The Lutheran priest and author Nadia Bolz-Weber questions how we might follow the Beatitudes:
It can be easy to view the Beatitudes … as Jesus’s command for us to try real hard to be meeker, poorer, and mourn-ier in order that we might be blessed in the eyes of God…. But what if the Beatitudes aren’t about a list of conditions we should try to meet to be blessed? What if they are not virtues we should aspire to?… Maybe the Sermon on the Mount is all about Jesus’s lavish blessing of the people around him on that hillside … who that world—like ours—didn’t seem to have much time for: people in pain, people who work for peace instead of profit, people who exercise mercy instead of vengeance.
Maybe Jesus was simply blessing the ones around him that day who didn’t otherwise receive blessing, who had come to believe that, for them, blessings would never be in the cards…. Doesn’t that just sound like something Jesus would do?
Bolz-Weber offers her own version of beatitudes for people who may not feel blessed today:
Blessed are the poor in spirit. You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you.
Blessed are they for whom death is not an abstraction.
Blessed are they who have buried their loved ones, for whom tears could fill an ocean.
Blessed are they who have loved enough to know what loss feels like.
Blessed are the mothers of the miscarried.
Blessed are they who don’t have the luxury of taking things for granted anymore.
Blessed are they who can’t fall apart because they have to keep it together for everyone else.
Blessed are the motherless, the alone, the ones from whom so much has been taken….
Blessed are those who no one else notices. The kids who sit alone at middle-school lunch tables. The laundry guys at the hospital. The sex workers and the night-shift street sweepers.
Blessed are the losers and the babies and the parts of ourselves that are so small, the parts of ourselves that don’t want to make eye contact with a world that loves only the winners.
Blessed are the forgotten.
Blessed are the closeted.
Blessed are the unemployed, the unimpressive, the underrepresented….
I imagine Jesus standing there blessing us all because I believe that is our Lord’s nature. Because, after all, it was Jesus who had all the powers of the universe at his disposal but did not consider his equality with God something to be exploited. Instead, he came to us in the most vulnerable of ways, as a powerless, flesh-and-blood newborn. As if to say, “You may hate your bodies, but I am blessing all human flesh. You may admire strength and might, but I am blessing all human weakness. You may seek power, but I am blessing all human vulnerability.”… [Jesus] was God’s Beatitude—God’s blessing to the weak in a world that admires only the strong.
Reference:
Nadia Bolz Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People (Convergent Books, 2015), 184, 185–186, 188.
Image credit and inspiration: Malek Larif, untitled (detail), 2019, photo, India, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like a raindrop poised on a leaf, the Beatitudes provide a drop-by-drop prescription to counter-culturally create the kin-dom of God.
Story from Our Community:
When I think about how many changes my life has gone through, I am amazed at the resilience of the human body and spirit. I am amazed at the way we are tied together by fate and fortune. We are one.
—Tom B.
