What if Jesus didn’t open his most famous "sermon" with poetry—but with policy?
In this episode of What the Bible Actually Says, Dr Tyson Putthoff continues his study of the so-called "Sermon on the Mount" (Matthew 5–7) and "Sermon on the Plain" (Luke 6) by unpacking the opening Beatitudes of Matthew 5—Jesus’ revolutionary campaign launch on a Galilean hillside. But this isn’t just about feel-good spirituality. It’s a constitution. A counter-empire manifesto. And the people it names as “blessed” are the very ones this world pushes aside: the poor, the mourners, the meek, and the justice-hungry.
Drawing on ancient Aramaic, the Greek of the Gospels, and the deep prophetic tradition behind words like ptōchos (poor) and tsidqa (righteousness/justice), this episode peels back the soft varnish of tradition to reveal the sharp political, social, and theological edge of Jesus’ words. These are not virtues for the already-blessed. They are divine declarations for the bent-over, the overlooked, and the spiritually crushed.
If you’ve ever wondered where you stand in Jesus’ Empire—especially when life leaves you broken—this episode is for you.
• Subscribe now and step into the radical Kingdom Jesus announced—and the new society he’s still building today.
• Want more? Visit BibleActuallySays.com for show notes, biblical texts, and exclusive episode content.
• Coming May 2025: Jesus: The Strategic Life and Mission of the Messiah and His Movement—Volume 1: A Handbook. In print May 30th! Get the book at Amazon or at Hekhal.co.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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What's up everybody, welcome to the What the Bible actually says
podcast. I'm your host, Tyson put off and
I'm thrilled to have you today. If this is your first time
listening Bao Kava to the show, and if you're a regular
listener, Rakim Hashmim, welcomeback.
I'm so glad to have you. Either way.
Before we begin, as always, let me remind you to subscribe and
(00:35):
don't forget to visit bibleactuallysays.com for free
resources, exclusive content, updates on what's coming next,
and don't forget to let us know your thoughts in the comments.
We want to hear from you. So in the previous episode, we
set the stage for Jesus's Sermonon the Mount and Sermon on the
Plane as recorded in Matthew 5, seven, and Luke 6.
(00:59):
We essentially set the context and located Jesus's Sermon on
the Mount and Sermon on the Plane in their geographical and
cultural and social history. It's going to be important to
understand that as we head into these next episodes, including
this one in which we really dissect the text and break down
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his words and look at what Jesusactually says.
So if you haven't yet, go ahead and have a listen and then come
back to this one with that background in mind.
So let's slow down now. In this episode, we're going to
listen carefully to what Jesus actually says in this, what I
call campaign declaration. Because if this really is his
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constitution, his manifesto for a new empire, then these opening
lines matter far more than we realize.
And what I'm talking about is what we call the Beatitudes,
which are a set of pithy sayingson the surface that we've taken
as this sort of way to be spiritual, this way to tap into
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our spiritual life, you might call it.
And what's striking about these so-called beatitudes, these
opening remarks in Jesus Sermon on the Mount, Sermon on the
plane, is how familiar and unfamiliar they are at the same
time. They're not obscure words,
they're famous, but we've heard them so many times that we've
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really lost our sense of not just the depth of what Jesus is
saying there, but the danger that was intrinsic to what he
was saying for those who decidedto follow him in his original
context. So these beatitudes in Matthew 5
and the blessings and woes in Luke 6 aren't just sweet
sayings. They are imperial inversions, a
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reordering of the world from thebottom up.
And I'm going to expand on all of that and I'm going to explain
what all of that means. But I just want to give you a
heads up about what we're in forwhen we start to dissect these
so-called Beatitudes. So let's take a look at the
text. Go get your Bible.
If you don't have it or if you're on the go, just listen.
And then you can go back, look at the text after you have some
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time to sit down and look at it closely.
Or if you need, go to bibleactuallysays.com.
Subscribe there and you'll get access to the show notes in the
biblical text that we're lookingat here.
But let's start with Matthew in this episode in in the next one,
we're going to take a close lookat Luke.
So in Matthew 5, one to two, we're told that Jesus went up to
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the mountain and after he sat down, his disciples came to him.
Then he began to speak and taught them.
So this posture, sitting down toteach is the posture of
authority. Rabbi sat down when they
delivered rulings. King sat down when they issued
decrees and Jesus is doing both.He's sitting in a posture of
authority and he's about to deliver the most radical, mind
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blowing, world changing message ever declared in public.
Then in verse 3 gives his opening line.
And just as a reminder, this, aswe talked about in the previous
episode, this is far less like achurch service or a revival or a
Billy Graham rally. This is Jesus launching his
messianic campaign. This is more like a political
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rally than a church service. So when Jesus begins to speak,
he's not just laying out something that we're supposed to
embrace in our heart and then dowhatever else we want to do in
our lives publicly. What Jesus is saying here in
these verses in this speech is he's laying out his vision for
how what he calls the empire of God is supposed to look.
