Our third session of the Three Things Beatitudes course covered, appropriately, three Beatitudes — the fourth, the fifth and the sixth.
Hungering and thirsting for righteousness
Righteousness can feel like a vague, churchy word, but it is essential to grasping Jesus’ vision of flourishing.
We began by zooming out to see that righteousness (dikaiosunē in Greek) is a key concept in the Sermon on the Mount: “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:20). Righteousness is “an umbrella concept that envisages what Jesus expects of his disciples” (as Jonathan Pennington notes).
And it’s not simply a New Testament concept. We zoomed further out to the Old Testament to see the bigger biblical picture of righteousness. We looked Job 29:12-17 and Ezekiel 18:5-9 to see that righteousness (tse.deq in Hebrew) is right relationship displayed in acts of justice (mish.pat in Hebrew). These together are the foundation of God’s throne (Psalm 89:14), his rule and reign that is the kingdom Jesus came to bring.
Hunger and thirst are states of deprivation. Jesus declares that we flourish when we look within us and around us and feel the lack of righteousness. This felt deprivation propels us toward realising, with the Spirit’s help, a world of right relationship displayed in acts of justice. This satisfies our hunger and thirst — if only for a moment — until Jesus returns and the hunger is satisfied forever.
Flourishing are the merciful
The fifth Beatitude reveals a key aspect of true righteousness in the time before Jesus comes again: mercy.
Mercy and almsgiving are intimately related from a biblical point of view. The Greek word for mercy is eleēmōn; almsgiving is eleēmosunē (used by Jesus in Matthew 6:3). Mercy is more than almsgiving, but almsgiving is the clearest display of the posture of all mercy.
Mercy is stretching out the hand. As Rebekah Eklund writes in The Beatitudes Through the Ages, this image “captures the wideness of the term mercy in the beatitude and elsewhere in Scripture.” She explains:
It’s also a phrase that hints at the potential power of an act of mercy. Think of the Persian king Ahasuerus stretching out his sceptre to Esther to grant her permission to approach the throne (Esth 5:1-3). An open-palmed, outstretched hand sometimes means, “I decline to hurt you” or “I restrain my power over you.” Mercy can be clemency. In this sense, mercy is not a “relatively bland” feeling of compassion but “life-or-death power.” When you are “at the mercy” of someone, you are entirely in their power, for good or for ill.
In a perfectly just world, there would be no need for mercy. But the God of the Bible, who is perfectly just, looks upon this world with mercy. God’s justice and his mercy “are two aspects of the one same quality”—his perfect love—“whose richness surpasses our words and ideas” (as Servais Pinckaers writes).
Jesus stretches out his hands on the cross, dying for us while we were still his enemies. The apprehension of his merciful kindness—this justice seasoned by mercy (to quote Shakespeare)—should provoke our repentance and conquer injustice in our hearts.
By his cross and resurrection, Jesus has initiated our entry into God’s economy of mercy, an economy that Shakespeare grasped so well in The Merchant of Venice:
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.
Flourishing are the pure in heart
This sixth Beatitude is a picture of the flourishing person who inhabits all the traits of the previous five: “Flourishing are the pure in heart because they will see God.” The pure heart has been cleansed from sin and for love. Purity of heart points us, then, to a posture of attentiveness.
Attention is the engine of love. Disciples of Jesus are called to active attention. Our hearts are purified by the gift of our attention in ways that better enable us to love God and neighbour.
The word attention literally means to stretch toward. It shares the same root with the words tension and tune. When we direct our attention toward the love of God and neighbour, our hearts are painfully stretched so that God might play on them the melodies of his love.
Our hearts are also being stretched that they might be filled forever with the bliss of seeing God. In this life, the Holy Spirit enlightens the eyes of our heart to see God’s love and power for us with ever increasingly clarity (Ephesians 1:17-20). This prepares us for the final day when we will see God face to face. As the apostle John writes in 1 John 3:2-3:
Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.
We closed our time together with George Herbert’s poem The Glance. The glance of God in this life is “A mirth but open’d and seal’d up again”, but Christ will one day “look us out of pain” for all eternity. There is no flourishing greater and no hope more purifying than this.
See you this Sunday for our final class on the Beatitudes.
We’ll see how the last two Beatitudes reveal our tendency to flee from pain and shore up on our own comfort. Jesus leads us beyond these dead ends, inviting us to walk with him on the path of the cross and empty tomb.
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