The Great Reversal: Dwelling in Possibility

It is good to be with you as we turn our hearts toward one of the most familiar, yet arguably a disruptive passages of scripture.

What do we do with the Sermon on the Mount? How do we approach and handle the most compelling sermon that Jesus ever preached? As I was preparing this week, I came across a thought from Professor Eric Barreto. He asks a question that stopped me in my tracks: “After Jesus has preached in such a compelling way, what do we have left to say?”

It is a valid question. The Sermon on the Mount really does have it all. I could get scholarly on you today. We could spend our time tracing the deep connections Matthew is making between Jesus and Moses, or how the Beatitudes mirror the Ten Commandments. And while that history is rich, it leaves me wondering: What is there to say about the teaching Jesus has for us today? What does this ancient text tell us about the way the Kingdom of Heaven is organized right now?

To answer that, we cannot separate these words from the story we have been following in Matthew’s Gospel. Remember where we are. Jesus has been baptized, he has been tested in the wilderness, and upon his return, he discovers his cousin John has been arrested. From that moment on, Jesus began to teach a specific message: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

He went about the countryside teaching that message, and the crowds followed. Large, desperate, hungry crowds. So, Jesus climbs the mountain for some respite, sits down with his disciples, and begins to speak. The Beatitudes are not just a list of nice sayings; they are the explanation of that initial message. These are the words that describe how the Kingdom has come near.

The words are simple:

Blessed are the poor in spirit…
Blessed are those who mourn…
Blessed are the meek…
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…

These passages are easy to say. They are easy to envision. But let us be honest with one another: they are extremely difficult to put into practice.

Look around at the society we live in. We, as a collective human family, have often done a poor job of living these words. This isn’t a criticism of this church, or of you personally. I know how hard this community of faith works. But when we look at the world at the injustice, the oppression, the violence, and the inequality we know that the Kingdom Jesus imagined has not yet fully come to be.

We must understand that the Sermon on the Mount does not stand alone. It is part of a larger, sweeping narrative. Andrew McGowan, a wonderful scholar, notes that if we disconnect the Beatitudes from the story of Jesus, they lose their substance. He writes, “They are not general principles for living, or an independently viable ethical framework… [Rather,] it is the reversal God promises of all that is wrong in the world.”

I love that phrase: The reversal of all that is wrong.

McGowan continues by saying, “The Beatitudes are not a mere commendation of moral goodness, but a promise of the way the justice of God will meet and transform the need of the world.” In a world that claims wealth, might, and military power are blessings, Jesus says: No. You have it backward. The good news is for the poor, the broken-hearted, and the oppressed. It is the promise that the posturing of the tyrant will eventually give way to the reign of heaven.

When we look closely at the text, we see a fascinating structure. There are nine teachings here, and the word righteousness shows up twice, essentially acting as bookends that divide the Beatitudes into two distinct sections.

The first four blessings reflect circumstances, situations that people are thrust into often against their will: poverty of spirit, mourning, meekness, and hungering for righteousness. These are the passive recipients of life’s hardness. The second set is more active: being merciful, making peace, having purity of heart. And finally, the ninth beatitude reflects on the systems of rejection and persecution that happen when we try to change the world.

So, how do we live in this Great Reversal?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer described it like this: “He comes in the form of the beggar, of the dissolute human child in ragged clothes, asking for help. He confronts you in every person that you meet. As long as there are people, Christ will walk the earth as your neighbour…”

If we can imagine Christ in our neighbour, then the Kingdom is at work. This echoes the prophet Micah, who centuries before asked what is required of us. The answer wasn’t burnt offerings or performative piety. It was this: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8).

Imagine a world where that kind of justice is done. Not retributive, punitive justice, but God’s justice, restorative and fair. Imagine a world where we walk humbly. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We need leaders not in love with money but in love with justice. Not in love with publicity but in love with humanity.”

Jesus was a leader in love with humanity. And in the Beatitudes, he is challenging our worldview. He is making us wonder if we are imagining the possibilities of the Kingdom of Heaven in ways that make us uncomfortable, or if we are just using religion to uphold the status quo.

Greg Paul, the founding pastor of Sanctuary Church in Toronto who works with the unhoused and marginalized, rewrites the Beatitudes to help us hear them with fresh ears. He imagines what those crowds of sick, desperate people on the hillside might have understood Jesus to say. In his book Resurrecting Religion, he writes:

Blessed are the spiritually bankrupt, for all the riches of the kingdom are available to bail them
out.
Blessed are those who see life is a litany of loss and destruction and who are so blasted by grief
they cannot stand, for they will find a new and strengthening intimacy among others
who grieve and with the Comforter by their side.
Blessed are the shoved out, put down, and ripped off, for they will discover that everything –
everything! – belongs to them and nothing can restrain them.
Blessed are those who are starving for justice, dying of thirst for someone to treat them right,
for a feast is coming.
Blessed are the guilty ones who, knowing their own guilt, show mercy to others; they’ll receive
mercy too.
Blessed are those whose whole being – body, soul, and spirit – is so focused on discovering God
for themselves that nothing in this world ever seems good enough; they’ll find what
they’ve been looking for at last.
Blessed are the ones who stand in the middle of other people’s disputes and are hated by both
sides; it’s a horrible place to be, but it’s where they are claiming their identity as children of God.
Blessed are those who are battered and bruised because they try to treat others well: they are
displaying their citizenship in the Kingdom of God here and now. (Greg Paul, Resurrecting Religion, 2018, p203).

Our job is not to romanticize these words. Our job is not to dilute the prophetic imagination that brought them forth. Those whom Jesus speaks to are the recipients of grace, but they are also often the victims of violence in a world bent toward destruction. We owe it to ourselves, and to them, to dwell in the possibility of a different world.

The poet Emily Dickinson wrote of this in her poem I Dwell in Possibility:

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

About the poem and the Beatitudes Prof Cameron Howard writes, “We might be so busy looking for a right answer, or an overarching theme, that we do not let the Bible transport us into its radical, ridiculous visions for the future. The prophets, as well as Jesus himself, ‘dwell in possibility,’ and their poems invite us, too, to dwell in that ‘fairer house.’”

Let’s you and I this community of faith dwell in that fairer house that we have been called to build. Let us commit to the Great Reversal. Let us build a house where the poor are lifted up, the mourners are comforted, and where there is a room available for everyone. Amen.