There
is a timelessness to All Saints Sunday, similar to the spacelessness
to World Communion Sunday.  On World Communion Sunday, as the Table
of Christ feeds people around the whole world, we are able to connect
to our siblings in faith without distance separating us.  On All
Saints day we connect to those who went on before us, blessed us, and
entered the great cloud of witnesses.  I often think of the great
cloud of witnesses as being not just around us, but under us – they
are the ones on whose shoulders we stand.  

Some
of the saints we knew well, some of their names will be read today,
some of them predated us by too many years for us to know them by
name, and yet they form the great cloud of witnesses.  This reminds
us, as well, that we are here only for a brief period of time in the
work of the church.  Someday, we too, will be part of the cloud.  The
generations march ever onward.  The cloud will someday include us,
and those who aren’t even here yet!  The generations march ever
onward.  Today is a day of timelessness.

It
is also a day of timelessness in that grief slows down time, and time
can feel relentless.  On All Saints Day we don’t JUST remember those
who went on before us, and take a moment to acknowledge them, we also
notice the heartbreak of grief and attend to each other in our
heartbreak.  While it is wonderful to have a great cloud of witnesses
around us, most of us would rather have those we love right here with
us!  We are thankful to God for their lives, but usually we really
wish we were able to share more time with them!

There
is a deep holiness to the All Saints celebration, deep enough that
there is mystery in it as well.  In seeking to be faithful to the
lives of the Saints, the lectionary has given us rather mysterious
text as well.  It seems simple, until you try to make sense of it!
Here are the useful bits I’ve learned about these so called
Beatitudes:

1. The
   verbs really matter.
2. A
   bunch of the individual “blessings” are quotes from the Hebrew
   Bible.
3. A
   lot of explanations exist to solve seeming contradictions

I’m
gonna explain each.  First of all, the verbs.  Those who speak Greek
say that a whole lot of effort is made into having the verbs be in
the form they’re in.  Namely, that the statements say blessed ARE,
but then indicate a future reality (mostly).  Furthermore, they
aren’t commandments, they are stated as facts.  Finally, according to
Feasting on the Word, “In
Psalm 1 the Hebrew word translated in our English text by our word
‘blessing’ is the word ’ashar,
which means in its literal sense ‘to find the right road’. … This
is the meaning of ‘ashar in the nine uses of ‘blessed’” in the
Beatitudes.”¹
That means that these mean something like “You are on the right
road when you are poor in spirit.”²
Or, perhaps, “You who are merciful are on the right road, you will
receive mercy.”  So each line says “this group of people is on
the right road – and this is where it will lead them in the
future.”  These aren’t particularly normal verb constructions,
which is why they’re worth mentioning.

Now,
the Jesus Seminar thinks there is evidence to suggest that Jesus
likely said 4 of these blessings – because they show up in Luke and
Thomas.  Those are: the poor in Spirit, those who grieve, those who
hunger and thirst (for righteousness), and those who are persecuted.
They think Matthew filled in the rest as a way to uphold the early
Christian Community.³
In both cases, the blessings have striking Hebrew Bible roots.  

First
off, this text seems to be a reworking of Psalm 1, that being a Psalm
that talks about blessed people rather extensively (in the “to find
the right road” meaning).  Regarding comfort to mourners, which the
Jesus Seminar thinks goes back to Jesus, that sounds a whole lot like
Isaiah 61:1-3, “The
spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the
broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to
the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, and the
day of vengeance of our God; to
comfort all who mourn;
to provide for those who mourn in Zion—to give them a garland
instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle
of praise instead of a faint spirit.”  Regarding meek inheriting,
which the Jesus Seminar thinks Matthew created,  we hear it in Psalm
37:11, “But
the meek shall inherit the land, and delight in abundant prosperity.”

