“Blessed
Are the Pure in Heart (Matthew 5:8)”
24th August 2023
Calvary
Homes
Lancaster,
Pennsylvania
Israel’s
first king was a magnificent physical
specimen.
1 Samuel tells us that he was a “handsome young man”―indeed,
that “there was not a man among the people of Israel more handsome
than he; he stood head and shoulders above everyone else” (1 Sam
9:2). And in the early days of his reign, the promise and potential
he had shown seemed to be fulfilled impressively. He won great
military victories, he united the nation, he was humble, and the
Spirit of God was upon him.
But
unfortunately, the story of Saul―as
you all know―ends
as a tragedy. God rejects Saul as king, and so gives the prophet
Samuel the unenviable task of anointing a new king while Saul was
still on the throne. He is sent to the village of Bethlehem to speak
to the family of a farmer and sheep-herder named Jesse, the grandson
of Ruth and Boaz. And
so he sets up a sacrifice and invites Jesse’s family to attend (1
Sam 16:5).
When,
as the family arrived for the sacrifice, Samuel caught a glimpse of
Jesse’s first son, Eliab―big,
strong, rugged―he
immediately thought―he
should have known better!―“Surely
this
is the LORD’s anointed” (16:6). But the text says, in verse 7 of
1 Samuel 16, “Do not consider
what he looks like
or his
height, because I have rejected him; for the LORD does not see things
as
people
do;
they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart”
(trans.
JRM).
Our
text this morning is from the Gospel of Matthew. It’s a very simple
text: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”
(Matt
5:8).
This verse is the sixth of the eight
(or nine)i
“Beatitudes” recorded by Matthew that introduce
Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount. In
the context of Matthew’s Gospel as a whole, the
Sermon on the Mount functions
as a précis
or summary of Jesus’ moral vision. The great subject or theme of
Jesus’ teaching and preaching was the
kingdom of God,ii
the long-anticipated kingdom of the end times in which God would
finally, at
long last,
fulfill
his ancient covenant promises and manifest
his saving sovereignty for all the world to see. Matthew,
by portraying Jesus as going
“up onto the mountain” and “sitting”
there
(Matt
5:1),
intends
us to see
him
here as a new
Moses
proclaiming his “law” to his
people.iii
This
new Torah of
Jesus,
as
the sermon bears out,
comprises
the
radical
will
of God
for men and women who
would be citizens of that
kingdom.iv
Right
at the outset―and
here is where it, as
we will see,
potentially
gets
tricky for
those of us who are
Protestant―Jesus
delivers a manifesto of sorts. In the
Beatitudes
Jesus
boldly proclaims
who is “in” and who, by implication,
is
“out” of the
kingdom. Note, if you will, the first and eighth beatitudes: “Blessed
are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt
5:3); and “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’
sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (5:10). By ending each
of these in the same way, Matthew “sandwiches,” as it were, the
entire section and thereby signals to his readers that all the verses
in between likewise describe the type of people to
whom the kingdom belongs.v
These
are the types
of
people
who
are citizens of the kingdom now
and
who
will,
when
the kingdom arrives in its fullness, experience all
the
future blessings which
are promised
in the intervening beatitudes.
This
list of people is an all or nothing list. Even more shocking―and,
make no mistake, the Beatitudes were meant
to disturb―is
that the list looks nothing like what we, let alone Jesus’ 1st century Galilean audience, would have expected it to look like. Look
at who Jesus congratulates:
the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, the persecuted―in
other words, the
kinds of people many of their
fellow Jews (not
to mention not a few Americans), especially those
who
were favorably
disposed to the venerable, nationalistic
tradition
of zealotry, would
have considered “losers.”
By
contrast, Jesus
blesses those who didn’t
fight for their own or their nation’s rights, but who instead
looked
to God for their help and
protection,
and who
waited
patiently for God to fulfill
the covenants he had made.vi
Indeed,
in these verses
Jesus
is speaking the
language of eschatological
reversal.
For implied in
the Beatitudes is
the notion that other
people,
many
of whom
may have assumed their pride
of
place in the kingdom to be assured, are
not
so “blessed.” Those
people, instead of blessing,
could instead
expect
judgment when the kingdom came.vii
At
this point, however, as I mentioned earlier, matters get potentially
tricky for those of us who are Protestants. Indeed, in my youth the
Beatitudes made me somewhat uncomfortable, conditioned as I was by an
evangelicalism that
took its cues from John and Paul when it came to the doctrine of
salvation. For Jesus here congratulates, not only
the
poor and oppressed, but also
those
who are meek, who are pure in heart, who
work for peace, who
hunger and thirst for justice, and who themselves show mercy to
others. Does
this not look, at first glance, like Jesus is listing so-called moral
and behavioral “entrance
requirements” for the kingdom?viii
My
youthful self instinctively asked, What
about John’s call to faith or Paul’s emphasis on grace alone?
As
I came to realize, however, such initial qualms, born of the
interpretive
lenses through which I read the text, were unwarranted. Yes,
it’s
self-evident
that
the
Beatitudes contain, at the very least, implicit
commands.
