Written by Charles B. Williams |
Sunday, June 11, 2023
In these blessings, we find the description of the citizen of heaven (Phil. 3:20–21), and with it, a heavenly pattern, for it marks the man who recognizes that this world cannot truly satisfy and reminds us that true blessedness is not found in the fading pleasures of all that this fading world offers. And it is here that we see the greatest blessing of all: that this pattern makes us ready for heaven, by molding us into the image of the King of this heavenly kingdom.
At the close of every Lord’s Day, the minister is afforded the tremendous privilege of pronouncing the benediction of our triune God on his assembled people: “May the Lord bless you, and keep you . . .” What beneficence! What boon! What bounty! to become the recipients of the divine favor and protection of the Maker and Redeemer of heaven and earth!
But then Monday comes, and once more we find ourselves engulfed in a seemingly endless wave of tragedies, both personal and corporate: an ailing father, a failed engagement, a divided congregation, a people in turmoil. Have the blessings failed? Has God forsaken his people?
Many of us recognize that divine favor is not materialistic, for the Scriptures never promise a life of influence, ease, or pleasure. At the same time, the sorrows we endure can so overwhelm us that we are left feeling confused and helpless. Bearing under the fury of a world that hates us from without, and the terrors of a conscience awakened to the depth of our own sin from within, such circumstances leave us utterly humiliated and exposed to our own inadequacy. And we ask: where is the blessing?
It is within this context that our Savior addresses his own, a people wounded and wearied under the weight of their estate of sin and misery. Matthew recounts to us those glad tidings Christ has brought as he pronounces the inauguration of the long-awaited kingdom, the blessings conferred upon the recipients of that kingdom, and the mode in which such blessings come as we await its consummation.
A Conflict of Kingdoms
The opening chapters of Matthew’s gospel narrate the irruption of the heavenly dawn into the earthly realm of sin and darkness. Against the backdrop of yet another mock Pharaoh comes one greater than Moses, the virgin-born Davidic Son, upon whose shoulders rest the government of an ever-increasing, unshakable kingdom (Isa. 9:6–7).
For sure, the nation had long awaited a deliverer, but their expectations were too small, too earthly. As Jesus travels from town to town, heralding the kingdom’s arrival, the people expect a political Messiah who will expel the Roman legions from their midst, not the demonic hordes. They hold to delusions of grandeur—of earthly power and prosperity—not spiritual liberation. The citizens want a theonomic revolution and festal buffets, while the rulers want only parlor tricks and magic shows. Yet Jesus’s message of the kingdom, summarized in the Sermon on the Mount, proclaims, not simply a better kingdom, but a different kind of kingdom. As Daniel portended, and as Luther recognized at Heidelberg in April 1518, the difference between the kingdom of Christ and the kingdoms of men was not a difference between dwarves and giants, but between light and dark. It was a difference not simply of size, but of kind. It was the difference between heaven and earth. And as this heavenly kingdom has irrupted into the earthly plane, it operates according to a different set of principles. The Beatitudes (Matt. 5:1–12) describe what life as a citizen of heaven looks like here on earth, as that light shatters and scatters the darkness. These blessings take on a particular form, upending Israel’s, and our, expectations.
The Blessings of the Heavenly Kingdom
When we consider the Beatitudes, we must first recognize what they are not. They are not natural dispositions. The great nineteenth century novelists—Hugo, Dickens, and Tolstoy—wrote of the poor, almost as if poverty itself was an unqualified virtue. Today, others do the same, but with respect to particular personality traits. Our Savior, however, does neither. He does not pronounce favor on a particular economic class; nor is he declaring that God’s grace is restricted solely to the morbid, the introvert, or the blissfully naive. Rather, the blessings of the kingdom befall those who have been subjugated by grace and reconciled through the mediation of the Son.