(Exodus 34:4-6; Matthew 5:7, Colossians 3:12-14)

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”  Does that mean that those who are not merciful won’t receive mercy?  You can certainly find support for that idea in the Bible—in the very next chapter, in fact, where Jesus says, “If you don’t forgive others, your heavenly Father won’t forgive you.”  Mercy and forgiveness aren’t the same thing, but they’re closely related; is Jesus saying that we have to earn mercy?

Clearly, that isn’t the point.  For one thing, remember what we’ve been saying:  these are descriptions, not commands, and we need to be careful not to read them as commands.  For another, remember the context here—remember the first beatitude, which sets the stage for the rest of them:  “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” blessed are those who know they have no riches of themselves, that everything they have is of God and from God.  These aren’t descriptions of things we’re able to achieve, but of the character that God is forming in us by his Holy Spirit.  And third—mercy, by definition, can’t be earned.  We cannot read this as law.

To understand this, first note that, like last week, Jesus does not say, “Blessed are those who perform certain actions.”  It isn’t “Blessed are those who show mercy,” it’s “Blessed are the merciful.”  You might think that’s a small difference, but it isn’t; it’s the difference between outward action and heart attitude—between law and grace, really.  If the blessing is on those who do specific things, then the blessing is contingent—you’re only blessed as long as you keep it up.  If once you fail to show mercy, you lose the mercy of God, at least until you correct your error; and then too, of course, you get into all the arguments about how much you have to do for it to count as mercy, and whether or not this or that act qualifies.  That sort of hair-splitting is of the Pharisees, not the gospel; and the blessings of God are not contingent, they are absolute.

This is important .  God makes it clear all through Scripture that his blessings are conditional—they are for those who seek him, who obey him, who are faithful to him, and he will not bless those who rebel against him—but they are not contingent on us, they are not dependent on chance.  His blessings are absolute and certain; God pronounces what he has already done.

We should also note this nuance:  our English translations don’t say, “they will be shown mercy,” but “they will receive mercy.”  That’s a translator’s choice, either is possible from the Greek, but I think it’s a wise one.  Just because you show someone mercy does not guarantee they will receive it; often people don’t, out of pride, or fear, or mistrust.  Or, worst of all, out of their hardness of heart and lack of mercy for others.  If you’re familiar with the story of Les Misérables, think of the suicide of Inspector Javert:  to accept the mercy shown him by Jean Valjean would be to accept and confess that his entire life to that point had been wrong.  He would have to repudiate the person he had been—to die to self in Christ, as it were—and he couldn’t do it.  He found it preferable to reject the mercy that had spared his life, and simply to die.  When we harden our hearts against mercy for others, we harden our hearts against mercy for ourselves, too.

The point here, as in all the Beatitudes, is:  “Blessed are those whose hearts are being changed by the power of God.”  I like the way the great British preacher D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it:  “Our Lord is really saying that . . . the one condition of forgiveness is repentance.  Repentance means . . . that I realize that I have no claim upon God at all, and that it is only His grace and mercy that forgive.  And it follows as the night the day that the man who truly realizes his position face to face with God, and his relationship to God, is the man who must of necessity be merciful . . . to others.”

If we truly understand our need for Jesus and his grace, if we see ourselves in the light of his goodness and holiness and if we hunger and thirst for his righteousness, won’t that change how we see everyone around us?  As Dr. Lloyd-Jones says, “Have you not felt sorry for people who show from the expression on their faces the bitterness and the anger they feel?  They are to be pitied.  Look at the things about which they get angry, showing that their whole central spirit is wrong; so unlike Christ, so unlike God who has forgiven them everything.  We should feel a great sorrow for them, we should be praying to God for them and asking Him to have mercy upon them.”  That’s not a com­mand, it’s an observation:  the more we understand that we owe everything to God’s mercy, the more this will be our heart toward others, and the more we’ll see others in this way.

As well, the more we grow poor in spirit and the more we hunger and thirst for the righteousness of God, the more we come to understand that our real treasure is something no earthly person or power can take away from us—yes, this points forward to a later section of the Sermon on the Mount—and the less we see other people as threats to us.  The more we realize how blessed we are in Christ, the easier it is to be merciful.

Blessed are the merciful, not because being merciful is a precondition to receiving God’s mercy, but because the merciful are those who have already received God’s mercy, and are being changed by it.  Blessed are those who show the mercy they have been shown, who live out the mercy in which they live, in the confidence that they won’t lose out by being merciful to others, because the mercy of Christ pays for all.

(Isaiah 55:1-3; Matthew 5:6, Colossians 3:1-4)

We have a problem with this Beatitude:  there might not be anyone in this room who understands the kind of hunger and thirst Jesus was talking about.  We have super­markets and water mains, restaurants and drinking fountains—in the course of normal life, we have food and drink everywhere around us.  We may be the first society in world history in which the great nutritional problem for the poor is obesity.  When pundits talk about “food deserts” in this country, they don’t mean places where you can’t get food, they mean places where you can’t get fresh vegetables; the problem is too many calories, not too few.  And as for thirst—well, I’ve read about what it’s like to suffer extreme thirst, but I’ve never come anywhere close.  Lack of water just isn’t a daily concern.