What
makes all the difference, however, is
the framework
in which we
understand these
implicit exhortations. And
it’s
quite clear, if we reflect carefully, that one text in the
Hebrew
Bible,
to which the
first three Beatitudes
allude,
provides
the needed framework.
This text is Isaiah
61:1-3,ix
which
reads:
The
spirit of the Lord God
is upon me,
because
the Lord
has anointed me;
he
has sent me to bring good news to the poor,
to
bind up the brokenhearted,
to
proclaim liberty to the captives,
and
release to the prisoners;
to
proclaim the year of the Lord’s
favor,
and
the day of vengeance of our God;
to
comfort all who mourn;
to
provide for those who mourn in Zion—
to
give them a garland instead of ashes,
the
oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the
mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.
They
will be called oaks of righteousness,
the
planting of the Lord,
to display his glory.
(NRSV,
alt. JRM)
If
we read the Beatitudes in this light,
it becomes quite
clear
that their
primary
purpose is not
to moralize, but
rather
to
comfort
or to
console.
Jesus, on the mountain, is not just
the new Moses; he is also
assuming the
prophetic
role
of Isaiah’s Spirit-anointed herald. And the
implicit
claim
he is making
is as brazen as it is astounding: his
followers,
as they are now―not
those of the other various Jewish factions that existed in
1st-century Palestine―are
the “meek” or “poor”
God was
going to
vindicate against their proud, rich oppressors when God, at long
last, inaugurated
his promised
kingdom.
If
this is so,
then
to
worry, as
I once did and some still do,
that the Beatitudes list so-called “meritorious virtues” that
qualify people for the kingdom is to bark up the wrong tree.
Instead, the Beatitudes
describe
men
and women who already
have been, in the language of Paul the Apostle, recipients of grace.x
They describe
the
patterns
of thought
and behavior that befit
the kingdom Jesus was announcing
and,
even
then,
inaugurating in his ministryxi
In
the
sixth Beatitude, Jesus pronounces blessingxii
on
the “pure in heart.” The
word “heart” is one that, I suppose, most think they understand.
But sometimes I’m afraid that we use it, like other biblical terms,
without thinking very deeply about it. When I was a Bible professor,
at times I heard students grumble something like this: “I’m here
at a Christian college, and I’m getting a lot of ‘head
knowledge,’ but I’m not getting ‘heart knowledge.’” Now, I
think I understand what they meant when they said this. But when the
Bible uses the term “heart,” it means something that embraces
the head. It means something that embraces the emotions. It means
something that embraces the will. It
means, really, the
core of one’s being
or, as Professor Dale Allison put it, “the human principle of
integration.”xiii
Proverbs
4:23 says, “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow
the springs of life” (NRSV). It’s the heart that controls
everything, for the
heart
is the
center of one’s personality.
And as Samuel was told that God looks on the heart, we need to remind
ourselves that it is with the heart
that God is most concerned, and
that it’s
those whose hearts are “pure” (καθαρός,
katharos)
who are to be congratulated.
What,
then, does it mean to be “pure?” Well, the word means, basically,
to be “clean.” We all understand something of cleanliness. In
fact, as Americans, cleanliness is something of a cultural
obsession. I well remember a story an
old seminary professor of mine
told of an American basketball player in Italy. This player, because
it was hot in Italy and he was dirty and sweaty, was taking three
showers a day. By doing so he was driving his landlord absolutely
crazy,
because, apparently, once a week there was considered sort of the
norm. In fact, in some places it’s not at all uncommon for people
to wash their hair only once a week―whether
they need it or not. Now, we chuckle at that because, as Americans,
we have an obsession with cleanliness. But our cleanliness is just,
as
it were, skin deep:
we are fixated
on physical
cleansing.
The
Bible, though, is concerned with two other kinds of cleansing. In the
Old Testament frequently―in
fact, some 500 times―we encounter the distinction between something
or someone being “clean” or “unclean.” You might immediately
think, “well, cleanliness is
next to godliness. That proverb is true after all.” But, of course,
the
Bible isn’t talking about physical
cleanliness or purity at all in these instances. Rather, it’s
speaking of what we might term “external,”
“ritual,”
or “ceremonial” purity:
one who desired to participate in the worship of God must be ritually
“clean.” And so, if one found herself “unclean” due to
contact with a corpse, or to the birth of a child, or to
menstruation, for example, she had to wait the prescribed time or go
through a certain ritual so as to become “clean” once again. In
Jesus’ day, many Jews were
consumed by their concern with this ritual purity. Most
notable among these, of course, were the Pharisees,
who
in their effort to prepare the people for YHWH’s return to Zion,
sought to extend the holiness and,
hence, purity of
the temple throughout
the land of Israel as a whole.xiv
Already
in the Old Testament, however, this original
notion of “purity” was extended metaphorically
to
refer to interior dispositions, what we might refer to as “internal,”
moral,”
or “spiritual” purity.
And
this contrast between moral
purity
and ritual purity later
found its way into Mark’s Gospel (Mark 7:14-23) in a story
subsequently
taken
up by Matthew in
chapter 15 of his Gospel.
