Reflecting on the many ways the Beatitudes have been understood, author Debie Thomas clarifies what she believes the Beatitudes are not:
People who know little else about Jesus know the Beatitudes. Some folks read them as lines of poetry. Some consider them a rule of life. Others find them naïve and impractical. Having grown up in the church, I’m familiar with the ways the Beatitudes are often misread and misused. I want to start there, by naming what they are not:
The Beatitudes are not sentiments. It’s easy in our consumerist culture to allow a word like “blessing” to become greeting card fodder, bland and meaningless. (“I’m so #Blessed.”) But the Beatitudes are not meant to settle and soothe us; they’re meant to startle us awake. Yes, they are pastoral, and yes, they give us hope. But Christian hope is not a sedative. Christian hope gets us up and out the door.
The Beatitudes are not to-do items. They are not suggestions, instructions, commandments, or quid pro quos. There is nothing transactional about them, nothing that smacks of a “should,” a “must,” or an “ought.” It is emphatically not the case that if I try very hard to be poorer, sadder, meeker, hungrier, thirstier, purer, more peaceable, and more persecuted than I am right now, God will like, love, reward, and appreciate me more than God already does.
The Beatitudes are not shame tactics. The point is not to read Jesus’s litany of blessings for the poor and the disenfranchised and walk away feeling like an overprivileged wretch. The takeaway Jesus intends for his listeners is neither shame nor self-condemnation. The last thing Jesus’s Beatitudes should do is defeat us.
The Beatitudes are not permission slips for passivity. To use Jesus’s teachings about sorrow, meekness, poverty, and persecution to keep oppressed people oppressed is to distort his words and intentions. There is nothing in the Beatitudes that excuses injustice, nothing that relativizes abuse, nothing that frees us to tell suffering people that their suffering is God-ordained and redemptive.
Through Jesus’s example, we learn that the Beatitudes are a vocation for our lives. Thomas points out:
Jesus acts. He doesn’t simply speak blessing; he lives it. Through his words, his hands, his feet, his life, he brings about the very blessings he promises. Insisting that pain in and of itself is neither holy nor redemptive in the Christian story, Jesus works to bring healing, abundance, liberation, and joy to everyone who crosses his path.
This is the vocation we are called to. The work of sharing the blessings we enjoy is not the work of a distant someday. It is the work we’re called to now. The Beatitudes remind us that blessing and justice are inextricably linked. If it’s blessing we want, then it’s justice we must pursue.
Reference:
Debie Thomas, Into the Mess and Other Jesus Stories: Reflections on the Life of Christ (Cascade Books, 2022), 120–121, 123–124.
Image Credit and inspiration: Minh Trí, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, 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:
The stories from the community always uplift my spirit. Today, I became tearful while reading Lazarus’s story. It touched me deeply, and I felt connected even through the ethernet. I am grateful and thankful for all the stories my brothers and sisters across the world send to Center for Action and Contemplation. They help me feel part of the bigger story!
— Shona C.
