3. The Beatitudes
The Beatitudes occur in two versions: in the ‘Sermon on the Plain’ in Luke (6:17-24f.) and the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ in Matthew (5:1-12).
Luke has:
Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the reign of God.
Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven, for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
Matthew has:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the reign of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the gentle, for they will inherit the land.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of justice, for theirs is the reign of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and accuse you falsely of all kinds of evil on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward in heaven. Likewise, they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Luke has just four ‘Beatitudes,’ followed by four contrasting ‘Woes’ (‘Woe to you who are rich…’). He uses the second person: ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the reign of God.’ In plain material terms, he reiterates the proclamations in Mary’s Magnificat: ‘He has put down the mighty from their seats / and exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things / and sent the rich empty away.’ Here in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus also echoes the speech with which he opens his ministry in the Nazareth synagogue (quoting the prophet Isaiah): ‘He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor…’ (I wonder whether his family were in the synagogue on that day?) Both the Magnificat and the scene in Nazareth (where the listeners are so outraged that they try to throw him over a cliff) occur only in Luke’s gospel.
This is the very opposite of the claim by some Christians, which also appears in the Old Testament, that wealth is a sign of God’s favour and poverty or other misfortune a sign of God’s displeasure. The coming reign of God on Earth will turn the world upside down, and the poor and hungry will come first. The last shall be first. This does not mean it is a good thing to be poor or hungry but that poverty and hunger are the first things that will be eliminated in the ‘reign of God.’
It seems that Jesus thought this reign of God, which he was announcing, would be coming down to Earth in power soon, ‘in the lifetime of some of those standing here present.’ His disciples in the early church clearly expected this. That didn’t happen, but it remains a good idea: the first signs of a just and kind society are that those who are poor have the wherewithal for a decent life and those who are hungry are filled.
Matthew has eight beatitudes, and in all but the last one, he uses the third person plural: ‘Blessed are they.’ He speaks of ‘the reign of heaven’ rather than ‘reign of God,’ but this was a Jewish habit of using a circumlocution instead of referring to the name of God directly. Here, ‘heaven’ does not necessarily mean an afterlife elsewhere. Matthew also ‘spiritualizes’ some of the Beatitudes, saying ‘poor in spirit’ instead of just ‘poor’ and ‘hunger and thirst for justice’ instead of just ‘hungry.’ This has weakened the force of Luke’s version, so that the Beatitudes have not always been taken to mean a good society on Earth, as mocked in the Joe Hill song:
You will eat by and by,
in that glorious land above the sky.
Work and pray, live on hay.
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.
In opposition to this interpretation, the Jesuit liberation theologian Ignacio Ellacuría, rector of the UCA University in San Salvador, rendered Matthew’s first Beatitude as ‘Blessed are the poor with spirit.’ Because of this theology, he was murdered, together with five other Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her daughter, on November 16, 1989, by the Atlacatl battalion of the Salvadoran Army, trained in ‘counter-insurgency’ in the notorious School of the Americas. ‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and accuse you falsely of all kinds of evil…’ In 2007, the Jesuit Jon Sobrino, who survived the UCA massacre because he was abroad that night, received a notification from the Vatican censuring him for making the poor the ‘setting’ [locus] for his theology. Instead of saying ‘extra ecclesiam nulla salus’ (‘no salvation outside the church’), he said ‘extra pauperes nulla salus’ (‘no salvation outside the poor’).
Even if we do not believe a supernatural God will one day bring about a kind and just society on Earth, it is still a good ideal to strive for. It is well worth keeping the gospel that the poor and hungry come first in ‘the reign of God,’ which we can take as a metaphor for a kind society, in which ‘the crucified people’ rise. The excluded and the ‘poor with spirit’ are entitled to a decent life; and if that demand is not met, our society is not ‘saved’—there is something very wrong with it.
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Jon Sobrino, Companions of Jesus: The Murder and Martyrdom of the Salvadorean Jesuits (CIIR, London 1990 and The Eye of the Needle: No Salvation outside the Poor, a Utopian-Prophetic Essay (Darton, Longman & Todd, London 2008). Both translated by Dinah Livingstone.