There
we read that Jesus said to the crowds,
“It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it
is what comes out of the mouth that defiles … Do you not see that
whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out the
sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and
this is what defiles” (Matt
15:11, 17-18, NRSV).
Jesus here is
unambiguous:
purity
of heart takes priority over ritual purity. Even
more startling:
the
road to defilement
is a one-way street.xv
Interestingly,
despite
persistent misperceptions,
Jesus
wasn’t alone in
this assessment. For example, the late New Testament scholar E. P.
Sanders cites the 3rd/2nd century BCE document, The
Letter of Aristeas,
which states that Jews “honour
God, and this is done not with gifts and sacrifices but with purity
of soul
(ψυχῆς
καθαρότητι,
psychēs
katharotēti)
and
holy conviction.”xvi
Importantly,
the
Old Testament authors realized that people could go through the all
required
ceremonies and yet remain spiritually unclean. The Psalmist, for
example, repenting
of his sin, implores God to “create in [him] a
clean heart”
(Ps 51:10).xvii
Likewise,
Isaiah, in the midst of his famous
vision
of God in the temple, cries out, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a
man of unclean (LXX: ἀκάθαρτα, akatharta)
lips” (Isa 6:5). The prophet, confronted
as he was by God’s transcendent holiness,
understood that the prescribed Temple rites were, ultimately, only
pictures
of deeper realities. They
themselves
could do nothing
to change the state of human hearts.
The
greatest of all illustrations, I think, of the need for moral
cleansing occurs in Shakespeare’s tragedy,
Macbeth.
Macbeth
is a Scottish noble, and he and his wife kill good, old King Duncan.
As Macbeth
comes back from stabbing Duncan in his bed, he is carrying the bloody
daggers and is shaken to the core of his being because he has, of
course, committed murder. And a significant thing happens as he
passes down the hall. It was customary for a nobleman, when somebody
said, “God bless us,” to respond, “Amen.” But when Macbeth
heard someone say “God bless us” as he was walking down the
hallway, his conscience wouldn’t let him respond. He
realized that sin had cut him off from the blessing of God.
When he comes to his wife, he is still carrying the daggers. So Lady
Macbeth
rebukes him for holding on to them, and then takes them for herself
in
order to
frame those who were watching over the king.xviii
Their
plot at first appears successful, as Macbeth ascends to the throne.
But
after several more murders designed to consolidate Macbeth’s power,
the sin Lady
Macbeth
has repressed begins
to work inexorably on her. She is guilty in her heart, and her guilt
begins to affect her mind. One
night, her lady-in-waiting and physician watch her as she walks down
a hall in the castle with a candle in her hand. As she walks, she
stops dead
in
her tracks and proceeds
to rub
her hands, perceiving on them a
spot of Duncan’s blood. In anguish she cries out:
Out,
damned spot! Out, I say! … Yet
who
would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? …
Will these hands ne’er be clean? … Here’s the smell of the
blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
hand.xix
It’s
a very gripping scene, for the physician, when he recognizes what has
happened, says, “This
disease is beyond my practice … More needs she the divine than the
physician. God, God forgive us all.”xx
Yes,
what
Shakespeare portrays
in the “Scottish Play,” Scripture
consistently affirms to be the universal human condition: sin
has penetrated to the deepest recesses of our hearts.
For example, the prophet Jeremiah observes that “The heart is
deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it”
(Jer 17:9, NIV). Now this puts us on the horns of a dilemma, does
it
not?
On the one hand, Jesus congratulates the pure
in heart. On the other hand, all of us are by nature impure
in heart. We
see, then, that the heart
isn’t just the seat of our personality. It’s the seat of our
troubles
as well.
If
this is true, then what
does Jesus mean when he speaks here
of
a pure
heart?
Throughout
church history there have been various suggestions.xxi
One
dominant thread, from the ancient church all the way through the
unfortunate 21st century evangelical emphasis
on
“purity culture,” has been to understand such purity to refer to
a lack of contamination from sinful desires,
in particular sexual desires―hence, chastity
and what
I would consider an
unhealthy emphasis on asceticism.xxii
Yet
this is unlikely to be the sense intended here
in
Matthew 5:8. For Matthew’s language in
this beatitude
clearly
echoes that of Psalm
24:3-6.
There
we read:
Who
shall ascend the hill of the Lord?
And
who shall stand in his holy place?
Those
who have clean hands and pure hearts,
who
do not lift up their souls to what is false
and
do not swear deceitfully.
They
will receive blessing from the Lord
and
vindication from the God of their salvation.
Such
is the company of those who seek him,
who
seek the face of the God of Jacob. (NRSV)
We
also may
discern
that
the Sermon on the Mount itself
later
fleshes out what cleanness or purity of heart entails. Matthew
6:1-18,
for
example, develops the necessity of a piety unconcerned with outward
show and wholly directed towards God. Matthew
6:19-21 directly
correlates the state of a person’s
heart with what that
person treasures. And Matthew
6:24
famously disallows the possibility of serving both God and money
simultaneously. Our
Lord’s brother James also
may
reflect knowledge of
this beatitudexxiii
when he writes, “Make
your hands
clean
(καθαρίσατε
χεῖρος,
katharisate
cheiras),
you sinners, and purify your
hearts
(ἁγνίσατε
καρδίας,
hagnisate
kardias),
you double-minded
(δίψυχοι, dipsychoi)
(James
4:8,
trans. JRM).xxiv
A
pure heart, in other words, is a heart
that seeks God alone, a
heart whose
allegiance is directed exclusively to God, a
heart that accordingly
devotes itself to God’s
priorities.
