The Beatitudes: Blessed Is Not a Reward (1 of 9)

Read as a list of entry requirements, the Beatitudes are crushing.

Be poor in spirit, mourn, be meek, hunger for righteousness, and then, if you have managed all of it, receive a reward. That is how they get preached and it is a misreading of the opening word.

What Does Blessed Actually Mean?

A condition already present, not a target to hit.

The word describes a state of divinely given joy that the person is in, rather than a requirement they must satisfy in order to qualify for something later.

That single distinction reorganises the whole passage. Jesus is not issuing nine instructions. He is looking at a crowd and telling certain people among them what is already true of them, which most of them would not have believed.

The tense is descriptive. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom. Not will be. Is.

How Do Matthew and Luke Differ?

Matthew has nine blessings. Luke has four, each paired with a corresponding woe.

Persecution is prominent in both collections, which is worth noticing given how rarely it features in modern treatments of this material.

The pairing in Luke changes the temperature. Blessed are you who are poor, and woe to you who are rich. Blessed are you who hunger now, and woe to you who are full. Matthew’s version invites contemplation. Luke’s version sorts the room.

Whether these are two versions of one sermon or teaching Jesus gave more than once is disputed and does not need settling here.

Who Are the Poor in Spirit?

Not the spiritually inadequate, and not the financially poor either, on the Isaiah background.

Isaiah uses the language of poverty for the humble and pious who seek God. The poor in that usage are people whose posture toward God is one of dependence rather than of claim, and who are waiting on him rather than on their own standing.

Read that way, the phrase describes people who know they have nothing to bring, and the kingdom is said to belong to them already.

Matthew’s addition of in spirit is often treated as a softening of Luke’s blunter blessed are you poor. It reads better as a specification, pointing at what the Isaianic usage already meant.

What Does It Mean to Mourn?

Several things at once, and Bailey separates them usefully.

There is grief over loss, and the promise attached is comfort rather than explanation.

There is mourning over injustice, which he ties to not succumbing to compassion fatigue. The righteous keep feeling the weight of what is wrong rather than adjusting to it, which is a real achievement in a world where the weight never stops arriving.

And there is mourning over one’s own sin, which receives the same comfort.

Two failures are named on either side. Denying suffering is wrong. Finding it darkly entertaining is also wrong, which is a sharper observation than it looks in an age with an appetite for other people’s catastrophes.

What sits underneath is the claim that suffering can become a doorway to profound wisdom, and that the house of mourning can make the heart glad. Neither is a consolation offered casually.

What Is the Righteousness Being Hungered For?

Not an abstract ethical standard, which is how it is usually heard.

Bailey’s reading is that righteousness refers to the claims of a relationship rather than to a moral ideal. The righteousness of God means his saving acts in history, the things he has actually done.

Israel’s righteousness, on that account, is a gift. It is a verdict God gives about them rather than a score they achieve.

And the response to a verdict like that is to act justly, which includes compassion for the needy. The model given is the exodus. They were treated with compassion when they had no claim, and they are to treat others the same way.

So hungering for righteousness is not a craving for personal moral improvement. It is a hunger for God to set things right, and a corresponding hunger to be part of that.

The image Bailey attaches is the merchant searching for the pearl. The blessed are those who keep looking.

Why Does Righteousness Produce Peace?

Because peace in this vocabulary is not the absence of conflict.

If righteousness means relationships put right and God’s saving action in history, then peace is what that produces rather than a separate item on the list.

Which is why the peacemakers are called sons of God two beatitudes later. They are doing what he does.

Part of a series on the Sermon on the Mount, following Bailey’s treatment.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapters 5 and 6. Supports the reading of blessed as a present condition rather than a requirement, the Isaianic background to the poor in spirit, the several senses of mourning and the two failures named against it, the account of righteousness as relational and as God’s saving acts, the exodus as the model for Israel’s response, and the connection between righteousness and peace. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 5:1-12, Luke 6:20-26, and the Isaianic poverty language.

Where the sourcing stops: whether Matthew and Luke preserve two versions of one occasion or teaching delivered more than once is disputed and is not settled here. The relationship between Matthew’s in spirit and Luke’s blunter phrasing is a long-running interpretive question.

Footnotes

1. The distinction between a description and a requirement is the whole reading and it can be tested against the grammar in a minute. Every clause is in the present. Nothing in the list is phrased as an instruction, and the promises attached are stated as facts rather than as terms.
2. That both denying suffering and being entertained by it are named as failures is unusually specific. Most treatments warn against the first. The second describes a great deal of how suffering is consumed now, and it was evidently recognisable enough in the first century to be worth naming.