That was not so for those gathered around Jesus.  Theirs was a dry land, especially in the hot summer, and travel was far harder and more dangerous than it is in our day.  They knew the sort of story Kenneth Bailey tells of a trip into the Sahara in which it was 110° in the shade and there wasn’t any shade, and then one of their goatskin waterbags leaked.  As he says, “my mouth became completely dry, and eating was impossible because swallowing felt like rubbing two pieces of sandpaper together.  My vision became blurred and the struggle to keep moving became harder with every step.”  The only thing that kept him and his companions moving forward was the desperate desire to reach the well that lay at the end of the journey; its water was their only hope of life.

What would it mean to desire righteousness as our only hope of life?  What would that look like?  Let’s be clear, this isn’t about earning our salvation, and it isn’t about having a certain lifestyle; Jesus doesn’t say, “Blessed are those who live righteously.”  This is not a blessing on those who think they have everything together, it’s on those who know they don’t; the all-surpassing desire for righteousness is the point.

So, again, what does that mean?  Well, the first thing to understand is that the Hebrew word for righteousness, tsedaqa, doesn’t refer to some sort of abstract ethical standard that we just have to measure up to, which I think is how we tend to think of righteousness.  Rather, it’s a relationship word.  Every relationship we’re in—dating, marriage, parent-child (from either end), friendship, work—makes certain claims on us, because the other person in that relationship has the right to expect certain things from us.  When we honor those claims and answer those rightful expectations, when the relationship is right, then you might say we are righteous in that relationship.

You can see that isn’t just a matter of law and duty.  Is it my duty to go home to my wife in the evening, or to tuck my kids into bed at night?  In a sense, yes, but that’s not why I do it; I do it because I love them, as an expression of love.  If I came home grumbling about being ordered around and having better things to do with my time, if I put the kids to bed in an angry and resentful spirit, that wouldn’t be to the point at all.  And so it is with righteousness before the Lord.

Of course, we understand that our righteousness is not from us; rather, God has declared us righteous in Christ Jesus and given us his righteousness by the work of his Holy Spirit.  He has acted in righteousness as the Mighty One who saves to give us a status that we could not earn on our own; he has established us and claimed us as his people whom he will pronounce righteous in the final judgment.

Which means, if every relationship makes claims on us, that his infinitely great gift of acceptance in his presence rightly deserves our unending gratitude and love; and if we live in love for God and gratitude to him, that will have a powerful effect on our behavior.  We will do what pleases him, not because we think we have to or because we want to get something, but because we want to please him.  I don’t go home because I want to manipulate my wife and kids, I do it because I love them and want to be with them.  Our righteous behavior is our grateful response to God’s righteousness in us.

At this point, the Greek gives us a blessing.  In Hebrew, righteousness and justice are two different words.  We’ve talked before about the Hebrew word for justice, mishpat; Paul Hanson, an Old Testament scholar at Harvard, has defined it as “the order of compassionate justice that God has created and upon which the wholeness of the universe depends.”  Actions in keeping with mishpat are those which advance the restoration of the original created order of the universe, when “everything was right, just, whole, in accordance with God’s perfect will.”  The Greek brings these together, with one word for both righteousness and justice:  dikaiosune.  The one who is righteous in the Lord, the one who lives to please him, is the one who does justice for others.

Note that:  it is to do justice for others, not to demand justice from others.  We have been shown incalculable mercy and infinite grace, by the righteousness of God; this is the model for how we should treat others.  This isn’t about demanding what we think we deserve, but about setting that aside to serve others.  It is, however, about standing up to do justice to those who are suffering injustice, and to show the mercy of God to those who are broken, suffering, or in need.  You may not have thought of the ministry of our deacons as a ministry of righteousness, but it is.

So what does it mean to hunger and thirst for righteousness?  Do I always passionately desire to please God?  No, I don’t.  But I want to get there.  I want, first of all, to be filled with wonder at God’s mighty act of salvation in my life, to be grateful to him as I should be and to be moved by that gratitude.  I want to love him more than anyone else, and to desire to please him above all others.  I want to live a life that pleases him, because I see the beauty in that.  I want to be free of my own unrighteousnesses, of the ugly places in my heart; I want to be pure and clear and undivided in his service, not struggling against myself, my own worst enemy.

And as part of this, I want to see God’s righteousness in others; I want to see justice done, the poor and oppressed lifted up, the sick and wounded healed, and those who are lost in the darkness brought into the light.  I want to see the redeeming work of God; I want to see him making all things new—and I want to be a part of that.

Can I honestly say I hunger and thirst for righteousness?  Some days; some days I’d rather have a burger and a Coke.  But I want the hunger and thirst, if you know what I mean.  And I have experienced enough of it that I’ve come to understand something very important:  “they shall be filled,” “they shall be satisfied,” does not mean “they will cease to hunger and thirst.”  Rather, it means that our hunger and thirst will only grow.

