O the Joy of Being Destitute
O, the Joy of Being Destitute by Rev. L. John Gable
July 10, 2022
Little more than two weeks ago I stood with our group of Tab travelers on what is called the Mount of the Beatitudes, overlooking the Sea of Galilee, and recited this teaching of our Lord called the Sermon on the Mount. It was a meaningful experience for me, and I believe memorable for them, to hear His words spoken in that place.
The Sermon on the Mount, recorded in Matthew’s Gospel, chapters 5-7, is a summary of what must be considered Jesus’ most essential teaching, the essence of His message, and we should be forewarned that it is radical and life-changing if we dare to listen to it carefully and take its meaning to heart. John Stott refers to the Sermon on the Mount as the “manifesto of the Christian counter-culture”. Dietrich Bonhoeffer used it as the basis for his classic, The Cost of Discipleship. In this teaching Jesus lays out for us, in no uncertain terms, the ethical demands of the Gospel and calls us to moral obedience to God’s commands. But this is more than a mere list of rules and regulations for us to follow. As devotional writer Oswald Chambers puts it, “The Sermon on the Mount is a statement of the life we will live when the Holy Spirit is getting His way with us.” Here Jesus is giving us a glimpse in to life in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Matthew sets the stage for this important teaching. After a season of preaching and teaching and healing, during which the crowds began to gather and grow, he writes, “When Jesus saw the crowds He went up on the mountain, and after He sat down, His disciples came to Him. Then He began to speak and taught them, saying…” As He was oft to do, Jesus went up on a mountain, to a solitary place, to get away from the masses, to pray and get some time alone with His Heavenly Father, and in this case, I believe, to be alone with His disciples, so that He could speak with them, intimately and personally, and pour in to them this essential teaching. Admittedly, at the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew records that “the crowds were astonished at His teaching”, so certainly the crowds found Him and gathered, but I believe Jesus intended this teaching to be heard first by His closest followers.
We read, when “Jesus sat down, His disciples came to Him.” First century rabbis would talk with their disciples as they walked along the road together, but when he was ready to formally teach them something of importance, something he really wanted them to understand and remember, the rabbi would sit down and his students, or disciples, would gather around him. We do much the same with our children or grandchildren, don’t we? We may visit casually with them throughout the day or evening, but when we want to teach or tell them something of real importance, we find ourselves asking them to “Come and sit down with me. I want to talk with you about something.” That gesture in itself, demonstrates the importance or urgency of what needs to be said. So, when Jesus sat down (the formal posture for teaching) His disciples came to Him, then He began to speak and taught them (Matthew’s way of emphasizing the importance of this message.) So, given its importance, we are going to spend the next 16 weeks slowly walking through this essential teaching of our Lord.
Jesus begins with what we have come to call the Beatitudes. If the Sermon on the Mount is the essence of Christian teaching, then we might call this the “essence of the essence.” The word “beatitude” comes from the first word in each of these eight phrases which have been translated “blessed”. Not coincidentally, this is also the first word of Psalm 1, which we read this morning. “O the joy of…O the blessedness of…O the happiness of…”, and then each statement is followed by a promise, the first being, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Familiar words to us, perhaps, but I hope our ears haven’t become too dulled to the radical nature of this message after so many years of hearing it. Listen again, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” Is our first response to hearing this surprise, shock, confusion, misunderstanding, a desire for more clarification? If it is not, then I would suggest that we aren’t really listening, or not really hearing, and we need to hear it again, and again, until it begins to sink in. In this opening volley of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus gives us a very clear picture of just how radical and counter-cultural His teaching is going to be. Life in the Kingdom of God is very different that life as we know it now, life as we have chosen to live it now. So, He is instructing us, as His followers, to begin living now as we will one day when God finally has His way with us, and the Beatitudes introduce us to the necessary first step.
Years ago there was a break-in at a large department store in Boston. At first it went unnoticed because the intruders didn’t take or damage anything. However, what they did wreaked such havoc and confusion that the store had it close its doors for a week. Rather than taking anything, these intruders simply changed the price tags on everything. A diamond necklace that would normally sell for thousands of dollars was marked as $1.99. A $5 shirt on the clearance rack suddenly cost hundreds. What these intruders did caused total confusion because it radically changed the value and worth of everything.
As we look more closely at the Beatitudes, and in a larger sense the whole teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, we see that Jesus has done essentially the same thing. Like the intruders in the Boston department store, He challenges and changes every one of our worldly standards. That which we think of as being of great importance and value Jesus discounts as being of very little worth in the Kingdom of God; those qualities and characteristics which we deem to be worthless in the affairs of earth become of great value in the economy of Heaven. Jesus sets up a whole new standard of values, ethics, ideals and behaviors, and as we will see, His standards are radical for they counter everything our society teaches us. However, as radical and challenging as this teaching is, we will discover, and this should come as no surprise to us, that Jesus is right. He is speaking a truth that we need to hear, and even in our initial opposition to it, we know in our heart of hearts that it really is true. C.E.M Joad writes, “We know, in fact, that we ought to live as Jesus enjoined. We may say that Christ’s prescription of good living is wholly impractical and is much too difficult; but that does not alter our conviction that it is (nonetheless) the right prescription.”
