bleeding out loud

Here’s another open capo riff. Capo on 4, open E,B strings. The video works-not sure why it displays the way it does.

Last Fall I was working on a writing project about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. It’s so much more than just a summary of Jesus’ moral/ethical teaching. Seriously. The dude had some fresh ideas.

No. The Sermon on the Mount is more. As God tends to do in the Scriptures, Jesus kicks it all off with blessing. What’s stunning is not that he blesses but what he blesses. The poor in spirit. Those who mourn. Those who are persecuted. According to pretty much everyone in their right mind, these things are the opposite of blessed. No one wants those things.

The magic is in the context. Jesus has just finished healing and casting out demons for many people in the crowd. He touches them, engages them, serves them, and not only does he restore their dignity, he brings them face to face with the divine. For many of the people standing on that hillside near Capernaum, the Kingdom of Heaven had just come upon them. God showed up.

So the SotM seems to function on two levels. First, it’s a provocative announcement of blessing. God blesses those who in every conventional sense we would think of as cursed. The losers. The outsiders. The have-nots. As Dallas Willard says, “The sat on, the spat upon, the ratted on.” Or maybe that was Simon and Garfunkel. I’m not sure. Either way, Jesus meets people in those places, the ones we think of as cursed. They come face to face with God. The Kingdom comes upon them. God is with them. In this sense, these blessings are the counter-intuitive announcement of the reckless and extravagant availability of God’s love.

But the blessings (or beatitudes as they’re sometimes called) also function as an invitation to live a particular to kind of life. One such blessing caught my attention. You might even say it reached off the page, grabbed me by the throat, and pulled me close and said something on the order of, “Pay attention. Your heart is on the line here.”

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” Matthew 5v8

What I learned is slowly changing a lot. I’ll do a pt. deux (rather than pt. 2) to unpack some of it.