s understandable that we don’t like grieving.  It’s particularly understandable that we don’t like facing up to our own sin, and the damage that we do.  But our efforts to avoid all that, just to make the pain and anxiety go away as quickly as possible, don’t do us any favors.  We try denial, refusing to admit there’s a problem or telling ourselves (and others) that we’ve gotten over our grief; we try problem-solving, looking for an expert who will make everything all better.  Too often, we end up with no way to handle pain and grief except to try to get rid of them.

This way of thinking creeps into our faith.  We see friends and family sick, or in pain, or struggling with some issue, and we define that as a problem and ask God to fix it.  Certainly, I believe in asking God for physical healing, and I’ve seen him do some amazing things; but if our horizon for prayer goes no further than that, we have an issue.  When God doesn’tremove the problem, we think he hasn’t answered our prayers, because we can’t imagine that he might have anything better in mind; we may wonder if he’s heard us, and start to question his love, or perhaps his power.  Pain is a problem, grief is a problem, and if God really loved us, he’d make them go away.

What we fail to see is that as long as we stand in this broken, sin-haunted world, God is not interested in keeping us from pain, or helping us avoid mourning.  God wants us to learn to mourn.  “The heart of the wise”—the wise being the one who is attentive to God, who knows his ways and follows him—“is in the house of mourning.”  Why?  Be­cause our world is an obstinate disaster and an incubator of nightmares.  Because we have each done great evil, and suffered great evil, and that matters.  Because the pain we have suffered is real, and so is the pain we have caused, and both are significant.  Because our sin was the many-headed lash that ripped open Jesus’ back, and the nails through his wrists.  Jesus died, quite literally, of a broken heart, and his heart was broken by our sin; and it is well that our hearts should be broken by what breaks the heart of God.

This is not to say that we should go around miserable all the time, or that it’s somehow wrong to laugh and enjoy ourselves; there is much good and beauty and pure pleasure in this world, and God made those things, and we honor him by delighting in them.  It is to say that we need to face our own sin, and the pain we cause ourselves and others, honestly, with our defenses down; we need to let it grieve us, and let God teach us to mourn the ill that we do.  It means that we need to face the hurt that has been done to us, and the losses we have suffered, with equal honesty, and let ourselves weep.  And it means that we cannot harden our hearts against the pain of the world, but let them break.

But note this:  that isn’t the end of the story.  Jesus doesn’t say, “Blessed are those who mourn because mourning is good for them”; he says, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”  Two key things here.  First, only those who mourn are com­forted; to deny or avoid mourning is to foreclose the possibility of comfort.  That’s just how it works.  God’s healing and peace come only as we move through our pain, not by any other road.  God doesn’t do shortcuts.

Second, his comfort doesn’t just make our mourning bearable; Jesus doesn’t say, “Those who mourn will be OK, for they will be comforted.”  No, he says, “Blessed are those who mourn.”  Out of our mourning, in the midst of our grief, God will comfort us, and his comfort will be so great that it will make even our mourning a blessing, to us and to others.  Stop and think about that:  you can be so powerfully comforted in your suffering that the pain and loss are worth bearing for the sake of the comfort God gives.

This is most true when we mourn for our own sin; for then the comfort we receive is the assurance of God’s grace and his faithfulness to forgive us, and the promise that he is at work by his Holy Spirit to purify our hearts and make us holy.  Indeed, it’s when we’re truly and deeply grieved by our sin that we’re most open to the Spirit’s work.  To face our own sin honestly and weep for the wrong we have done, and the wrong we desire to do, opens us up for the greatest work of healing and comfort possible in our lives:  the healing of our sinful, divided hearts by the love and grace of God in Christ Jesus.

Billy Collins is one of the preeminent American poets of our time, a distinction reflected in the fact that he was chosen in 2001 as the U.S. Poet Laureate.  He’s also a professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, since poets these days can’t make a living writing poetry, but only by teaching others to do the same.  Some years ago, his experience in the classroom moved him to write this lyric, which he called “Introduction to Poetry”:

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

Now, you might wonder where I’m going with this; but I intend to focus this year on the teaching of Jesus, beginning this morning with a series on the Sermon on the Mount, and as we embark on this voyage of discovery, Billy Collins has something to tell us.  Granted, the Sermon on the Mount is not poetry, but we need to approach it in something of the same way, because it’s what I would call “poetic theology.”

I’m not the only one to come up with this term—Fuller Seminary professor William Dyrness has used it as the title of one of his books—but I’m going in a bit of a different direction with it than he did.  My point here is about the nature of the text.  Poetry stands in opposition to prose, which is ordinary text, and most theology is quite prosaic indeed.  Consider Paul in the book of Romans, for instance:  he appreciates poetry, but he clearly teaches in prose.  He sets out propositions, he builds up his arguments, he lays out his evidence, and he works through them logically to a conclusion.  His arguments may be complicated, and his reasoning and his use of evidence, founded as they are in a very Jewish way of thinking, may be strange to our modern Western scientific mindset, but it’s all still logical argumentation in the classic sense, building a chain of reasoning from the beginning to the conclusion.  Paul is a prosaic theologian.

Jesus doesn’t do that.  He could have, but he doesn’t.  Instead, he teaches in images and stories, in metaphors and appeals to experience.  Where Paul and others engage in the classic battle of arguments—head to head, strength against strength, and may the best premise win—Jesus turns our own strength against us.  His teaching is intuitive and evocative, slipping around our rational defenses.  Like Paul, he goes after the false assumptions that produce our false beliefs about God, the world, and ourselves, in order to replace them with truth; but where Paul attacks them head-on with logical argument, Jesus subverts them, calling our hearts to witness against us.

