Matthew 5:1-12 (NRSV Updated Edition)
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he began to speak and taught them, saying:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
~
"Now, the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount points to what I have called ‘the intelligence of the victim’. It starts with the beatitudes, where the people chosen as exemplars of proximity to God are all marginal, dependent people. People who have a certain relationship to others which one might describe as precarious: the poor in spirit are poor relative to people who might use power and riches against them; those who mourn are those who are in a relationship of vulnerability owing either to some loss, or some overbearing situation; the meek are meek in the midst of a social other that despises meekness; the merciful refuse to be involved in a vengeful relation to the other, that is they don't insist on their rights over against another; the pure in heart have acquired their purity of heart with difficulty in the midst of a world which does not encourage it; the peacemakers are notoriously those who eventually get blamed by both sides for not sharing their violence - each side sees them as traitors and those who are persecuted for righteousness [...] Well, the intelligence of the victim couldn't be more explicit - and this is emphasized again in the final beatitude: “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you, and utter all kinds of falsehood against you.”
"The key feature of blessedness is that it involves living a deliberately chosen and cultivated sort of life which is not involved in the power and violence of the world, and which because of this fact, makes the ones living it immensely vulnerable to being turned into victims. That is the center of the ethic as taught by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount."
- James Alison, Knowing Jesus, pp. 42-43
~
"Jesus has been speaking for only a matter of seconds, and he has already turned our normal status ladders and social pyramids upside down. He advocates an identity characterized by solidarity, sensitivity, and nonviolence. He celebrates those who long for justice, embody compassion, and manifest integrity and non-duplicity. He creates a new kind of hero: not warriors, corporate executives, or politicians, but brave and determined activists for pre-emptive peace, willing to suffer with him in the prophetic tradition of justice.
"Our choice is clear from the start: If we want to be his disciples, we won't be able to simply coast along and conform to the norms of our society. We must choose a different definition of well-being, a different model of success, a new identity with a new set of values.
"Jesus promises we will pay a price for making that choice. But he also promises we will discover many priceless rewards. If we seek the kind of unconventional blessedness he proposes, we will experience the true aliveness of God's kingdom, the warmth of God's comfort, the enjoyment of the gift of this Earth, the satisfaction at seeing God's restorative justice come more fully, the joy of receiving mercy, the direct experience of God's presence, the honor of association with God and of being in league with the prophets of old. That is the identity he invites us to seek."
- Brian McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking, pp. 128-29
~
"Jesus is not speaking, as it were, from a starting point but from a midpoint. This is God in the middle of us, speaking into the midst of all our lives and indicating something about a quality of being alive which is what he is promoting.
[...]
"[T]he Greek 'makarioi' can be translated as blessed or happy, those are the two standard translations. “Happy” suggests [...] a good mood and it's perfectly nonsense - many of the people in this situation are not happy in the normal sense. “Blessed” suggests a kind of a fictional description of them, that although life is really awful they're blessed, so it's kind of extrinsic and outside them, a label.
"The translation which I've chosen - which is not really translation, it's a proposal - is “radiant.” Why do I say that? Because each one of the groups described are people who are in the midst of the grind in one way [or another]. They are precarious on the inside of the grind of being human, but they're beginning to turn up the right side. There is something about going through the grind in which they are being brought to radiance. [...] I know it's not a translation, it's just a suggestion, but I think it's suggestion that indicates something of the quality of someone who's going through the grind and is [...] beginning to come out with a sense that they're doing something real.
[...]
"[I]t seems to me [...] that he's saying these are not instructions from above, these are indications of what really is from within. And that's going to be the extraordinary thing about what we're going to learn over the next few weeks [from the Sermon on the Mount]: it's all to do with patterns of desire in the midst of living with real things. It's never a question of “I give you an order and now you must fulfill it.” It's always a question of: this is what is going on and this is what desire looks like, let's work out how to live this in such a way that it bears witness to God.
"So, “radiance” [and] the notion of God not coming down from above but being in the midst and actually beginning to show forth what it's going to be like to be radiant with life alongside him, with him being alongside us and enabling us to inhabit and to discover the kingship of God."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time 2023 A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK7aJyYupVU)
[Source of quotes from James Alison's Knowing Jesus and Brian Maclaren's We Make the Road by Walking, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/epiphany4a/]
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