The Beatitudes Are Spiritude in Action

[HKHaugan]

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven (Mt.5:3).

 

This very well may be the foundational theme for the whole Gospel.  It is addressed to every human being, believer and unbeliever alike.  Jesus is making a statement that opens the door to the heart. That is, if the heart is willing to receive it.  The heart is the internal battleground where fear dominates an individual’s view of self and others because of its self-centeredness caused by sin. 

 Sin victimizes the heart’s aloneness as it surveys the environment in which it exists.  Fear is the twin brother of pride which together produce defensive self-protection through rationalization and self-justification.  The primary biblical examples are Adam and Eve.  When God asks Adam, “Where are you?” he replies, “I heard you in the garden and I was afraid was because I was naked, so I hid.”   I heard you in the garden (spiritually separated from God), and I was afraid (spirit of fear and shame), because I was naked (relationally alone), so I hid (loss of identity, relationship and self-worth).”

 It doesn’t stop there.  God asks two other questions that gets Adam to see how it has affected his relational experience with Eve as well as God. “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”  Adam discovers he has another problem, defensiveness.  He blames both God and the woman, “The woman you put here with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it.”  Blame.  The woman feeling the same effects tries to shift the blame on the serpent.  It’s always someone else who is responsible for my condition in life.  There is no perfection, no love, only aloneness and despair.

Summing it up we have aloneness, fear, guilt, loss of identity, self-worth and blame as six factors produced by sin, the tempter’s nature carrying out his plan to separate each human being from their Creator.  They comprise the downside in the spiritual dimension that influences every single human being as they process their daily living experience.  It is these factors and their instigator that put into action God’s response, a spiritual response to counter the tempter and his temptations.  He curses the serpent and puts enmity between the serpent and the woman telling him that her offspring will “crush your head and you will strike his heel.”  Herein lies the plan that will spiritually restore the heart of every individual spiritually, personally and relationally, first to God and then to one another.  Yes, their bodies will die but they will find a new way of life which will be spiritual, personal and relational.  That perfect life finalized in the birth, life, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, God the Son.

 Each of us having been born with a sinfully self-centered nature can be reborn spiritually by accepting God the Son Jesus in our mind and heart, who through the Holy Spirit gives us this new life to grow and share with others.  With a reborn spirit we can live with confidence personally and relationally.  The tempter’s six, aloneness, fear, guilt, loss of identity, self-worth and blame are replaced with each of us having a unique relationship with Jesus, faith instead of fear, our guilt forgiven, making us a child of God, blameless and spiritually maturing.  Think again about Jesus changing the six jars of water into pure wine at the Cana wedding feast.  God’s ‘Seven’ replaces the tempter’s six.  The Holy Spirit births each of us into a relationship with our Heavenly Father through Jesus His Son in a never-ending growth experience in His eternal Kingdom. 

 

 

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted (Mt.5:4).

One thing that must precede our reading of the Beatitudes is the One who is presenting them.  He is the source of the blessings.  He is the source of their meaning.  He is the source of their resolution.  If He is giving His blessing in the moment we experience each of these, it is because He is present in each of us personally and the Spirit is resolving them in us.  These are His insights for the restoration of the image of God in each of us.

 There are three kinds of mourning, personal, relational and spiritual.  In each there is a degree of sorrow, guilt, regret and remorse.  Sorrow is usually because of our recognition that we can’t control circumstances.  Guilt is when we know we have done wrong and we have that sense of grieving separation for our part in it.  Regret is the specific reaction we have when we are aware of our complicity.  Remorse is the hanger-on when we don’t have what caused the problem resolved.

 Personally, we mourn over our tendency to make mistakes, past errors that remain with us because of distance and time.  Grief is the mourning we carry at the death of family, friends and associates. 

Relationally, we mourn over our aloneness, not being understanding and understood, emotionally distressed and isolated because of unresolved relationships. 

 

Spiritually, mourning can find itself expressed in anger or blame.  It’s when we don’t understand the ‘why?’ in a situation or “Oh God, why me, what have I done to deserve this?”  We slam a door, beat our fist on a table and scream at the world around us.  In each of these we are searching in the invisible for a visible, understandable answer.  It is deep within the heart, beyond the mind’s grasp and seemingly lost in a spiritual reality that seems distant. 

 The very image of God in us recognizes its separation from it source.  Therein begins the blessing.  The recognition causes a reaching out.  We think, we investigate our emotions and attitudes that lie in the heart.  Realizing we are an image of God and even a child of God, we search His Word, we call on friends for prayer, we share our feelings with another brother or sister in the Spirit. 

“…for they shall be comforted.”  The promise is that what starts with recognition is the gateway to resolution.  Comfort is that personal sense of having heard the call and accepting it in the heart.  But comfort is temporary.  It is the moment that stability finds a base in the heart in order that we move on to the next event in our life having been freed from what had stopped us.  Whether it is the death of a close friend or family member the comfort we receive spiritually is to free us from the self-mourning to being available for someone else’s time of mourning.  To know that the will of God is to take care of His own both in life and in death.  Blessed are those who know the meaning of mourning in the mind, plant it in the heart and live it in the Spirit.

The very fact that we mourn is the image of God in us reflecting our separation from our Creator.  His promise for the believer’s future in Him, “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death' or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed (Rev.21:4).”

 

 

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth (Matt.5:5).”

 Are you a country boy, an urban sophisticate, a suburban seeker?  Is Chicago ‘your kind of town?’ Maybe the ‘Big Apple’ is you.  Perhaps you left your heart in San Francisco or feel you are a ‘man of the world.”  But above all that, are you comfortable in your own skin, the most local part of the earth you will ever know?  Why?  From dust we came and to dust we shall return (Gen.3:19).  Our personal identity is wrapped up in so many spiritless things that this may be the best way to approach the meaning of meekness. 

 There are two basic meanings of meekness.  There is the present age’s idea that meekness is empty weakness.  Then there is the Biblical understanding, gentleness arising from an inner strength.  Meekness (Gk. praeis) used in the time of Jesus had a built-in understanding.  It was gentleness in the context of a relationship with God.  Regardless of circumstance you didn’t get rattled when insulted, provoked when challenged or when a weakness was manipulated.  This was an inner strength upon which you relied and lived.  ‘You were comfortable in your own skin.’

The Biblical kind of meekness is a particularly applicable word for our present age where cultural division and personality attack are the daily media presentations.   We are launched into the fray on a daily basis simply by turning on the news.  The underlying media strategy is to get us to feel overwhelmed, to take sides, see everything as a personal threat and stay frustrated about issues over which we as individuals have no control.  Right there, in those moments, meekness is the issue.  Because what happens on a large cultural level happens within every individual.  Based on what we ultimately believe in and trust, that is the strength behind how we ultimately process our life and respond. 

 This world condition, the way human society without God works in our earthly environment, is not new.  It is the challenge everyone has always faced every day.  Having just emerged from a major political climate of anxiety, frustration and emotional duress, we are confronted by the temptation to dwell on possible future alternatives of survival through social upheaval and insecurity.  We have to face the fact that we are media influenced, culturally conditioned and feel individual isolation.  How believers in Jesus face all that starts with repentance because meekness is reliant not on what but who is the source of the inner strength that causes us to pause and realize who is in ultimate charge of everything.  When our personal world is turned upside down who is the ‘right-side-up’ person upon whom we depend for counsel?  It’s not about having a stiff upper lip or gritting your teeth or sucking it up and getting on with it.  It’s about releasing ourselves to the One who is our strength.  That’s meekness in every next moment.

 When Jesus was teaching on that distant mountainside, was in the world He lived in experiencing inner and outer religious, political and social turmoil.  The dominant Roman political machine, the compromised spiritless religious leadership, the social class separation and its judgmentalism, the economic climate and physical survivability were all prevalent cultural forces in the individual mind.  In that shaky climate the Lord Jesus called people to realize how blessed the meek are.  Not only that.  The meek shall inherit the earth.  Say what?

 Right there, Jesus the man of inner spiritual strength, Spiritude, was presenting Himself as the source of that strength every person can have.  If we approach our earthly life with Him at the center of our processing this life then it is on the earth we are directly involved with that we inherit real strength; truth for our mind, a trust for our heart and the spiritual guidance of the Holy Spirit.  Notice how Jesus fulfills that reality when God gave Adam and Eve the right to rule over the earth.  Starting with the body and place we live in and the relationships we have within them, that is the earth we will inherit when we place ourselves in the loving hands of a loving God who revealed Himself in Jesus.  The earth then becomes our friend not our enemy. There is beauty everywhere that can be seen and enjoyed.  It begins where our inner strength is.  Nothing can shake what we know is real within.

Meekness is not anxiety hiding behind a fake smile, a pretensive handshake and a passive attitude.  “Who by being anxious can add one hour to his life? (Mt.6:27).”  Jesus was never led by anxiety over the economic, social and political issues that surrounded Him.  In fact, it was those things and their anxiety-producing enemies that killed Him.  But He rose from the dead and beat the world.  His kind of meekness was what we were designed to have by faith and in turn to share it.  The Holy Spirit was the strength within, the faith leading Jesus to follow His Father’s will in all His choices and decisions. 

 His Spiritude is our life and the earth we walk every day becomes ours.  Therein is the meaning of meekness.  Meekness in the world of relationships and meekness on the daily real estate where we have been placed.  The Cross in daily detail is our real meekness before God in Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Meekness before God, the vertical beam. Practiced where we are, the horizontal beam.

 

 

 

 

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled (Mt.5:6).

 There is a significant difference between what we hunger and thirst for visibly and what we hunger and thirst for invisibly.  Righteousness involves both.  It’s not just processing in the mind, heart and spirit what will meet the desire of our physical satisfaction.  It is really something much deeper, the hunger and thirst for being right in everything we think and do.  Wherever we are and whatever we do with whoever we are needs to be right.  We want to look right, be right and act right.  It’s the deep inner hunger and thirst in everyone. 

 The social and economic culture we live in has a set of thirst quenchers that work for awhile but always seem to come up short when it comes to filling us.  The hunger pangs for more never seem to get the promised vacuum filling.  You get the right job in the right profession, have a growing family, hang around with the right people and get a home in the right neighborhood with a club membership and special seats at sports arenas.  You’re famous and people recognize you when you walk in.  But there’s something all that doesn’t fill, the invisible emptiness in the physical fullness.  As health slips way and the common pursuits are no longer heart driven, emotions fray and despair plays a familiar tune.  The missing link is the spiritual void that was left in the dust of our ‘right’ choices.  The ‘fitting in’ to the secular world’s process sapped all the energy and all that was left was the ten virgins’ unprepared lamps. Empty lamps, empty hearts and empty lives.

 The real hunger and thirst is for wisdom, a wisdom that comes only from a relationship with the Lord of Right, Jesus, the Son of God.  Remember Eve seeing the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?  She looked at it thinking it looked right, was the right kind of food and desirable for gaining wisdom, the ability to think and do right.  She took some and ate not realizing that apart from God that ‘right’ was not accessible without God leading the access.  All she came up with was aloneness, fear, relational separation, blame, shame and despair.  These made up the spiritual heart condition all human beings inherited ever since. 

 So then, what is the ‘right’ Adam and Eve lost?  Answer, faith, trust, belief, the spiritual “substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen (Heb.11:1).”  Their mind was tempted to think apart from God, their heart to trust apart from God and their spirit to have faith to do what was really right apart God.  The whole of human history is wrapped in the coils of this condition.  When Paul became convinced that there were none righteous, no not one (Rom.3:10) and that only a relationship with Jesus could begin the recovery, his purpose and mission became his life.  People needed to be restored to God through the only person who ever got life right, the resurrected Jesus, the Righteous One, whom he encountered on a road trip to Damascus.  Thus his three missionary journeys, his many letters to the churches in the Mediterranean and his appeal to the emperor in Rome for an audience to be a witness to this truth about Jesus. 

 Jesus revealed that being right was a spiritual gift from a spiritual source, the spiritual Kingdom of God.  That in order to get life in this world right it had to start with a relationship with Jesus who made every next moment of His life right in this world through faith.  That through His Crucifixion and Resurrection He became accessible spiritually, personally and relationally to all who would receive Him.  But it starts spiritually, through the gift of personal choice, the only way a loving God can share His love.  The freedom to choose Him is the deepest freedom because it reaches our ‘inmost being’ where we really live and process life.  So, righteousness is not just a ‘religious’ word.  It means that the deepest yearning in our life is the yearning to be right in all we do.  We want to love right, be right, say right, do right and make the right choices in everything.  That is a totally right desire that can only be met by the One who is the Righteous One, Jesus the perfect Son of God.  He is the only One who ever got life right.  His death showed it.  His Resurrection proved it.  John wrote that Jesus was the way, the truth and the life (Jn.14:6).  The whole of the Bible is built around that reality.  The hunger and thirst within fulfilled in Him. 

 

 

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy (Mt.5:7)

There seems to be an orderly flow of the Spirit as we go from the major theme introduced, spiritual poverty.  Each step in the Beatitudes is a step toward spiritual riches and maturity.  It rings with Jesus’s words that will emerge in 6:19, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. 20 But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Mercy is the key word in the Old Testament for love.  For the Hebrew mind mercy was the love of God.  That in turn takes us to His parable of the Good Samaritan in which the culturally despised people of Samaria were considered unclean as was their land.  If the institutionally religious priest and Levite passed by an injured man what was really going on there?  Notice their process.  Their religious responsibility to maintain bodily cleanliness to remain liturgically clean was more important than the needs of another image of God.  Jesus is identifying ethnic, cultural and religious failure to meet the real needs of people around them, spiritual needs. 

If we deal with the Parable known as that of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10), I would hasten to say that the real subject of the parable is the half dead man, the one assaulted and left to die on the road to Jericho.  He is the one in need.  He is all of us left half dead by sin, with its religious, cultural, ethnic and secular identity divisions keeping our hearts suspended from spiritual functioning.  When Jesus uses the image of a Samaritan who could do good, it was a jarring confrontation to the self-elevating religious mindset that believes in religion before relationship.

Ethnicity, religion and identity seeking are the primary barriers to spiritual maturity expressed relationally through prejudice and judgmentalism which are attitudes governing the secular mind.  The most combatant followers of modernized tolerance are the those who offend the basic openness of shared ideas the freedom that comes from real tolerance.  The most intolerant are those whose constant bleating for tolerance exposes their hypocrisy.  It take Spiritudinal mercy that sees all people as images of God to be loved with patience and understanding. 

Those who do not know Jesus are the half dead walking all around us.  They just don’t know that death shadows their every move.  That is relational death, emotional death, social death and that inner grasping for meaning and purpose based on self-survival through self-elevation, spiritual death. 

Mercy is both a quality and a gift od the Spirit.  It takes sin’s blinders from the eye and gives the formerly blind to see the quality of God’s image in everyone starting with self.  This comes from the love of God which opens up the way we view the world of people the way Jesus did.  No one was beyond the scope of His love and concern.  

One more thing about mercy.  When one has realized that it takes the Cross to put in perspective our own spiritual poverty.  It’s then that the door is open to the riches that lie right behind the door that is Jesus.  He fills us with the Holy Spirit who provides and fill us with mercy.  Mercy is given us to see the mercy available to everyone through us.  “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” They will not only be given mercy, but they will also show what mercy is and those shown will be blessed.