We get a glimpse of the truth of this way of thinking whenever we play the hypothetical game, “If your house was on fire and you had time to run in and grab only one thing, not counting children and pets, what would it be?” Invariably, we would go, not for that which was most costly, but for that which was most valuable to us, and those are not necessarily one and the same thing. We would most likely go for the priceless photo album rather than the costly painting. This begins to hint at what Jesus is saying to us here. He is going to speak to our hearts with the intention that our heads will follow. He is going to teach us a new design for living according to the values and standards of the Kingdom of Heaven, so we must brace ourselves, for they are very different that the values and standards by which we have grown accustomed to living.
The first Beatitude becomes the touchstone for all the rest. This one lays the foundation for all that is to come. Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” When Luke records this teaching, in what is commonly called the Sermon on the Plain, he writes, more starkly, “Blessed are the poor.” Now what is the meaning of that, either the poor or the poor in spirit? There is nothing particularly ennobling about being poor, nothing glamorous or desirable about lacking the daily necessities of food and drink and shelter, the very lowest rung of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. Every week we welcome neighbors and friends to Tab who, by and large, by any worldly standards, are considered “the poor”, and few of us would admit to envying their condition. So, in reading this teaching of Jesus we must be very careful not to misread it such that we refuse to help those in need presumably “for their own good.” However, what Jesus does say is that the poor know something that the rich do not know; they know something that we should be envious of; they know their need. Those who are poor or needy or destitute in a worldly sense know their need for food, water, shelter, safety, so they seek to find it. Unfortunately, we who are rich, whose pantries are full, whose hunger pangs are easily met at our next meal, too often don’t recognize the very real emptiness with in us; we have masked it too well with other things. So, when Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” He is saying there is a blessing that comes to those who know their need for God, and this becomes a consistent teaching throughout His ministry.
A number of years ago I was part of a mission trip to Mexico with a group of adults and young people from our church. We stayed and worked in the barrios of Cancun, that sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? Some of the homes we stayed in had only a pipe in the ground which served as their latrine. Our hosts were gracious and generous to us despite their evident lack of earthly resources, yet as we reflected on that experience many of us came to realize that while we were rich in the things of this world, they were rich in the things of God. They literally lived each day in dependence on God’s provision of daily bread. We found ourselves, in some strange and counter-intuitive way, being envious of their poverty. I remember one of our church members saying, “Could it be that the things we call our blessings may be the very things which are holding us back from the real blessing God intends for us, a deeper and more intimate trust and love of Him?”
“Blessed are the poor in spirit”. Blessed are those who know their desperate need for God, a need that cannot be satisfied by anything less than God, for they are getting a glimpse of what life is like in the Kingdom of Heaven. New Testament scholar and theologian Dale Bruner calls this “the holy paradox of grace.” Jesus blesses our inadequacy. It is those who feel the depravity of their sin, the deep hurt and harm caused by their transgressions, their desperate need for forgiveness, who are most blessed by God; and conversely, it is those who are so sure of their righteousness and satisfied with their station in life, those who think they have no need of repentance and forgiveness, who have cut themselves off from the real blessing God intends for them.
So, Jesus’ opening volley in the Beatitudes is this, “Blessed are you who know your need for God. Blessed are you who know that the stuff of this world cannot satisfy the deep longing you have in your heart and soul for the stuff of heaven. Blessed are you who recognize your sin and brokenness and your need for repentance and forgiveness, for you will have your needs met by the only One who can truly meet them, by God Himself. But those who naively give no such honest reflection to their spiritual need and show no honest repentance will go away empty.
Who gets to know God? Those who know their need for God. Who gets to see God? Those who seek Him, who hunger and thirst after Him. Who will receive mercy? Those who show mercy, and so on. The world teaches that God helps those who help themselves (that is Benjamin Franklin, not Jesus); Scripture teaches that God helps those who can’t help themselves. So, if we think we can, we can’t. And if we know we can’t, we can. “Blessed are you”, says our Lord, “when you realize you can’t do it on your own. Blessed are you when you realize that you need Me.” Such is “the holy paradox of grace.”
Friends, once we realize our need for what only God can give us, we are blessed to get a glimpse of the Kingdom of Heaven; a glimpse in to life as it one day will be when God finally has His way with us; a glimpse in to the adventure of living the “counter-cultural”, “turn your world upside down”, “blessed” life Christ intends for us, right here, right now.
Rev. L. John Gable
Tabernacle Presbyterian Church
Indianapolis, IN