As
a whole, the lists of qualities of people sound like lists in the
Hebrew Bible that relate to who can enter the temple!  There are
moral standards being held here, and they reflect the tradition they
grow from.  For example,

Psalm
15:1-5

1 O Lord,
who may abide in your tent?
   Who may dwell on
your holy hill? 
2 Those
who walk blamelessly, and do what is right,
   and
speak the truth from their heart; 
3 who
do not slander with their tongue,
   and do no evil
to their friends,
   nor take up a reproach against
their neighbours; 
4 in
whose eyes the wicked are despised,
   but who
honour those who fear the Lord;
who stand by their oath even
to their hurt; 
5 who do
not lend money at interest,
   and do not take a
bribe against the innocent. 
Those
who do these things shall never be moved.

Psalm
24:3-6 does the same.  So, Jesus is REWORKING, or REMOLDING his own
tradition, and then Matthew is doing the same.   Given those
realities, the really interesting pieces may be in what finally gets
included and excluded?  Why were the poor in spirit, those who mourn,
the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the
merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who are
persecuted for righteousness the groups of people who fit?  Is it
because things were hard for peasants and things were hard for early
Christians?  Or is there something deeper?  (I don’t know, I’m just
wondering.)

Finally,
people have done a lot of work to try to understand this passage, as
it is one of the best known parts of the Bible while being rather
obscure.  The New Interpreter’s Bible has points out, “Peacemakers
does not connote a passive attitude, but positive actions for
reconciliation.”⁴
(180, NIB)  Marcus Borg explains some of the others:

“’Poor
in spirit’ almost certainly does not refer to well-to-do people who
are nevertheless spiritually poor, but to people whose material
poverty has broken their spirit.  Moreover, ‘righteousness’ in the
Bible and Matthew does not mean personal rectitude, as it most often
does in modern English, but justice.  ‘Those who hunger and thirst
for righteousness’  likely means ‘those who hunger and thirst
for justice.’  The meaning of
Mathew’s wording is thus similar and perhaps identical to what we
find in Luke, for it is the poor and hungry who yearn for justice.
In short, like the Lord’s Prayer, the Beatitudes confirm that the
kingdom of God is both religious and political: it is God’s
kingdom, and it is a kingdom on earth
that involves a transformation of life for the poor and hungry.”⁵

Perhaps
that’s why these groups were included!  Taken
together, the work of scholars establishes that these are meaningful
phrases that fit into the rest of Jesus’ teaching, and that they
aren’t meant to just be a mystery!

So,
these really are powerful teachings.  As one scholar puts it, “In
none of the beatitudes is advice being offered for getting along in
this world, where mercy is more likely to be regarded as a sign of
weakness than to be rewarded in kind.”⁶
“Christianity is not a scheme to reduce stress, lose wight, advance
one’s career, or preserve one from illness.  Christian faith,
instead, is a way of living based on the firm and sure hope that
meekness is the way of God, that righteousness and peace will finally
prevail, and that God’s future will be a time of mercy and not
cruelty.”⁷
The Beatitudes continue in the tradition of differentiating the ways
of God – justice, righteousness, peace, well-being for all – with
the ways of the world.  The values the Beatitudes celebrate are not
at all the ones the world seeks, but they are the ones that build the
kin-dom.

On
All Saints we remember those who went on before us, and we remember
the ways that their lives followed God’s ways.  On All Saints we
remember that they have shown us the right road, and that in doing so
they made it easier for us to travel it.  We also remember that the
roads that we choose matter: they matter for the kin-dom itself, and
they matter for those who will come after us.  

It
is a good road, this one that Jesus describes, it is a very different
road than others we could also choose to walk.  It is a good thing we
have models who have walked the road ahead of us – and continue to
walk it with us as the great cloud of witnesses.  Amen  

– 

1Earl
F. Palmer “Pastoral Perspective on Matthew 5:1-12” in Feasting
on the World Year A Volume 4, David L. Bartlett and Barbara
Brown Taylor, editors (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, KY,
2011) 238.

2Palmer,
238.

3Robert
W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels:
The Search for the Autthentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA,
1993), page 138.

4M.
Eugene Boring, New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VII: Matthew
Leander E. Keck editorial board convener (Nashville: Abingdon Press,
1995), page 180.

5Marcus
Borg, Jesus: The Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious
Revolutionary (HarperOne:
2015), 190-191.

6Boring,
179.

7Boring,
181.

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady