Thought for the Day - Seeing the Beatitudes

Haywood Street Beatitudes Frescoe, by Christopher Holt

A Thought for the Day given at the lunchtime service of Holy Communion at St Giles-in-the-Fields on Wednesday 11th September 2014 based on the text of Luke 6.20-26

Jesus lifted up his eyes on his disciples - his closest followers - and said the words we now call The Beatitudes.

Since then, countless people have imagined Jesus’s eyes resting on them and have sought to understand what the Church of England website describes as “perhaps the most important, subversive and revolutionary text in the Bible.

Some see differences between the Beatitudes recorded in the gospel of Matthew and the gospel of Luke. That the account in Matthew focusses on the kingdom to come - ‘blessed are the poor in spirit’, ‘blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness’ - with Luke’s text focussing the reality of the poverty around us in the here and now : ‘blessed be “ye” or “you who are” poor’, ‘Blessed are ye that hunger now’; a radicalising rather than spiritualising emphasis. Others suggest that such is the importance of this teaching that Jesus may have said these words more than once; the two gospel writers perhaps recording separate events.

Many see the beatitudes as the New Testament’s version of The Ten Commandments - revealing both the nature of God himself and of his expectations for how we are to follow his will. Augustine described the Beatitudes as the perfect charter for the Christian life. But unlike the Ten Commandments, this time, the instruction is relayed to his people by God himself, who embodies the beatitudes in the example of Christ. Some see the perfect way he lived out these blessings on the world right to the very end, finding correspondence between Christ’s last words on the cross and the text of the Beatitudes – particularly the way they are expressed in Matthew’s gospel.

Some see the close proximity of the blessings and woes in Luke’s gospel (the woes come a bit later in Matthew) as particularly problematic for modern - and especially Anglican - ears; in an age when it is common to side-step binary judgements in favour of a third - or middle way. While others see Luke’s quickfire blessing and woes as essential, that we might learn to see through the eyes of Jesus. To see that when we are relatively comfortably off financially, well fed, laughing our way through life and regularly showered with praise, we may be living the life of Riley - but not the life of Christ. To live that life - the life of true richness, fulfilment, flourishing and peace, we must accept that we cannot rely on our own merits. We must accept that we are poor, we are in need of nourishment, purpose and reconciliation. We must accept we need our Saviour.

The one who is lifting up his eyes on us now. 

As we hear the words of The Beatitudes, this week, who or what do we see in them?

Image:  Haywood Street Beatitudes by Christopher Holt. featuring members of the Hayward Street Congregation in Ashefille.