WHAT JESUS MEANT
The Rev. Dr. Morris W. Hudgins
Northwest UU Congregation
December 12, 2010
Introduction
One of my favorite books of recent years is a book I read titled, “What Jesus Meant; The Beatitudes and a Meaningful Life” by Erik Kolbell. The author was Minister of Social Justice at Riverside Church in New York when he wrote this book. The forward to the book was written by noted minister and activist, William Sloane Coffin. Credits to the book were written by a varied group: Unitarian Universalist minister, Forrest Church, President of the Children’s Defense Fund, Marian Wright Edelman, and former anchorwoman, Jane Pauley. The values expressed in this book are Unitarian Universalist. It is clearly and simply written with much advice on how to live a meaningful and good life. I highly recommend this book.
Before I discuss the beatitudes, I would like to give you some of the background and assumptions of the author. Kolbell is a model for how we Unitarian Universalists should approach religion. First, and foremost he tries to respect the religion of others. He is uneasy about people who exalt their own beliefs by belittling someone else’s “at a time when respect for others is increasingly drowned out by the vice of intolerance disguised as a virtue of principle. . .” (p. 12)
Second, the author accepts the modern biblical conclusion that the “Sermon on the Mount” and the Beatitudes which introduce it are probably the most authentic quotes attributed to Jesus. If you have read anything from members of the Jesus Seminar you already knew this. They have reached the same conclusion: If we understand the Beatitudes, we probably understand what Jesus taught in the first century.
Third, the author also accepts the fact that Jesus was not trying to start a new religion. Rather, he was trying to reform an old one. I quote from the author: “The beatitudes—and the Sermon on the Mount that follows—are an exquisite expression of the promise and expectation of Judaism as first preached by the prophet’s of old.”
I first learned about this book from an interview between Kolbell and Charlie Rose on Public Television. What impressed me most was his statement that if you really want to understand Jesus you have to understand ancient Judaism. Jesus went back to the old prophets to look for a message that would speak to modern Galilee.
Kolbell reminds us that Jesus spoke to the Jews who were living under Roman occupation in Northern Israel. They were largely poor people, living off the land and sea, who relied on the learned rabbis to teach them how to apply Scriptures to their everyday lives.
As we go back in time we learn that the Jews were a people who had a history of exile and deportation, governed by nations other than their own; a people who paid high taxes for the benefit of others. Their life expectancy was shorter than the money class. Their living conditions were more crowded and dangerous, and less sanitary. Their children received an inferior education, entered the work force earlier, and they “nurtured few dreams of social advancement.”
The Jews were also governed by a king, Pontius Pilate, whose primary allegiance was to Rome and they were counseled by a high priest who was paid well to serve at the pleasure of a pagan emperor.
These are basic facts about the culture in which Jesus was born. It was also a culture at odds about what it means to be a religious people. We all know about the Zealots, the people much like some modern Moslems, who believed the most sacred calling, was to give up your life in a fight with those in power and authority. There were Zealots in the first century. There are Zealot-like people living in our world today, who would like to see the power-structure of the world change, and they are willing to die to accomplish this end.
In the first century there were also the Pharisees who argued endlessly over Scriptures and what it means to follow the letter of the law. Then there were the Sadducees who were the aristocratic priests of their day, who held much power and authority. Unlike the Pharisees they did not look to the letter of the law, did not believe in the bodily resurrection, divine determinism, or the importance of the oral tradition.
Finally, there were the aesthetics, the social dropouts who lived in isolation in caves, prophets who foresaw the future, and lived a communal life-style.
All of these groups made for a lively religious debate in the first century when Jesus lived. What Kolbell reminds us is that Jesus spoke to all of these groups and preached a simple message to his followers. The author believes that it is this message that can speak to us today. It can “help us make sense of an increasingly sophisticated, secularized, fast-paced, and isolating world.”
Why might you be interested in the message of the beatitudes?
· If you want to live life more peacefully with yourself, your families, and your neighbors.
· If you want to alleviate the suffering of strangers as if they were your brothers and sisters.
· If you are interested in having the warring nations lay down their arms.
· If you want to look for good and noble values to pass on to your children.
· If you want to find a moral compass “in a world where equivocation is the refuge of cowards.”
· If you want to find a purpose to your life that is greater than the sum total of your worldly possessions, a job title, or your social standing.
· Finally, if you want to find “a sense of permanence in a sea of change” you might be interested in this message.
These are the goals of the book which inspired this series, and I hope they can give us some direct ways to a more meaningful life.
