Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany

Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany (A)

January 29, 2017

Text: Matt. 5:1-12

            The blessed Christian life, as it is described by Jesus, appears to be anything but.  Blessed are… the poor in spirit?  Those who mourn?  Those hungry and thirsty for righteousness?  The persecuted?  Yet Jesus makes no bones about it.  They are blessed.  Blessed by God.  And now, this is often misunderstood as some sort of conditional statement: “If you are poor in spirit, you will be blessed,” as if being poor in spirit, or mourning, or hungering and thirsting for righteousness, is a good work by which we merit being blessed.  The Beatitudes, as the blessings in our Holy Gospel are called, are all too often portrayed as a new and better New Testament version of the Ten Commandments.  The “Be-Attitudes,” as some clever Christian has quipped.  Be like this.  Have this attitude.  And it makes the words of our Lord all Law.  Do this.  Be this way.  God will bless you for it.  Beloved in the Lord, this is a total misunderstanding of our text.

            These are not words of command.  Our Lord here speaks words of consolation to His own who are in the world, but not of the world.  These words are pure Gospel.  Blessed are the poor in spirit.  In a world where the movers and the shakers and those who seem to be somebody claim great richness of spirit, Christians recognize our utter poverty.  What does it mean to be poor in spirit?  The rest of the Beatitudes are an unpacking of that.  To be poor in spirit is to mourn over sin and death and the brokenness of this fallen world, but to be comforted by the redeeming work of Jesus Christ in His death for your sins and His resurrection victory over death.  It is the meekness of repentance and submission to your Lord and His Word, and longsuffering with your neighbor, knowing that in the end you will inherit the earth.  It is hungering and thirsting for a righteousness beyond anything within your grasp, the righteousness of Jesus Himself, knowing that you will be satisfied as He pours His righteousness upon you by grace.  It is to be merciful because you have first received mercy from God; pure in heart, in other words, cleansed by the waters of Holy Baptism and Absolution, knowing you will see God with your own eyes on the Day of Resurrection; a peacemaker among brothers and sisters in conflict, for Jesus has made peace between you and the Father in the forgiveness of sins, so that God calls you His own child.  And yes, it is to be persecuted in this life for righteousness’ sake, for the sake of Jesus and His Name which you bear in Baptism and His Word.  For the world will hate you as it hates Him.  But do not despair.  Rejoice and be glad.  Yours is the Kingdom of heaven, and great is your reward, for so they persecuted the prophets and apostles who were before you.  To be poor in spirit, finally, is to recognize that you are nothing, and Jesus is everything.  It is to recognize that you bring nothing to the table before God but your sin and death and hatred of all that is good, and that God brings nothing to the table before you but Jesus and His righteousness and love and forgiveness and His very resurrection body and blood, to give you everything that is good.  The consolation of the Beatitudes is that in spite of your utter and absolute poverty, God loves you, you are precious to Him, and all things are  yours in Jesus Christ, His Son.

            In this life, we think that to be rich is to be blessed, to be poor is to be cursed.  Many are the TV preachers who will tell you that if you believe in enough and follow their seven steps conveniently published in their book for $19.95 plus shipping and handling, God will bless you.  You will be healthy, wealthy, and wise.  If, after buying the book and reading it carefully and sending in your offering, you are still poor, you must not believe enough.  You must not pray hard enough.  You must have committed some sin that prevents God from blessing you.  Jesus turns this hellish logic on its head.  It is the great reversal of all the best of human reason.  And He does it in the flesh.  Beloved, the Beatitudes are not first of all a picture of you.  They are a picture of Jesus.  Almighty God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the only-begotten Son of the Father, becomes a little Baby, born of the Virgin Mary.  God makes Himself poor in spirit, to save you.  He is born in poverty.  He is born in a stable.  He is born with the government on His back.  He’s in Bethlehem to be taxed.  He is born to be the poorest of the poor, the meekest of the meek, Himself without sin, but with your sin piled upon Him so that He becomes THE Sinner.  So greatly does He hunger and thirst for your righteousness that He dies for it, the accursed death of a criminal hung on a tree, crucified between two thieves.  Naked, bleeding, nailed, pierced, for you.  “For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21; ESV). 

            And now He is risen from the dead.  The Kingdom of Heaven is His, not just as God, but as a man.  He is comforted, satisfied, glorified, seated at the right hand of the Father, ruling all things in heaven and on earth.  And because the Beatitudes are first of all a picture of Christ, they are a picture of you in Christ.  They are a picture of the Baptized. 

            Well, if all of this is true (and it is!), what does this mean for how you live now, in this life?  It means you can be meek: gentle, quiet, imposed upon, loving those who are hard to love, serving those who are hard to serve.  Not so that you will be blessed, but because you are already blessed in Christ, who loved and served you unto death when you were impossible to love and serve.  It means you can be merciful, not in order to receive mercy, but because you have received mercy, and you know what it is to receive the perfect mercy of your Lord Jesus Christ in the full and free forgiveness of all your sins.  That person in your life over whom you’ve been holding a grudge, the one you just can’t forgive?  Have mercy.  Absolve that person.  How can you not, after all God has forgiven you for Jesus’ sake?  Be pure in heart by confessing your sins and reveling in the Holy Absolution.  Go make peace between warring neighbors, and in so far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.  And when it comes to persecution, just suffer it.  Suffer it because you know that you are blessed.  You are blessed on account of Christ.  You are blessed on account of His suffering and death, which sanctifies your own.  And you know how this all turns out in the end.  You know that all that is wrong will be right on that Day.  So you can live now as if all that is wrong is already right.  Because Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.  And that is the answer to all evil.

            You are already blessed by God.  You already have eternal life by virtue of your Baptism into Christ.  And so, all things are already yours in Christ Jesus, the Kingdom of Heaven and earth itself.  But it doesn’t look like it yet.  You cannot see it yet.  You will.  Just wait.  On that Day, what is hidden will come to light.  All that is true now in a hidden way will be manifest.  It will be a great Epiphany.  The Lord is coming.  Wait just a little while longer, beloved, until the time is fulfilled.  In the meantime, the Lord here sets a Table before you where all the Beatitudes are delivered under bread and wine.  Here is your righteousness, your comfort, and your satisfaction.  Here is mercy and peace and your great reward.  For here under bread and wine is our Lord’s true body and blood, given and shed for your forgiveness and raised for your justification.  Here is the very Kingdom of Heaven in the stuff of earth.  Here is Jesus for you.  And you are blessed.  In the Name of the Father, and of the Son (+), and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.