"I Stand With..."
“I Stand With…”
Matthew 5:1-11
One of the great temptations as a Christian is to create Jesus in our own image. You can look at our art and see that this is true. It didn’t take long for Jesus to become blue eyed and blond haired and European which is quite extraordinary for a Middle Eastern, Jewish man. At a deeper level, all you have to do is look back to an earlier time and the cultural appropriation of Jesus will become clear. An awful lot of sermons were preached in Jesus’ name that supported slavery or touted keeping women in “their place,”or that offered some pretty horrific parenting advice. Of course, a really insightful person who sees such things will rightly step back and consider our own times and wonder how we have created a Jesus who just happens to say what we want him to say now.
This is why we need to find and amplify the ways that Jesus’ teachings challenge us. We need to find the things which we’ve glossed over or the things which make us uncomfortable and lean into those teachings. If we’re ever going to grow in faith then we have to listen when Jesus tells us what we don’t want to hear. That’s the moment when growth begins.
So, let’s put this morning’s text in context. In ways which we gloss over, the radical nature of Jesus challenge to everything that people thought they understood started with his birth. His mother, an unmarried pregnant woman, and her fiancé’, eventually become parents when Jesus is born in a barn—hardly the auspicious beginning of the new messiah. Eventually, as an adult, his ministry begins not by visiting a rabbi in the temple in Jerusalem for a certified, official, paid blessing. No, he visits that lunatic John the Baptist—a totally uncertified religious leader. This is the story of people thumbing their nose at institutional religion and its religious leaders. John baptizes Jesus not in holy water but in an unknown river in the middle of nowhere. And what happens? God shows up like God has never showed up at the temple: “This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Any member of the religious ruling class would have heard this and found it completely subversive!
After his time in the wilderness, Jesus begins his ministry. He gathers disciples who are completely run of the mill guys: fisherman and tax collectors and the like. There’s not a divinity school student among them. Then, just before our text, huge crowds are gathering, crowds of the sick and the lame and the blind. Jesus heals these people. Healing was the temple’s bread and butter, money making work. Jesus is actually healing people (something the temple couldn’t do) and doing it for free. He’s on thin ice. Beyond the sick, the crowds are also made up of people of every background: rural and urban; Jews and Gentiles, women and men, young and old. Jesus welcomes them all which was totally counter to the many rules about who could and could not spend time together.
Like the birth story or the story of the baptism, the story of Jesus and these early crowds is so easy to miss. Nothing is happening in the prescribed way that it was supposed to happen. Rules were being broken! And yet, as the child is born, as the baptism unfolds, as the disciples are called, as the crowds of every kind of human being gather, God’s presence keeps breaking through. It is as if a single person is rising to challenge the insights of the religious authorities and as soon as he does this, God chimes in, “You’ve got that right, son!” God is working in and through Jesus, every rule breaking step of the way.
In our text, the crowds are overflowing. Jesus leads his disciples up the side of a mountain. As they sit around him, I can only imagine the crowds following up the mountain side. Then, Jesus gathers himself to speak. At which point, I like to pause and consider what those disciples and that crowd thought they were about to hear. Maybe they thought that Jesus was about to consolidate his early gains. After all, the man had a real head of steam going. A word or two about how great he was and how great he could make them wouldn’t have been that shocking. Leaders do this, after all. Maybe they thought he was going to give a nod to the religious authorities and encourage them all to go to the temple. That would have won him some friends in high places. Maybe he was about to tell them what they wanted to hear—that the Romans’ days were numbered, that soon they would all be free.
Jesus does none of those market savvy, power-mongering, leadership consolidating things. Instead, he starts speaking words that no-one expected or wanted to hear. These are words that we’ve heard so many times and have so thoroughly tamed that we almost altogether miss their shock value. He takes everything that everyone thinks they know for sure and flips things on their heads.
To hear this, we have to clarify what is a traditional but not all that helpful translation into English. The word, “blessed,” really misses the force of what Jesus is saying. Jesus is not offering advice. He’s not telling us who we should aspire to be. He is not telling us about a payoff that is going to come to people some day—the reward they are going to get for putting up with things now. No, Jesus is declaring what is already true. The best translation to capture the force of that declaration is to substitute, “I stand with…” for “blessed.”
