It’s awards season in Hollywood.
This Sunday’s Oscar presentations come on the heels of the Screen Actors Guild awards, the BAFTAs, and the Golden Globes.
In truth, when it comes to Hollywood, every season is awards season. When you include all the technical and cinematic specialty events, there are more than 300 annual awards shows in which the TV and film industry honors its own.
In Jesus’ day, it was typical for Israel’s spiritual teachers to hand out awards as well, although not quite so literally. They routinely announced their “nominees” for the men and women who were most blessed by God.
Their proclamations went something like this: Blessed are the faithful and the obedient and those who try with all their might to become very pleasing to God.
Rigorously religious people came off looking quite good.
Then along came Jesus. After he produced his own list of winners, spiritual achievement awards have never been quite the same.
Jesus’ statements are known as the Beatitudes – eight declarations found in the Sermon on the Mount at the beginning of the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.
Understanding the Beatitudes is not rocket science. Rocket science is easy. At least rocket science follows known rules and principles. Jesus’ statements seem to violate every known assumption about spiritual vitality.
They turn upside-down the world’s most cherished values.
The Beatitudes aren’t guidelines for positive thinking or personal happiness. They are descriptions of the kind of people who are able to get close to God and are therefore bound to experience the kind of life they have always wanted.
If Jesus were handing out spiritual Academy Awards, those expecting to win Best Performance by a Righteous Person are not going to be giving any acceptance speeches. He doesn’t say, “Blessed are the comfortable, because that means God must be taking care of them.” He says just the opposite. Only those who are desperate for God as their only security are likely to sell out to him.
And unless we sell out to Jesus, we’ll just play religious games in Jesus’ name and call it “going to church.”
The very first Beatitude, for instance, is simply not the sort of thing you’d expect a great religious teacher to say: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3).
Who gets to enjoy God’s kingdom? Blessed are those who have so overdrawn their spiritual checking accounts that the grand total of what they have to impress God is zip. Blessed are those who have no spiritual assets, who are religiously pathetic, and don’t know the first thing about knowing God. In other words, blessed are the spiritual underachievers.
This is a joke, right? Why would it be a good thing to be spiritually impoverished?
The answer is that if you are spiritually bankrupt – and you know there’s nothing in your own performance you can count on – then you’ll ultimately conclude you have nothing to count on except Jesus.
Scottish Bible commentator William Barclay notes that the concept of “the poor” in ancient Israel had an interesting evolution. At first, poor people were identified as those who had little or nothing. Because they had little, they had no influence, even on the course of their own lives. Because they had no influence, powerful and irresponsible people were left free to crush them. Because they were crushed by others and were desperate for help, poor people were those most likely to place their hope in God.
They hoped in God because they had no other hope – and acting out of such desperation turns out to be the very thing that saves us.
Jesus’ first Beatitude ought to scare the living daylights out of outwardly religious people. Jesus wrecks the curve by eliminating the curve. When it comes to being good enough to impress God, we’re all put back to zero.
He then goes on to say, “Blessed are those who mourn – who grieve their own spiritual brokenness. Blessed are the meek – who know that they cannot leverage God with spiritual Brownie points and therefore must simply trust him.”
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness – who long, more than anything else, to be “in the right” with God.
Blessed are the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who are getting pushed around, laughed at, and squeezed out of the spotlight because they are certifiable losers in society’s winner-take-all games of money, sex, and power.
The bottom line with Jesus? Life’s “losers” are ideally positioned to become God’s winners.
Which, when you think about it, suddenly makes acceptance speeches a whole lot easier.
That’s because whenever we are blessed, there’s really only one Person to thank.
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