The
19th
century Danish philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard nicely
summed up what is meant in his 1847
work entitled Purity
of Heart Is to Will One Thing.xxv
The
pure heart, as
St. Augustine put it,xxvi
is the single
heart, unalloyed by the destabilizing influence of idolatry
and self-seeking.
The
problem remains, however. How is
it that
these
“pure in heart” people, people
whose hearts are totally directed toward God,
become
pure in heart?
Once
again, the Old Testament provides a clue, for there we learn that it
is God
who alone can change the heart. Quite
a few times there we find the call for the people to “circumcise”
their hearts.xxvii
But, as so often in the Bible, the “ought” does not imply a
corresponding
“can.”
Moses,
who called on the people to circumcise their hearts in Deuteronomy
10, understood this. After forty torturous
years
of dealing with Israel in the wilderness, he is sadly aware that the
people’s heart is not right with God. In his closing remarks to the
people, in Deuteronomy 29, he wistfully says, “But to this day the
LORD has not given
you a mind to understand, or eyes to see, or ears to hear” (Deut
29:4, NRSV).
However,
in the same speech, in
Deuteronomy 30, he
looks forward to a time, on the other side of judgment and exile,
when “the LORD your God will circumcise your heart …
so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with
all your soul, in order that you may live” (Deut
30:6, NRSV).
The Hebrew prophets later pick up on this hope. The exilic prophet
Ezekiel, in particular, points to this day in chapter 36 of his
prophecy, where God promises, “A new heart I will give you, and a
new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove from your body
the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek
36:26, NRSV).
It’s
the uniform testimony of the New Testament, reflected in Jesus’
beatitude in Matthew 5:8, that this promise of a new heart has found
its fulfillment in and through Christ. One of the great texts of the
Bible is found in Acts 15, where the apostles gather in Jerusalem to
discuss the terms of Gentile inclusion in the people of God. At issue
was whether or not they had to be circumcised to join the covenant
people of Israel. After much debate,
Peter got up and said:
My
brothers, you know that long
ago
God made a choice among you that the
Gentiles
would hear from
my mouth the
message of the gospel
and become believers. And God, who knows the heart, testified for
them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us; and in
purifying
their hearts by faith
(καθαρίσας
τὰς
καρδὶας
αὐτῶν, katharisas
tas kardias autōn),
he has made no distinction between them and us. (Acts
15:7-9,
trans. JRM).
He
purified their hearts by faith.
In other words, through Christ and his work on the cross, the wait
for the new heart is over. As
a result, those
who believe in Christ are
purified from sin and receive the Spirit of God as the effective
agent
both
of inner renewal
and ongoing
purification.xxviii
In
C. S. Lewis’s children’s
novel,
The
Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
there’s
a little boy named Eustace Scrubb who, because he stole a bracelet
from a dragon’s lair, is turned into a dragon himself. Eustace
then
meets Aslan the Lion, who shows him a well that he can go to to get
washed. But first he had to undress. The problem was that, after
working long and hard to remove his scaly suit, the scales grew back
immediately. After two more unsuccessful attempts, finally Aslan says
to him, “You will have to let me
undress you.” So Eustace lies down, and Aslan proceeds to tear his
claws into him right into his heart, and the scales come off,
painfully,
one layer at a time. The boy then goes
to the well,
takes
a dip in it, and comes
out with a brand new set of clothes.xxix
What
Lewis is picturing for us, rather transparently, is the fact that we,
as sinful humans, can’t change ourselves. It is God
who must change us. Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart.”
But to be
pure in heart, one must first
have their hearts purified by the finished work of Christ.
Our
text in Matthew goes on to tell us what benefit will accrue to those
who are pure in heart. It
says the pure in heart―those
whose hearts have been purified and are, consequently, turned
exclusively to God―
will see
God.
Their
good fortune is
that they will experience the beatific
vision, the vision
of God.
What
this “vision” will entail―and
whether or not it can be attained, if only in part, in the present
world―is
a matter of perennial dispute and speculation.xxx
This
isn’t surprising, for the
Bible seems to speak out of both sides of its mouth on
the matter.xxxi
On
the one hand, the Bible says
it is impossible for human beings to see God.
People in ancient Israel, who
no doubt conceived of
their God in embodied form,xxxii
longed to get a glimpse of God. Moses, for example, who had already
seen YHWH indirectly
in
the form of a burning, inextinguishable bush (Exod
3:1-12),
asked God in
Exodus 33 to
show him his glory
(Exod
33:18).The
Lord, however, in no uncertain terms, responded by saying that no
one
could “see him” and “live” (Exod
33:20).