Listen to this: “I stand with the poor in Spirit;” “I stand with those who mourn;” “I stand with the meek;” “I stand with those who hunger and thirst for righteousness; “I stand with the merciful;” “I stand with the pure in heart;” “I stand with the peacemakers;” “I stand with the persecuted.” Jesus is stating for everyone to hear that he is on the side of the folks who have gotten the short end of the stick in this life. That notion is revolutionary.
Why is this revolutionary? The answer is simple. In Jesus’ culture, the understanding was that the world was full of winners and losers. Where was God in that cross section of people? Obviously, God was with the winners. They must have done something to please God. Therefore, God made them the winners as a reward for their good behavior. By contrast, the losers in life were losers because they made decisions that angered God. Their plight was God’s punishment for their sins. Therefore, the temple and the priests and the rabbis were in the business of teaching people (for a price) how to please God and get the rewards. And, if anyone wanted to complain about things being unfair in his or her life, well, then, the question to ask was, “What have I done or what did my ancestors do to anger God?” In which case, (surprise!) there would be a sacrifice to be offered at the temple (for a price) to get right with God again. If you wanted to know where someone stood with God all you had to do was look at that person’s life.
Jesus sayings—known as “the beatitudes,”—fundamentally challenge this understanding. In the theology written by the winners—the people who have power—God sanctions the way things are. Anyone who challenges the way things are is challenging God. In Jesus’ beatitudes, God stands with the powerless, with the people whom everyone has already judged and dismissed. This alliance between God and the powerless is not conditional on the powerless doing anything. God already stands with them…period.
See if this analogy helps make this point clear. When Jesus is baptized and a voice speaks from heaven, declaring, “This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well-pleased,” the shocking truth is that Jesus hasn’t done anything yet other than show up. He hasn’t preached or taught a thing. He hasn’t healed anyone or performed any miracles. God just loves him. Here’s the thing…this is what Jesus is saying about the people whom everyone considers to be the “losers.” Jesus works through the list and essentially says, “These are my people with whom I am well pleased. These are my beloved.”
What Jesus begins to invite us to see is that God is not a judgmental God. Rather, God is a loving God—a God of grace. God is offering us all a chance to be loved. Through Jesus, God is going straight to the folks who have been told they are unlovable or who maybe have come to that conclusion themselves and saying to them, “You get first dibs. This isn’t going to be about earning something. This is going to be about accepting something. Can you accept that you’re in, that you’re loved? Can you allow that truth to change how you live in this world?”
As I thought about this text this week, my mind kept drifting to the strangest place—gym class in grade school. It was time to pick teams. The gym teacher would pick the popular kid or the athletic kid to be the captain. They never gave it much thought. Those kids just kind of felt like winners already, even to the teachers. These winners would alternate between picking their friends or their potential girlfriends. (The captains were never girls…) Then, things would begin to grow uncomfortable. The captains would work through the dregs of the class until there was the last unpicked kid. Maybe, there was some part of you, even in grade school, who felt bad for that kid. Maybe you were that kid…
Imagine this, though. Imagine a new captain is picked and their first pick is the kid who was always picked last. The other captain and the gym teacher would exchange glances. A murmur would rumble through the class. With a shrug, the other captain would pick some great athlete. Pick by pick, the undesirables would be scooped up by the captain of the revolution. Look into those previously unpicked kids’ eyes. Can you see the shock and the surprise and the joy? Look in the revolutionary captain’s eyes. Can you see that confidence that says, “We’ve already won!”? Can you feel the buzz in the gym over the fact that what’s happening here is truly something new?
This is our first glimpse of what Jesus will call the “Kingdom of God.” In the Kingdom of God, we are here not to judge each other but to love each other. We feel empathy for each other. We look at each others’ lives and see, not God’s judgement, but simply how unfair and difficult and heartbreaking life can be at times. We know that instead of reaching the conclusion that those who suffer are getting what they deserve, God reaches out a helping hand. The kicker, though, is that we are supposed to be that hand. We are supposed to be the captain in gym class who chooses differently. We are called to be the people who declare, “I stand with the overlooked and the ignored, with the people who got the short end of the stick, with the folks who are being treated unfairly. I stand with them because they are God’s children. They are my brothers and my sisters. They are God’s beloved.”
Do we really believe that we can we be loved by a gracious God and not be a source of grace and love ourselves? Do we really think we’ve only meant to love the people the world considers winners?