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…

Several years ago I was supposed to speak at a women’s conference here in Ontario on the Beatitudes and the kingdom of God. The idea was “seeing yourself through a kingdom lens.” I’d suggested that topic in part because it was specific but still broad enough for me to develop my talk over time, as…

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.” This last of the “negative beatitudes” once more blesses those who are in an unblessed state. Being hungry and thirsty is not good. I have often read this as, “Blessed are those who are starving, who are famished for things to…

Christians often say “meekness isn’t weakness; it’s power under control” (a definition I think we owe to the early twentieth-century Olympic runner and missionary Eric Liddell) and take pains to point out that being meek is not the same thing as being a doormat. But the fact is there’s a reason people in the world…

Like the first blessing in the Beatitudes, the second appears at first to be nonsense. “Happy are those who mourn” is a contradiction in terms. Jesus, I’m convinced, did this on purpose: he chose terms that were meant to shock and bewilder before giving way, upon closer inspection, to hope.   Like poverty of spirit,…

When Moses went up into a mountain, he delivered the Law, summed up in the Ten Commandments. In biblical symbolism, ten is a number of completion: it presents a finished form, in the case of the Law a rounded righteousness. Jesus also climbed a mountain and delivered a torah–a “teaching” or “law”–but he began his…

When Moses declared some fourteen hundred years before Jesus walked the earth that God would “raise up a prophet like unto me,” it’s doubtful anyone thought he was talking about a specific person to come. Moses, the deliverer of Israel and the one through whom God gave the law and instated the Sinai Covenant, was…

Matthew 4:23-24 gives the shape of Jesus’s early ministry: Jesus was going all over Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. Then the news about Him spread throughout Syria. So they brought to Him all those who were afflicted, those suffering…