Sermon

Sermon # 1027
February 6, 2011
Matthew 4:23-5:12
Dr. Ed Pettus

“The Good News of the Kingdom”

Jesus came with a message. Jesus came to bring good news. He wanted then and wants us to realize something about the life we have on this earth. Jesus proclaimed the good news of the kingdom of heaven. After Jesus was baptized by John in the river Jordan, he was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. The next story in Matthew’s gospel tells that when Jesus heard John the Baptist had been arrested, Jesus began to preach his message. His first words were: “Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near”. As he called his disciples, he also went throughout Galilee visiting synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom. The beatitudes begin and end with the kingdom of heaven. The Sermon on the Mount is filled with the message of the kingdom of heaven. The gospel of Matthew also includes parables about what the kingdom of heaven is like.
I have been preaching recently about discipleship and our focus on Jesus Christ and today we look at his message to us. It is a message of good news. Good news does not sell well today – if it did we might hear more in news broadcasts. Bad news seems to sell. It certainly gets most of the air time. But Jesus is clearly a bearer of good news for the kingdom of Heaven has some near. It is in our midst. This message drew people to Christ. His fame spread very quickly throughout the region and people would bring their sick family and friend to meet Jesus. And he preached and healed, and when word gets out…word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertizing. Good news was welcomed in Galilee, and Jerusalem, and Decapolis, and Judea and beyond the river Jordan. People were coming from every direction to see this healer and preacher of good news.

These people were eager to hear about a new kingdom. Many had probably lost hope for something new. Some thought a new kingdom would come in power to overthrow the Roman Empire. Some were exhausted by the same old messages given by messengers who spoke empty words. So Jesus comes on the scene speaking as one with authority. People took notice. The downtrodden, the poor, the beaten, the wounded, the marginal, everyone heard and came to hear more. Great crowds came. It is hard for us to imagine the number of people or the kind of people who came to see and hear Jesus.

It is in this setting where Jesus goes up the mountain and sits down to proclaim his message of the kingdom. We have come to call this the Sermon on the Mount. The congregation included Jesus’ disciples and all of these people who have come to be healed of physical disease and spiritual dis-ease. Today we will focus on the most famous part of this sermon – the beatitudes.

The beatitudes are on the one hand a favorite text for many in the Christian community, but, on the other hand, they are also troubling for us. We have struggled to understand fully what they mean. But perhaps we are helped in seeing this message through the setting, through the message Jesus had been proclaiming up to this point and to whom he was speaking on the mountain.

Some have thought of the beatitudes as goals to be attained. We hear there is blessing for a type of person, meek or peacemaker or poor in spirit, and we try to become that type of person thinking that we could then be included in the blessings and mercies given in the sermon. But taking into consideration the setting and the message that the kingdom has come near, we might see the beatitudes, not as goals to attain, but as recognition of the church, that is, of who is welcomed. Later in Matthew Jesus welcomes again with the call: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).

Jesus says, Blessed are…
Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the mournful, the merciful, and so forth. He is addressing people hungry for good news, people searching for wholeness, those who have questioned if hope is even possible anymore. Blessed are…an address to the Christian community, the searchers who had come to see Jesus. Some of you are poor in spirit, some of you are meek, some of you have pain, some of you are pure in heart and Jesus has a message of good news for you…you have a place in the kingdom of heaven. Meekness and poverty of spirit and persecuted ones, these are not goals for us, this is who we are. It is who the people were who came out from all over the region to hear and see Jesus. In essence the message Jesus brings is that those who are peacemakers, the persecuted, the pure of heart…these are signs of God’s blessing. Blessed are you who are in the condition you are in. Blessed are you who have this character of heart and mind and soul that has come to hear the messenger of good news. Blessed are you who are not received anywhere else.

Blessed are those…for they will…
They will: inherit the kingdom, be comforted, inherit the earth, and so forth. Life in the kingdom is here and now but it is not yet fully realized either. They will see even more, they will see God, the will receive mercy, they will be filled. The beatitudes are about the character of the characters who came to hear Jesus and the destiny that is theirs to come and has even come near if not fully yet. The beatitudes open our eyes to who we are and give us the message of hope for the kingdom here and yet to come. Realizing who we are as God’s church in the world – we have hope in the kingdom of heaven.