Kolbell does this by speaking to the each of the beatitudes; meekness, empathy, righteousness, peace, persecution, purity, poverty and simplicity. In summary, the author is trying to give us some guidance about what it means to be a good christian with a small “c.” He believes that the way to a better world, or the Kingdom of God, as it was called in Jesus’ day, is for us to be more loving, compassionate, humble, and self-denying. Kolbell asks, “What is the Kingdom of God like according to Jesus?” His answer:
If you want to live a blessed life, he told them, take the world as you know it and turn it on its head. That is to say, imagine it free of the tyranny, poverty, loneliness, and greed that now hold it in thrall. Imagine it loosed of the unholy trinity of ignorance, arrogance, and indifference that conspire to suffocate all remnants of hope. Imagine such a world, he told them, and then, having imagined it, live in accordance with it. Live it into being. Live as though the world is turned upside down, because when you do you will see the kingdom, if not come, then at least coming.” (p. 21)
After this series, I hope you will see that our world is not that much different from the world of the first century. People still suffer even though there is great wealth. Wars are still planned by the mighty and fought by the weak. Some people in our society continue to be persecuted because of the color of their skin, their religious belief or non-belief, their sexual orientation or their family of origin. He writes: “There are times in our own lives, as in lives past and generations long ago, when we ourselves must strain to detect the faint whisper of God’s promise above the din and demands, the broken shoelaces and broken promises, that fill our days.” (p. 26.) This is the goal of this series: to find some promise and hope and meaning in a world that is often hopeless, meaningless and full of broken promises.
Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit
Let us focus this morning on the first of the beatitudes. I think it was put first in the Sermon on the Mount because of its importance. The first of the Beatitudes is: “Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit.” First, let’s look at the word “blessed.” The word “blessed” means several things:
First, it means sacred or holy, hallowed or consecrated.
Second, it means to be comforted or joyous.
Third, it means happiness. Have a happy day.
Fourth, the strangest definition of all, it means to be cursed, confounded, or worthless, as in “he hasn’t a blessed cent. He had none.”
When the person behind the grocery counter tells me to “have a blessed day” I hope they aren’t giving me a curse, but rather are wishing me a happy day, a comfortable day, a joyous day. Some may want more. They may prefer that I have a holy day, a special day.
I will be glad to have all these, but what did the author of Matthew, Luke or Thomas mean when they said, “Blessed are the Poor or Poor in Spirit?” The participants in the Jesus Seminar prefer the word “Congratulations” to the word “blessed.” I don’t like that any better than blessed. Can you imagine the person at Kroger’s saying, “Have a day of congratulations!” No, I can’t.
Let’s just accept the word “blessed” to mean, “Have a good day or a special day.” I will take that when I can get it. But what would a first century rabbi mean by it? When Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor” I think he probably meant that the disciples would be rewarded by God either in this life or the next. They were words of encouragement to his followers, that even though they were not rich, though they were often hungry, and they mourned the loss of their family and friends, they were still to be rewarded by their god. That is what I think Jesus meant. Luke, unlike Matthew, said, “Blessed are the poor.”
Erik Kolbell wants it to mean more. Let’s look at his definition of “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” I quote,
. . .spiritual poverty is liberation from the authority I assign to these and other things to serve as a measure of my worth, and the faith and willingness to look elsewhere for it. (p. 30)
He then continues:
This is why this first beatitude follows so close on the heels of the story of Jesus’ rejection of the temptation by Satan, who took him to a mountaintop and offered him “all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.” All that the world has to offer is never sufficient for us to purchase our goodness in the eyes of God, and so we are oddly freed from such fruitless strivings. Or, as Francis Bacon put it, “Money is a good servant, but a bad master.” (pp. 30-31)
Kolbell tries to have it both ways. He wants “poor in spirit” to have nothing to do with money, but then he also wants it to have everything to do with money. Here is where Kolbell looks to the Jewish tradition. He writes:
Poverty of spirit, as Jesus learned, as the psalmist wrote, and as the rabbis taught, is not a rejection of things per se but a repudiation of the power they have to control our lives, to dictate who we are. By this I mean if I am poor of spirit I turn my back on all culturally bound measures of my wealth and worth and pay no mean. I stand empty before God and naked to the world with absolutely nothing to either commend or condemn me; I refuse to see myself as the sum total of the heft of my resume or the paucity of my credentials, the breadth of my riches or the extent of my debt, the quality of my friends or the disdain of my enemies. I could be a graduate of a distinguished university, of a local night school, or an eighth-grade dropout; the president of my country club or captain of my factory’s bowling team; live in an exclusive neighborhood, a row house, or a prison cell—and it would not matter. I could hold down a prestigious job at a Fortune 500 company or scrub that company’s floors at night, could eat in fine restaurants, hash houses, or soup kitchens. (p. 30)
In spiritual poverty I can declare with full faith and confidence that I will not be defined by the car I drive, the reputation I hold, the company I keep, or the dinner party I did not did not get invited to. . .