The
New Testament goes
even
further.
1
Timothy tells
us
that God is “invisible” (ἀόρτος,
aortos)
(1
Tim 1:17)xxxiii
and
that
he dwells
in “unapproachable (ἀπρόσιτος,
aprositos)
light” (1
Tim 6:16).xxxiv
John
even makes the claim that “no
one
has ever seen God.” For
him, only Jesus,
the “unique” or “only begotten” one,
himself
God by nature
(μονογνὴς
θεὸς, monogenēs
theos),
has revealed and expounded him
(John
1:18).
But
back
in Exodus, in response to Moses’s petition,
God condescended and allowed the prophet a glimpse―a backward
glance, as it were―of his “goodness” and “glory” after he
had
passed
by. But even here Moses had to be covered by
God’s “hand” and
stand in the cleft of a rock (Exod
33:19-23).
Yet,
on
the other hand,
the
Bible
also
holds out the possibility, indeed the promise,
of seeing God.xxxv
Particularly
important here
are those texts in the Psalms in which the Psalmist anticipates going
up to the temple
to “see” the
“face of
God” or
behold his “beauty” there.xxxvi
Among these texts
is
one
that,
as we have seen, serves as the basis of our beatitude,
namely,
Psalm
24:3-6:
“Who
shall ascend the hill of the LORD? … Those who have clean hands and
pure
hearts
… They will receive blessing from the LORD … Such is the company
of those who seek him, who seek
the face of the God of Jacob.”
If indeed these Psalm
texts
provide the background for what
Jesus is saying,xxxvii
it suggests to
us that
the notion of “seeing God” speaks, at the very least, of
experiencing
God
intimately
and
perceiving
his presence
at
the temple,
God’s dwelling place.
With
this in mind, I turn your attention in
closing to
the final book of the Bible, where John the Theologian in
Revelation 21-22 provides
us with a magnificent vision of the new
heavens
and new
earth,
where the new
Jerusalem comes
down out of heaven (Revelation
21:1-22:5).
This
city is described as cubic in shape (21:16).
What
this symbolizes becomes clear when we remember that the
original
Holy of Holies was
a
cube (1
Ki 6:20), and that
Ezekiel
likewise
pictures
the new, eschatological temple the
same
way
(Ezek
45:2).xxxviii
But
in
John’s vision on
Patmos,
the new
Jerusalem
had no temple,
because
its sanctuary (νάος,
naos)
was
“God the All-Powerful” (ὁ θεὸς
ὁ
παντοκράτωρ,
ho theos ho pantokratōr)
and the Lamb (τὸ ἀρνίον, to
arnion)
(Rev 21:22). Indeed, the vision
of the descent of the new
Jerusalem suggests that the entire new earth is to
be a
vast temple,
and
that God’s presence fully suffuses the eternal home of God’s
people.xxxix
Most remarkably, however, God’s people themselves
are portrayed as
priests
serving in this eternal temple;
for, as John writes,
“They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads”
(Rev 22:4).xl
This
is our hope, the
vision
of God―the direct,
unmediated
perception and experience of God, of being known even as we are now
known (1 Cor 13:12),xli
and of being transformed to being like he is (1 John 3:2).xlii
We have this hope vouchsafed
to us by Jesus himself in his promise that the pure in heart shall
see God. More
than half a century ago the
late British New Testament scholar
George Bradford Caird wrote:
The martyrs have protested, ‘If only we knew how it was all going to end’. And this is the
true end of man, the beatific vision, which is also the transforming vision; for those who
enjoy it bear his name stamped on their foreheads, because they have also come to bear
the impress of his nature on their lives.xliii
What
a day that shall be! To God alone be the glory.
i The
eight primary beatitudes (Matt 5:3-9) are bound together by an
inclusio, with the first and
eighth ending with the identical, “for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven,” the present tense ἐστιν (estin)
contrasting with the future tense in each of the promised blessings
in the intervening verses. The ninth apparent beatitude (5:11-12),
not only is much longer and addressed to “you” rather than third
person objects as in verses 3-9, but also is an expansion of the
beatitude addressed to those “persecuted for righteousness’
sake” in verse 9. Interestingly, this same pattern of pithy
beatitudes
followed by a much longer
one at the conclusion of the list is also found in a fragment of the
Dead Sea Scrolls (4Q525; text found online
@http://nextstepbiblestudy.net/index.php/tag/4qbeatitudes/).
ii On
the kingdom of God, still classic is George Eldon Ladd, The
Presence of the Future: The Eschatology of Biblical Realism (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974). Cf. Also N. T. Wright, Jesus and
the Victory of God (Christian
Origins and the Question of God, vol. 2; Minneapolis: Fortress,
1996) esp. chapters 6-10.
iii Gk.
ἀνέβη
εἰς
τὸ
ὄρος
(contrast Luke 6:17,
which states that Jesus “stood on a level place” [ἔστη
ἐπὶ τόπου
πεδινοῦ]).
