Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
Isaiah 9.1-4; Psalm 27.1, 4-9; 1 Corinthians 1.10-18; Matthew 4.12-23
Church of Scotland, Costa del Sol, Fuengirola, February 2 2020
“What was that?” asks Gregory.
On a mountain top in the distance, Jesus of Nazareth is speaking. Gregory and his group find it hard to hear him, partly because they are far away and partly because they are squabbling among themselves.
“What was that?” asks Gregory (which is, if you think about it, an unlikely name for a Jew).
A man nearby says, “I think it was ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers.’
“What’s so special about the cheesemakers?” asks Gregory’s wife.
“Well,” says Gregory, “obviously, this is not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.”
Some of you may remember this scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a film that pokes gentle fun at religious types and left-wing political types and, here, at Bible scholars, who are always saying bits of the Bible are not meant to be taken literally.
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Let me make a couple of scholar-type points.
Over the three Sundays Vivien and I are pleased to be with you, we shall be reading through chapter 5 of Matthew’s Gospel, the first of three chapters in which Matthew gives us the Sermon on the Mount.
I say “Matthew” advisedly, because it is quite unlikely that Jesus of Nazareth in real life ever preached a sermon this long.
No, this is Matthew gathering together the tradition handed down to him in one of the great blocks of teaching that distinguish the first Gospel from the three others.
Last Sunday, if my friend and colleague Jim Sharp followed the lectionary, you will have heard from Matthew how Jesus appears in Galilee preaching “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Turn your lives around, for God is beginning to assert God’s rule over all the earth.
Now in the Sermon on the Mount that follows, Matthew is drawing together the teaching of Jesus to tell us what it means to live as those who believe that God’s reign is coming and are turning their lives around.
What it means is challenging, both then and now – challenging to those who first heard Jesus, to those who first heard Matthew read, and to you and me.
But Matthew doesn’t begin the Sermon by challenging us. He begins by telling us that we are blest – at least, if we are meek and lowly of heart. That is the obvious reading of the passage we have just listened to. Is it meant to be understood literally?
This brings me to my second Bible-scholar-type point.
Over Christmas, one of the films the BBC showed was The Greatest Story Ever Told, George Stevens’ 1965 retelling of the story of Jesus. I have to say I was slightly taken aback when, every time Jesus opened his mouth to teach, he spoke in the English of the King James Bible.
There are, I suspect, still people who think that the English of the Authorized Version is the authentic language not just of James VI and I but of God himself. But all our English Bibles are translations of translations.
Matthew wrote ancient Greek, which was then the common language of the Mediterranean. And Jesus spoke Aramaic, which was then the common language of the Orient. Our English Bibles are two languages removed from what Jesus originally said. Mostly this is not a problem, but sometimes it can be.
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Some of you may know the name of Elias Chacour, a Melkite archbishop who was one of the first Palestinian Christians to bring the plight of his people to the world’s attention.
In one of his books I read while in Jerusalem, he complains that our conventional translation of the beatitudes is far too passive.
He asks how he could tell a young man in a Palestinian refugee camp, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted?”
“That man would revile me, saying neither I nor my God understood his plight,” says Chacour, “and he would be right.”
But, he says, if we go back beyond our English and Matthew’s Greek to the original Aramaic of Jesus, we find something much more active.
Chacour understands Jesus in Aramaic to say something like this:
Get up, go ahead, do something, move, you who are hungry and thirsty for justice, for you shall be satisfied.
Get up, go ahead, do something, move, you peacemakers, for you shall be called children of God.
Christianity, he says, is not passive but active. It’s energetic, alive, going beyond despair. And on that point, he is, of course, right.
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So have we Western Christians misunderstood the beatitudes all these years? And do we all need to learn Aramaic to understand what they really say?
You may be happy to learn that my answer to both these questions is No.
Let me try to bring together what is right in our translation with what is right in Chacour’s argument.
I need, first, a sentence or two about what Jesus means when he says the kingdom of heaven has drawn near.
Isaiah 43 quotes God as saying, “Behold, I am doing a new thing.”
Many times in the story the Jews told themselves about their history, God does a new thing. After the human race goes thoroughly astray, God chooses Abraham so that through him and his family all the families of the earth may be blessed. When the descendants of Abraham are slaves in Egypt, God sets them free. When their descendants are in exile in Babylon, God allows them to return home – this is the particular new thing prophesied in Isaiah 43.
But now, says Jesus, God isn’t just doing a new thing: God is doing the definitive new thing, definitively putting the world to rights and establishing God’s reign over all the earth – and doing it, Jesus implies, through him.
This is what our Gospels tell us, each in its own way. In his life, death and resurrection, Jesus begins to establish God’s reign, even though this reign – and his own role in it – will not be universally recognized nor entirely realized until he returns in glory.
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If we turn now to the beatitudes as we heard them this morning, we must say that they are passive in voice but anything but passive in meaning.
We read, for example, ““Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The idiom here is that of the divine passive. What it means is, “God blesses the poor in spirit, because God gives them the kingdom.” Matthew is just too respectful to say the name of God out loud.
So too with all the other blessings. God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice: they shall be satisfied. God blesses the peacemakers; they shall be called children of God.
This is part of what it means that God’s reign is breaking into our world.
Precisely because this is so, we can and should be active in peace-making; we can and should be energetic in working for justice; and we should never despair.
Turn your lives around, says Jesus. Walk humbly with God, as Micah tells you, and work humbly with God to bring about God’s purpose.
We don’t always do that. We don’t always hear the clarion call of Jesus on the mountain top or the still small voice of the Spirit. We are sometimes too far away and too busy squabbling among ourselves.
But if we draw near and listen, we can still hear what Jesus said on the mountain top and respond.
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In a moment, we shall all be invited to draw near, to sit at table with the risen Christ, and share the bread that is his body and the wine that is his blood.
These are tokens of our commitment to change the world, beginning with ourselves. But, more than that, they are symbols of God’s abiding love for us and of Christ’s unfailing invitation to us to be his brothers and his sisters.
Amen.