This means that we can’t break down the Sermon on the Mount the same way we would one of Paul’s letters, into a series of arguments and commands; to use Billy Collins’ language, we can’t tie it to a chair and beat it with a hose to find out “what it really means.”  If we try that, we end up reducing it to law.  That’s a sad thing, and yet many, many people go on and do it anyway.  For one thing, we’re accustomed to living by law, and so turning these chapters into a series of laws feels normal to us.  For another, it’s efficient; it gives us the feeling that we now understand what it really means, and we can go on to the next thing.  It’s the fast way to study—and to preach through—this text.

But it isn’t the faithful way.  The faithful way is the slow way—to walk inside its room and feel the walls for a light switch, to drop in our questions like mice and watch them find their way out, to live within it for a while, and come to know it from the inside.  It’s to let Jesus set the agenda, and listen carefully; and so that’s what we’re going to do this year, first in the Sermon on the Mount, and then through some of the parables.

Part of listening carefully to the Sermon on the Mount is paying attention to the structure.  It doesn’t flow the way we’re used to from sermons in our own culture, so it might seem like a disjointed jumble of topics, but it’s actually structured quite carefully, in a very Hebrew way.  You might remember last month I talked about the “sandwiches” in Mark; what we have in the Sermon on the Mount is a large-scale version of the same thing.  It’s a type of parallelism which has been given several names, but the one I like best comes from Dr. Kenneth Bailey, who calls it “ring composition.”

We see this kind of thing all over the gospels.  The way it works is in a long text, the first and last sections parallel each other, then the second and the next-to-last, and so on, all the way to the middle.  The emphasis falls on the middle section, as I told you with Mark, but also on the beginning and the end.  What’s at the center of the Sermon on the Mount?  The Lord’s Prayer.  At the end, we have the parable of the wise and foolish builders; here at the beginning, we have the Beatitudes.  As we read the rest of the sermon, we need to see it in the context of the Beatitudes, in the light of the Lord’s Prayer, with the final parable to put the exclamation point on the whole thing.

Since that final parable uses the image of a foundation, of the foundation of a house, to make its point, we might think of the Beatitudes in those terms, as the foundation for the whole Sermon on the Mount—we can only understand anything Jesus says the rest of the way if we understand that he’s building on what he says in these first ten verses.  I know v. 11 begins with “Blessed,” but I think that’s a transition into the next section of the sermon.  For one thing, look at the first and eighth Beatitudes, verses 3 and 10.  They both talk about the kingdom of heaven, which is Matthew’s term for the kingdom of God.  This is another, very simple, form of parallelism, what scholars call an inclusio; think of it like a picture frame.  The Beatitudes are framed by these references to the kingdom of heaven; that tells us that they—and by extension the rest of the sermon—are about the life of the kingdom of heaven, and we need to understand them in that way.

So, all this being said, what does it mean for us as we read the Beatitudes?  For a detailed answer, we’ll need to look at each one in turn, which we’ll do over the next eight weeks; but there’s one thing to say right now which will shape everything else.  The word “blessed” here is not the word that means to pray for a blessing for somebody.  It’s a word which refers to a blessing that is already present.

In other words, do not read these as promises (or bribes):  they don’t say, “If you can just be poor in spirit (whatever that means), you’ll be rewarded with the kingdom of heaven.”  Do not read them as commands (or threats):  they don’t say, “If you don’t go out and get persecuted somehow, you’re going to Hell.”  These are descriptions.  They tell us, and the world, “You’re looking for blessing—you’re looking for happiness—if you want to know what a blessed person looks like, look here.  It’s not who you think.”

Blessing doesn’t come by pursuing it, but only as we pursue other things, because—and here’s the key—it doesn’t come by our own efforts and our own work.  The blessed person is the wholehearted follower of Christ, and we don’t make ourselves that person by our own strength.  This is the work of the Holy Spirit, by the grace of God.  That’s why this isn’t law:  because it’s all grace.  It isn’t earned, it’s a gift.  Let’s pray.

A   5:1-10                    The way of the disciple:  already blessed

      B   5:11-16                  The way of the disciple:  marks of a true disciple

            C   5:17-20                  Thesis:  Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets

                  D   5:21-37                  The true application of the law (correcting misuse)

                        E    5:38-48                  Trust in God (contrast with Gentiles)

                              F    6:1-6                      Reward:  earth vs. heaven

                                    G   6:7-8                      On prayer:  trust

                                          H   6:9-13                    Lord’s Prayer

                                    G`  6:14-15                  On prayer:  forgiveness

                              F`   6:16-24                  Reward:  earth vs. heaven

                        E`  6:25-34                  Trust in God (contrast with Gentiles)

                  D`  7:1-6                      The true application of the law (correcting misuse)

                                    G“ 7:7-11                    On prayer:  trust

            C`  7:12                       Thesis:  Jesus summarizes the Law and the Prophets

      B`  7:13-23                  Two ways:  marks of a false disciple

A`  7:24-29                  Two ways:  already blessed/already cursed

E:  God’s character:  justice, longsuffering, ḥesed, including his provision for the world

E:` God’s character:  his care for us, illustrated by his provision for the world