Conclusions
I think Kolbell is right on here. No matter how large the group of followers Jesus had when he was killed, (I believe it was pretty small) he was speaking here to his disciples. He was giving them advice about the “Kingdom of God.” That kingdom could be in this life or the next, but in the end it means how their God wants them to live. For Jesus it had nothing to do with how much money you, your formal education, or who your friends are, or how society says you are to live. It has to do with being aware of poverty. This is what it means to be “Poor in Spirit.” It is fitting that Jesus gave his followers some words of hope even though they lived in poverty by our standards.
Kolbell gives us a good example of the message Jesus was probably preaching in the first century. First he tells the story of a wealthy merchant and he tells him that “poverty of spirit” and the Kingdom of God have nothing to do with his riches, but has everything to do with a child’s illness, the death of a friend, depression, or a loss of his reputation among his friends.
Here is the story:
Lets now imagine that somewhere that somewhere in the crowd is a seamstress, a woman in her late teens, of little means, who works long hours with primitive tools in the manufacture of beauty for the pleasure of others, her days spent hunched over this merchant’ fine linens. It is a daily tease for her, this work that she does. She is so near to elegance, close enough to touch it, smell it. Indeed, she even creates it, only to have it slip through her weathered hands at day’s end in exchange for a few meager denarii, about seven cents pay at a time when an average worker earned ten times that amount. Her fingers are gnarled and her back bowed. Her eyesight is bad and she is old beyond her years. She returns home each night to a tiny one-room brick hovel where the roof leaks and there is never enough firewood. She has scant resources to feed her two children, let alone herself; and she worries about where the money will come from to pay this year’s taxes.
The preacher tells this woman that the poor in spirit are blessed, that the kingdom will be theirs, and she glories at the prospect of a life lived beyond the hell of poverty and all she associate with it, for to her poverty of spirit is a lack of things, but it is also the degradation and diminution of self-worth that accompanies that lack. . .But now she hears that all this will one day be but a dim and dreary memory because a better time beckons, a time when her needs will be seen to, her family provide for, her dignity restored. I am the poor in spirit, she believes, and the kingdom is at long last mine. (p 29)
If this is what Jesus preached, it makes sense to me that his message would spread among the poor, the disenfranchised, the persecuted of his day and today. Jesus preached that all people can be comforted, can be looked at with favor in God’s eyes, no matter what their station in life. But he did more than this. Jesus also taught people how they can bring God’s Kingdom into being. This is what the Sermon on the Mount and the beatitudes are all about. Kolbell says this in his introduction:
The Sermon on the Mount moves from divine possibility to human enactment, first by painting a picture of what a blessed life is to look like and then giving us a sense of how to nurse it into being. True blessedness (happiness for me), Jesus tell us, includes things like reconciling yourself to your accuser, turn the other cheek, love your enemy, being more righteous than the Pharisees and more humble than the silent saints, letting your light shine before others, and offering your prayers, alms, and fasts in humble solitude. To live a life contrary to the vicissitudes and vagaries of the world is to be with God. It is what Helen Keller describes as fidelity to a worthy purpose, to paraphrase St. Paul, blessedness means being not conformed to the world, but rather transformed by the power and knowledge and love of God (or goodness). (p. 22)
I understand what Kolbell is saying. I grew up in relative poverty. I saw what other children had, and I knew I wanted those things. I grew to cherish the things I had, and like my mother, learned to save for that rainy day. One of the things that drew Marti and me together was having this philosophy. I also grew up knowing that one can be happy in life without a lot of possessions. I am bothered by the fact that so many people live with wealth while others are in extreme poverty.
This is what “Blessed the poor in spirit” means. It means caring about how people are treated in our society, that all people have a chance to share in the world’s bounty, can have a chance at a quality education, and a job that pays a living wage, and don’t toil in labor for minimum wage so executives can make millions each year. To be “poor in spirit” is not to give away all we have, but to give of ourselves for the good of all. If we do, our life will truly be blessed. I hope all of us can find such blessedness.
If we are blessed with being poor in spirit, we are hungry for something more than food, we care about others, we mourn the loss of our friends, we are merciful, we are humble, and we will be peacemakers. If we are blessed with being poor in spirit we will share that spirit with others, and they will see our light shine. This is the message of the Beatitudes and I believe this is what Jesus meant for his disciples. He was like Moses, a leader of men and women, showing people the way to the Promised Land. His message was like the Buddha, or Lau-Tse, showing people the way, to an enlightened life. We have all been blessed by their examples. May we all find some of that enlightenment by having an awareness of poverty. We will indeed find happiness, and will be congratulated. Thank you.