That might sound like an addiction, but the thing about addictions is they give you increasing cravings for diminishing pleasure; that’s because they lead only to death.  In God is only life, and so the more we hunger and thirst for his righteousness, the greater the joy and delight we find in his righteousness, and in his presence, and therefore the more we hunger and thirst.  Psalm 37, which we read last week, says, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart”—because the more you delight yourself in the Lord, the more that becomes the desire of your heart.  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, not because the time will come when they will achieve righteousness and won’t need to desire it anymore; rather, blessed are they, for the hunger and thirst are themselves the blessing.  The blessing is the thirst.

(Psalm 37:1-11; Matthew 5:5)

Meek.  What sort of word is that, anyway?  Sounds like a mouse:  “meek, meek, meek.”  Kind of looks like one, too, as Andrea Skowronski pointed out to me the other day.  Rhymes with “weak.”  I go looking for definitions, I find things like “overly submissive or compliant,” “spineless or spiritless,” “deficient in spirit and courage,” “easily imposed on,” “tame,” “lacking in self-assertion,” and “docile under provocation from others.”  So . . . blessed are the wimps?  Blessed are the doormats?

In a word, no.  Meekness is not weakness, and it has nothing to do with being “deficient in spirit [or] courage”; though it does have to do with being poor in spirit.  We might say that if we are poor in spirit toward God—if we find all our riches in Christ, if we let go our self-protectiveness and self-defensiveness and just follow him, trusting that he will take care of us—then we will be meek toward those around us.  Meekness is expressed in how we exercise our strength, to what purpose we use our courage, and which Spirit is guiding us as we do so.  The meek are not those who are never angry, because anger has its proper place as a response to injustice; rather, the meek are those who don’t let anger drive them to sin.

There are two aspects to this.  First, meekness is strength harnessed to the will of God, serving his purposes rather than our own desires.  It doesn’t mean we don’t get angry when we see injustice done—even when that injustice is done to us; this is not about making ourselves victims—but it means that we submit ourselves in humble obedience to the authority of God.  We give up our claim to pronounce our own judgment, and we renounce any right to demand—or inflict—pun­ishment on others, but we do not simply accept injustice.  Rather, we let God’s justice judge our sense of justice; we let him be the one to decide if we’ve been done wrong, and we leave the doing of justice in his hands.

Thinking about our strength harnessed to God’s will, Andrea gave me a good image this week for this.  I’ll admit, I don’t know much about horses; we see a lot more sheep imagery in the Bible than horse imagery because sheep were a lot more com­mon, so you don’t get this in seminary.  In dressage, which is a form of equestrian competition, there’s a movement called piaffe—basically trotting in place.  As Andrea explained it to me, “It’s very physically demanding because horses are built to move forward.  In this movement, the horse pushes off almost straight up with two diagonal legs (for example: left hind and right fore).  Ideally, he actually hovers in the air for a moment before landing and pushing off with the other diagonal pair.  Since the horses usually used for dressage can easily weigh 1200 pounds, it requires a great deal of strength.  However, it also requires patience and complete trust in the rider.”

Second, meekness is strength restrained by the human will submitted to God, so that—while we do not try to enforce our own idea of justice—we become agents of God’s justice.  Kenneth Bailey, in his book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, notes that this was an important concept for Aristotle, who defined meekness as “the virtue of acting halfway between recklessness on one side and cowardice on the other. . . .  The one who is truly [meek] is the one who becomes angry on the right grounds against the right person in the right manner at the right moment and for the right length of time.”

Part of this is that the meek are those who have learned the self-control not to just react when they are challenged or attacked.  We talked about this a little during Advent, that when we perceive a threat, instinctively the fight-or-flight reaction kicks in; either we counterattack, or else we back down, deny, pass the blame, or just plain run.  By the grace of God and the work of his Spirit, however, we can learn to stop and catch ourselves—and once the impulse to react rolls past, to think and pray, and do something constructive.  Of course, it then remains to follow through in obedience to the will of God; but once the first reaction is over, that becomes much easier.

Now, note the blessing Christ pronounces on the meek:  “they shall inherit the earth.”  Or, as his original hearers would have understood it, “they shall inherit the land”—which is to say, the Promised Land, the land of Israel.  The Jews believed the land was theirs simply because they were the descendants of Abraham; the Romans believed it was theirs because they’d conquered it.  The family of Herod considered it theirs because Rome had given it to them to rule.  There were those in Israel—the Zealots—who were planning to make it theirs by taking it back from the Romans.  They actually thought they would be able to do it, and so not too long after Jesus’ day, within the lifetime of his disciples, war would break out between them and the forces of Rome.

In contrast, Jesus says, no, it isn’t those who have the right ethnic heritage who will inherit the land of God’s promise; it isn’t those who would claim it by brute force and the willingness to kill, either.  Joining the Zealots who sought fiery revolution wasn’t the way to go, and neither was supporting the corrupt powers that be.  Instead, Jesus says, God’s promise will be fulfilled to those who aren’t seeking it for themselves and their own gain.  You don’t inherit the land, you don’t receive the promise of God, by seeking the promise; you only receive it by seeking God, his kingdom and his righteousness.