Note this phrase is found
multiple times in the LXX of Moses ascending Sinai (e.g., Exod 19:3;
24:15, 18; 34:4). For “sitting” as the posture of an
authoritative teacher, not least that assumed by the rabbis, cf.
Matt 13:2; 15:29; 23:2; 24:3; 26:55; Luke 4:20; Eusebius, Historia
ecclesiastica
5.20; m. ‘Abot
1.4.
On
the Moses typology
involved here, cf. esp.
Dale C. Allison, Jr., The
New Moses: A Matthean Typology
(Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock,
2013) 172-80.
iv It
is not insignificant that
Matthew distinguishes between the “crowds” and his “disciples,”
and makes clear that the addressees
of the sermon were the latter (Matt 5:1-2; cf. also Luke 6:20; note
that Luke places his “Sermon on the Plain” immediately following
Jesus’ choice of twelve apostles [Luke 6:12-16]).
v Gk.
αὐτῶν ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν.
Dale Allison suggests that the present tenses are futuristic
presents, meaning that the outcome of the final judgment is here
being announced by Jesus: the poor and the persecuted “will be
given the kingdom” (W.
D. Davies and Dale Allison, Jr., A
Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according
to Saint Matthew,
3 vols. [ICC;
Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988-97]
1:445.
I am inclined, however, to believe the present tenses in these
verses deliberately contrast with the future tenses in verses 4-9,
and that Matthew is playing on the “already/not yet” character
of he kingdom in Jesus’ ministry, and in New Testament theology
more generally. Yes,
such people will
be given the kingdom, but they already
are,
as it were, citizens of the kingdom and participate in the blessings
associated with its irruption into the world in the midst of the
present age.
vi Cf.
Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament:
Community, Cross, New Creation; A Contemporary Introduction to New
Testament Ethics (San
Francisco: Harper, 1996) 97: “The counterintuitive paradoxes of
the Beatitudes alert us to the fact that Jesus’ new community is a
contrast society, out of synch with the ‘normal’ order of the
world.” An instructive
contrast to Jesus’ Beatitudes are those found in the Book of
Sirach (ca. 200-170 BCE), in
which ben
Sira conventionally asserts
the blessedness of those who seek wisdom, obey the Torah, and have a
healthy home life (Sir. 14:20-27;
25:7-11). Cf. Scot McKnight, Sermon on the Mount
(The Story of God Bible Commentary; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013)
34-36.
vii See, e.g., Matthew 8:11-12. Indeed, the rhetorical opposite of “blessing” is that of “woe” or of being
“cursed.” Cf. Matt 23, where Jesus pronounces “woe” on the scribes and Pharisees seven (!) times.
Many, going back to Johann Albrecht Bengel in his famous Gnomon in the 18th century, have posited
a correlation between the Beatitudes and the woes of chapter 23. See., e.g., N. T. Wright, The New
Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 1; Minneapolis:
Fortress, 1992) 386-87. On the theme of eschatological reversal implicit in the Beatitudes, see James
D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Christianity in the Making, vol. 1; Grand Rapids and Cambridge,
Eerdmans, 2003) 412-14; Ulrich Luz, Matthew 1-7 (trans. James E. Crouch; Hermeneia; Minneapolis:
Fortress, 2007) 190.
viii The
language comes from Robert A. Guelich, “The Matthean Beatitudes:
‘Entrance Requirements’ or Eschatological Blessings?” JBL
95 (1976) 415-34. Guelich argues for the latter option.
ix On
this, cf. esp. Davies
and Allison,
Matthew,
1:436-39.
Cf. Matt 11:5 and Luke’s programmatic
use of the text in Jesus’ introductory synagogue reading at
Nazareth in Luke 4:16-21.
x On
the function of the Beatitudes in placing “grace” before
“imperative” and “blessing” before “demand,” cf. Davies
and Allison, Matthew,
1:439-40.
xi Cf.
N. T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters
(New York: HarperOne, 2010) 103: “God’s
future is arriving in the present, in the person and work of Jesus,
and you can practice, right now, the habits of life which will find
their goal in that coming future”
(italics
his).
xii Because
of the archaic and fusty nature of the term “blessed,” not a few
translators and writers have attempted to substitute various other
locutions for it for translating μακάριος (makarios).
One of the least happy of such alternatives is indeed the term
“happy” itself. Not only does the term “happiness” in modern
English connote a feeling
or psychological, existential state tied to what we may refer to as
“happenings;” the term, for Americans, inevitably recalls
the words of Thomas Jefferson, for whom the pursuit of happiness is
an “unalienable” right bequeathed to us by our Creator. But the
“happiness” of the Beatitudes, reflecting the Hebrew term ’āšrê,
speaks
of a person’s eschatological
situation.
Jesus here is congratulating
these people for the fortunate
position
they find themselves in. Though at present they may be the poor and
oppressed, Jesus provides consolation by assuring them of their
future vindication in the kingdom which was, even then, breaking
in
as a mustard seed.
xiii Dale
C. Allison, The Sermon on the Mount: Inspiring the Moral
Imagination (Companions to the
New Testament; New York: Crossroad, 1999) 51. Cf.
