Monday – Matt. 5:1-12
Welcome to all who have taken up the challenge to study and meditate upon Matt. 5.
I’m looking forward to the journey.
I read through Matt. 5:1-12 a couple of times. Then I picked up a book by Dallas Willard called, The Divine Conspiracy. A large part of his book is devoted to the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7). So, today was a ‘study’ day rather than a ‘meditation’ day.
Here’s what struck me from the Matt. 5:1-12 passage:
1. Jesus was speaking to his newly chosen, wet behind the ears, disciples (Matt. 4:18-22). The didn’t yet have any understanding of Jesus’ kingdom values.
2. He was also speaking to a rag tag horde of messed up people. Gathered before him were the formally ill, those recently freed from demon-possession, people who have been in pain for years, and folks who had been paralyzed (Matt. 4:24). Not only had those people just been set free but it’s a guarantee that many in the crowd showed up to see Jesus that had not yet been healed or set free from being demonized.
3. This mob was in Jesus mind and eyes as he spoke the words of in Matt. 5-7. Most of them were probably dirty, illiterate, unorthodox in their ideology, and irreligious. They were certainly poor in spirit, mourning, and searching for righteousness. They had very recently been shown tremendous mercy by Jesus (through healing and casting out demons). And they were persecuted. I used to think that the persecution Jesus was speaking about came from people who didn’t follow God. But remember who hated Jesus in his time? It was the religious elite. The Pharisees and Sadducees. They spent their life trying to follow God, religiously.
That’s scary because I tend to spend most of my time on the religious side of the tracks.
4. So, who would be in that crowd today? Here’s what Dallas Willard says,
“The flunk-outs and drop-outs ad burned-outs. The broke and the broken. The drug heads and the divorced. The HIV-positive and herpes-ridden. The brain-damaged, the incurable ill. The barren and the pregnant too-many-times or at the wrong time. The over-employed, the underemployed, the unemployed. The unemployable. The swindled, the shoved aside, the replaced. The parents with children living on the street, the children with parents not dying in the ‘rest’ home. The lonely, the incompetent, the stupid. The emotionally starved or emotionally dead… Murders and child-molesters. The brutal and the bigoted. Drug lords and pornographers. War criminals and sadists. Terrorists. The perverted and the filthy and the filthy rich…”
Am I telling the people in the above list that the are valuable and loved by God or do I turn a blind eye to them?
Okay, gotta run. I promised my little guy I’d play cars with him.