Let’s take one example: Blessed are the poor in spirit. Who are they? Is “poor in spirit” something we should strive to become or a group Jesus sees gathered at the mountain? If anything we are not in a position to say whether or not we deserve to be in the kingdom of heaven or to receive God’s love or whether we are poor in spirit or meek or merciful. Poor in spirit – these are the kinds of people I think are poor in spirit: people who don’t understand the Bible. Has that ever happened to you? People who do not know what to pray. People who say they cannot grasp God’s love. People too sad or melancholy to believe they can be accepted by God. People who know they are bankrupt when it comes to the things of God. But who are those received into the kingdom? The least of these…those who believe they are un-receivable. Those who struggle with prayer and religion and spiritual disciplines and service and worship and communion. The poor in spirit is any who question or doubt and the good news preached to us in Jesus Christ is that we are welcomed in the kingdom of God!

We could never “do” enough – that is why we cannot earn our place in the kingdom. Beatitudes are not goals or conditions we must achieve, but examples of people who are welcomed into the kingdom…these are the kinds of people who were welcomed nowhere else! If beatitudes were goals to be achieved they would be nothing more than a new legalism, a form of works righteousness. Do we really think that Jesus set our goals at being poor and mournful and meek and persecuted?

In Luke’s gospel and the parallel passage to the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus also proclaims blessings to people who are in a particular way: poor, hungry, weeping…and the message is the same – there is hope in the kingdom of God. But then Jesus announces the opposite of beatitudes in the form of woes. The reason Jesus gives woes to the rich and the full and the laughing is because they have the danger of thinking they do not need the kingdom. It is terribly difficult to see the kingdom that has come near when we believe that we have it all and can get it all ourselves without any need for God. Terribly difficult.

I think that what people heard in Jesus’ words was that anyone is bless-able! There is no one God cannot change. In the beatitudes people heard an upside down world being set right side up! According to Dallas Willard: “[The beatitudes] are explanations and illustrations, drawn from the immediate setting, of the present availability of the kingdom through personal relationship to Jesus” (The Divine Conspiracy, p. 106). What is Jesus saying in the beatitudes? How do we live in response to them? “They serve to clarify Jesus’ fundamental message: the free availability of God’s rule and righteousness to all of humanity through reliance upon Jesus himself, the person now loose in the world among us. They do this simply by taking those who, from the human point of view, are regarded as most hopeless, most beyond all possibility of God’s blessing or even interest, and exhibiting them as enjoying God’s touch and abundant provision from the heavens” (p. 116).

Remember who came to see Jesus. These were the powerless, the weak and meek, the marginalized in society and they had little hope in their situation. Jesus sought to help people realize that they were able to be good, made good by being in a relationship with Jesus. That relationship means walking in the present kingdom of heaven, seeing the truth of Jesus’ message that the kingdom is here and is now and yet is to come. But we drift away from kingdom living and get swept into social and media expectations that say we need to have more and consume more and do whatever it takes to get ours and whatever else those messages are.

Jesus’ message brings us into the kingdom, helps us realize we are in the kingdom as we are – poor in spirit or meek or peacemaker or hungry or thirsty. The purpose of Jesus’ sermon was to help us become realistic with our lives and to open us to the nature of God’s kingdom. Jesus would go on to teach more about the kingdom. The kingdom is like a mustard seed, like yeast, like a treasure hidden in a field, like a net thrown into the sea and what we notice about these things is they are common things, like the common people who are received into the kingdom. This is the kingdom the world does not receive and of which it does not know. The kingdom is a condition of vision, love, hope, joy in which we dwell as God’s people, as a people in Christ.

I was trying to think of a way to visualize the kingdom that has come near, but Jesus himself said it is not a kingdom that we can say is over here or over there. It is a kingdom among us, or as could be translated, within us (Luke 17:20-21). It is the kingdom where we are welcomed, the kingdom we are to seek, and in which we are to grow to becoming changed in the inner life toward inward righteousness. We may not be able to see it but we can see a lot in the world that we know is not the kingdom of heaven.

In one way the beatitudes extend an invitation to those who have never been invited to anything – come to Jesus and in coming you will know the good news of the kingdom of heaven. For it is yours and you will be comforted, filled, called God’s children. In today’s world, this is still very good news, good news indeed! Amen.