F. Baumgärtel
and J. Behm, TDNT
3:605-14; BDAG, 508-09; A. Sand, EDNT
2:249-51.
xiv Cf.
Emil Schürer, The
History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ.
Revised and edited by Geza Vermes and Fergus Millar, 4 vols.
(Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1973-87) 2:396-400.
xv Interestingly,
Matthew does not include Mark’s parenthetical comment, “Thus
Jesus declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:19), a perspective later
implied in Acts 15 and stated cryptically in Titus 1:15 (“To the
pure all things are pure”). Matthew’s omission certainly fits
the context of Jesus’ ministry―he
hardly would have advocated ignoring the Torah’s explicit
commands―and likely
reflects his intended audience of Jewish Christians who, even in the
years after 70 CE, would certainly have, by and large, continued to
keep the Torah as part of their Christian identity. On the history
behind the passages, cf. Dunn, Jesus Remembered,
573-77.
xvi Ep.Arist.
234. Cf. E. P. Sanders, The
Historical Figure of Jesus
(London: Penguin, 1993) 219. Interestingly,
Sanders―to
highlight the parallel with Jesus?―replaces Aristeas’s “soul”
with “heart” in his translation. To
be sure, Matthew’s Jesus polemically
excoriates
his most significant critics, the Pharisees, for
their emphasis on―indeed, intensification
of―the
Torah’s ritual demands in comparison to what he considered their
relative
neglect
of what he termed “the weightier matters of the Law,” i.e.,
justice, mercy, and faith (Matt 23:23;
cf. 9:10-13). They “strained out a gnat” before drinking wine―in
obedience to the command of Leviticus
11:20-23―but were oblivious to
their willingness to swallow the equally unclean, and infinitely
larger, camel (23:24; it is likely that Jesus’ absurdist witticism
was made even more memorable in its historical context by means of a
play on the Aramaic words for “gnat” [qalmâ]
and “camel” [galmâ]).
Likewise, in the very next “woe,” he accuses them,
metaphorically,
of scrupulously cleaning the outside of plates and cups, but failing
to do the same to the insides, which were “full
of greed and self-indulgence” (23:25). The point is concisely
articulated by R. T. France: “Ritual purity without moral
cleanness is a sham” (The
Gospel of Matthew
[NICNT; Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2007] 875).
As for the Pharisees themselves, they would have viewed their
meticulous observance of the ritual commandments to be the necessary
outworking or
expression
of a pure heart.
xvii LXX
Ps 50:12 (καρδίαν καθαρὰν κτίσον ἐν
ἐμοί ὁ θεός)
xviii Shakespeare,
Macbeth, II.2.
xix Shakespeare,
Macbeth, V.1.31, 35-36, 39,
45-47.
xx Shakespeare,
Macbeth V.1.53, 68-69.
xxi For
a concise, selective account of the history of interpretation, cf.
Rebekah Eklund, The Beatitudes through the Ages
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021) 196-213.
xxii For
example, the late 2nd century apocryphal work, Acts of
Paul and Thecla, has an
extended commentary of sorts on Jesus’ beatitude, in which he
interprets the blessed as “those who have kept the flesh chaste”
(οἱ ἁγνὴν τὴν
σάρκα τηρήσαντες)
and “the self-controlled”
(οἱ ἐγκρατεῖς).
Cf. Jeremy B. Barrier, “A
Critical Introduction and Commentary on the Acts of Paul
and Thecla” (Ph.D. diss.,
Texas Christian University, 2008) 119-26.
xxiii James
here clearly alludes to Psalm 24:4, but it seems a stretch to
imagine that he and Matthew/the oral tradition behind the “M”
texts in his Gospel, drew upon the psalm independently. Assuming a
date for Matthew some time after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE and
the Jacobean authorship of the Book of James (or at least the
letter’s contents which were later edited), since James the Just
was killed in 62 CE (Josephus, Ant.
20.200),
this means that James would
have drawn
from the pre-literary form of the Jesus tradition, from which
Matthew also later drew in composing his beatitude.
xxiv The
term δίψυχος,
literally “two-souled,” is not found in extant Greek literature
prior to James. For the Jewish/Old Testament background of the term,
cf. Peter H. Davids, The
Epistle of James: A Commentary on the Greek Text
(NIGTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982) 74-75.
xxv Søren
Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing,
trans. Douglas V. Steere, rev.
ed. (New
York: Harper Brothers, 1948
[1847]). Cf. Clifford
Williams, The Divided Soul: A Kierkegaardian Exploration
(Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2008).
xxvi St.
Augustine of Hippo, On the Sermon on the Mount,
trans. William Findlay (Jazzybee
Verlag: Altenmünster,
Germany, 2017 [1830]) 1.8: “For that is a pure heart which is a
single heart.”
xxvii Deut
10:16; Jer 4:4. The implication, of course, is that the people of
Israel, though circumcised in the foreskin, were uncircumcised of
heart (Jer 9:25-26).
xxviii The
notion of Christ’s work
“purifying” his people is found in a broad range of New
Testament documents. Cf. Tit 2:14; Heb 9:14; 1 John 1:7.
xxix C.
