We don’t say it, but most of us understand the Sermon on the Mount as one giant losing proposition. We cannot possibly be as righteous as it calls us to be. It’s the law squared and compounded. But that understanding only proves we’re reading it with the eyes of a Pharisee. This week, forget…

The Sermon on the Mount begins with a charter: the eight blessings of the kingdom. That’s followed by a purpose statement: that we might be salt and light. Next comes Jesus’s discourse on the law. He says: Don’t assume that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy…

In the progression of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus begins with the offer of the kingdom. The kingdom is a gift of grace, given to the empty-handed, the poor in spirit. It is a blessing, a gift empowered with the quality of fruitfulness and the capacity to bring forth life. This gift is transformational,…

  It’s one of my pet peeves, and I hear Christians say it all the time, usually with an air of superiority. “We shouldn’t be surprised things are getting so bad. The only thing that’s going to fix it is Jesus coming back.” We say it about politics. About cultural trends. About R-rated movies. About…

  The Beatitudes, so familiar and easy to gloss over, are breathtaking when we see them clearly. Far from just a disjointed list of niceties, these kingdom blessings encompass the gospel according to Jesus. The kingdom of God is here, and so we are transformed by the grace of God–and the whole world with us.…

The gospel is a comedy in the classic literary sense: it ends with a wedding and turns expectations on their heads along the way. It’s often said that the people of Jesus’s time expected the Messiah to come in military power, overthrow Rome, and rule Israel from a literal throne in Jerusalem. That is surely…

The last of the Beatitude blessings is the longest and in some ways the most perplexing. To quote it in the beautiful King James: Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all…

Discovering the gospel in the heart of the Beatitudes, made me read the whole list very differently. Rather than a disjointed list of random blessings, the Beatitudes are a journey. They take us from our starting point (impoverished, broken, grieving, afflicted), gift us outrageously, and pass through the gospel to what we become: pure, peacemakers,…

From the beginning, the Beatitudes have been full of outsized blessings. You have nothing? I’ll give you a kingdom. Alone in your grief? God himself will come alongside you. Struggling against oppression and injustice? Take heart; you will inherit the earth. But perhaps none is so outsized, so outlandish as this: “Blessed are the pure…

I will never forget the awful, sick feeling that came over me the day I watched someone in my life get what she deserved. She was a bitter, judgmental, hypercritical person. She’d brought negativity and pain into so many lives. She never really had time or grace for others. That day, I watched it come…