S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
(New York: HarperCollins, 1994 [1952]) 113-16.
xxx On
the history of interpretation of “they shall see God,” cf. esp.
Dale C. Allison, Jr., “Seeing
God:(Matt. 5:8),” in
Studies in Matthew:
Interpretations Past and Present
(Grand
Rapids: Baker, 2005) 43-63; cf. Also Eklund, The
Beatitudes through the Ages,
215-34.
xxxi For
a convenient laying out of the various biblical, Jewish, and early
Christian texts dealing with the matter, cf. Allison, “Seeing
God,” 44-45n.7.
xxxii Those
of us reared with a worldview rooted in Western philosophy might
find this a bit surprising, if not off-putting. But we do well to
consider how ancient Jews would have understood the anthropomorphic
descriptions of God which are routinely understood as metaphorical
today, not to mention the fundamental biblical conception of human
beings as created in the image of God. Indeed, as Allison has
demonstrated (“Seeing God,” 45-48), belief in an embodied deity
was widespread in Second Temple Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism, and the
early Church (e.g., Tertullian, Against Praxeas,
7.8-9; Allison thinks it plausible, based in part on Matt 18:10,
that Matthew himself conceived of God in this fashion). Influential
in turning the tide away from such literalism were Origen and
Augustine. Cf. Augustine, On the Sermon on the Mount,
1.8: “How foolish, therefore, are those who seek God with these
outward eyes, since
He is seen with the heart!” For a recent defense of a corporeal
view of God, cf. Puttagunta Satyavani, Seeing the Face of
God: Exploring an Old Testament Theme
(Carlisle, UK: Langham, 2014).
xxxiii Paul
also speaks of Christ as the “image of the invisible God” in his
famous Christ-hymn in Col 1:15. Cf. also Heb 11:27.
xxxiv These
two texts are correlated in the wonderful 1867 hymn of the Scottish
Free Church minister Walter Chalmers Smith, “Immortal, Invisible,
God Only Wise”:
Immortal,
invisible, God only wise,
In
light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
Most
blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
Almighty,
victorious, thy great name we praise.
xxxv Besides
the texts we discuss here, see also Job 19:26; 1
Cor 13:12; Heb
12:14; 1 John 3:2. The
hope expressed in these texts, as
in Matthew 5:8,
is an eschatological
hope. Nevertheless, the desire to have a vision of God in
this life,
if only partial and provisional, has persisted in both Jewish and
Christian history. As early as the 1st century BCE a strand of mystical Judaism appeared that developed
spiritual exercises designed to lead to the vision, found in Ezekiel
1, of the heavenly chariot, with God enthroned above it (still
classic here is Gershom Scholem, Jewish
Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition
[New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1965]). For
the Christian tradition of attaining to the beatific vision in this
life, see now Hans Boersma, Seeing
God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018).
xxxvi E.g.,
Ps 11:7; 17:15; 24:3-6; 27:4; 42:2; 63:2. Cf. Also 4 Ezra 7:98;
T. Zeb. 9:8.
xxxvii See
Mark S. Smith, “‘Seeing God’ in the Psalms: The Background to
the Beatific Vision in the Hebrew Bible,” CBQ
50 (1988) 171-73. This is
deemed the “simplest” suggestion as to the text’s meaning by
Allison, “Seeing God,” 59.
xxxviii Ezekiel’s
measurements technically make the New Temple a square, with the
height of the Temple implied rather than explicitly spelled out.
xxxix Cf.
G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek
Text (NIGTC; Grand Rapids and
Cambridge: Eerdmans,/Carlisle: Paternoster,1999) 1093-93;
idem, A New Testament
Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New
(Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011)
553.
xl It
is surely no coincidence that the phrase, “Holy to the LORD” was
to be engraved on the gold head plate worn by Aaron, the high priest
(Exod 28:38; 39:31).
xli “For
now we see in a mirror, indirectly; then we will see face to face.
Now I know in part; then I will know fully, just as I have been
fully known” (trans. JRM). Paul here alludes to Numbers 12:6-8,
which contrasts Moses’ “face to face,” direct encounter with
God’s glory (LXX; MT “form”) with God’s indirect speaking to
other prophets in visions and dreams. Even Paul, as he later told
the Corinthians, beheld God’s glory indirectly, via
the face of Jesus, God’s “image,” who had called him on the
Damascus Road (2 Cor 3:18). The hope of Christians is that we will,
like Moses, be privileged to “see” God face to face, which Paul
characterizes as the experience of knowing fully even as God has
fully known us. Cf. Roy Ciampa and Brian Rosner, The First
Letter to the Corinthians
(Pillar New Testament Commentary; Grand Rapids and Cambridge:
Eerdmans/Nottingham: Apollos, 2010)
658-60.
xlii For
arguments to the effect that in 1 John 3:2 the object (αὐτὸν)
of believers’ transforming, future sight is God, not Christ, cf.
Raymond E. Brown, The Epistles of John
(AB 30; Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1982) 394-95.
xliii G.
B. Caird, A Commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine
(Harper’s New Testament Commentaries; New York: Harper & Row,
1966) 280-81.