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So he opens up in verse 3 in a sitting posture and he says this
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of
heaven. And I imagine he paused after
each of these so-called Beatitudes just to let his
audience digest what he's sayingbecause none of what he says in
Matthew 5 to 7 and Luke 6 is expected for us.
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We sit here and we read the showcalled Sermon on the Mount and
the Sermon on the plane. And these are familiar texts to
us. We we print bits and pieces of
these in really fancy fonts on Home Decor and buy it from Hobby
Lobby or on Etsy. I mean, his buy one, get one
half off. So why not, right?
And we recite these sayings fromthis account in sermons, not
necessarily as the primary verseof the message, but as sort of a
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support verse from time to time to the other other verses that
we're discussing in the message.But there wasn't a single line,
a single verse of this campaign speech of Jesus that his
listeners would have expected tohear it first the way we do.
I mean, it wouldn't have taken long before they began to
understand whom he favored and whom he did not favor.
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But line after line, Jesus makesdeclarations that completely
upend what people in his own world, as well as people in our
own world think about who God is, whom he favors, and how he
wants his empire to operate. His opening line wasn't.
We're going to go and make our people great again.
We're going to go take back the nation from those who've
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corrupted it. We're going to go force people
to recognize who God is and how powerful he is.
And we're going to do it with strength and power and
domination and force if necessary, because God bless us.
That's exactly not how Jesus opened his campaign speech in
Matthew 5. Three, Jesus said nothing like
that. And trust me, that's what many
of his listeners wanted to hear,and it's who many of his people
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thought God was all about. But On the contrary, Jesus
declares blessed are the poor, for theirs is the Kingdom of
heaven. Now keep in mind that's our
English translation. Remember that the New Testament
was written in ancient Greek, but Jesus actually spoke in a
Galilean form of Aramaic. So in Galilean Aramaic, the
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language Jesus actually spoke Matthew 5 three would have
sounded something closer to breek enun aniye bruja dilhon al
Kuta dishmaya. So the first couple of words
here breek enun. It's not a passive wish, it's a
declaration. It's not may you be blessed.
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It's you are blessed and not because of something you've
done, but because of who God is and what kind of Kingdom Jesus
is inaugurating. This is constitutional language.
These are not hopes or private affirmations the way we often
take these. This is Jesus speaking and
issuing royal policy to the masses.
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Just as Caesar might say these are the people who belong to
Rome and the Roman Empire. Jesus is saying these are people
who belong to the empire of God.This is his opening line, his
pream, and he begins with the least likely citizens, the amha
arets, the people of the land, rather than the elite and the
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wealthy and the powerful. This isn't a private fundraiser
in which he's schmoozing up to the wealthy donors and the
powerful who can make connections for him so that they
can get him in the door and cut deals behind the scenes so that
he can launch his Kingdom in that manner.
He's taking it to the masses, tothe poor, to the Amha arets, the
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people of the land, and he's announcing what his Kingdom is
going to look like and whom it'sgoing to favor on earth as it is
in heaven. And the people he identifies are
the Annie Bruja, the poor in spirit.
Now this is interesting because we take this and we make it into
a sweet little saying of Jesus and an encouragement.
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And it absolutely is 100% supposed to be an encouragement.
But when he says poor in spirit,this is not about quiet humility
or this vague sort of sense of religious brokenness.
It refers to those who are crushed internally.
They're exhausted, they're disenfranchised, they're running
on empty. And Jesus is drawing directly
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from a deep prophetic stream when he uses these words.
The Hebrew word ani in its Aramaic and Greek counterparts,
the Greek is potokos. These terms often referred not
just to economic poverty, but tothe afflicted, the humbled, the
dependent. Isaiah 61, one quoted by Jesus
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in Luke 4. Remember when he goes back home
to his synagogue in Nazareth andhe makes that speech in the
synagogue and he declares that the Spirit of the Lord has
anointed him. We talked about that in a
previous episode. If you didn't listen to that, go
check it out. But he announces, quoting Isaiah
61, one that he has come and he's been anointed to bring good
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news to the poor. Same word there.
That's the word Luke uses here. The Greek is putokoi in the
Aramaic Targum of Isaiah. Just a note about the Bible
because I'm going to use some ofthese words throughout this
podcast. The Old Testament was written in
Hebrew, but since everyone in Jesus's day spoke Aramaic, there
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were Aramaic translations of theOld Testament that we call
Targums. Likewise, there were a lot of
Greek speakers throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, and
so there's an ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Old
Testament that we call the Septuagint.
Anyway, all of that to say, in Targum, Isaiah, so the Aramaic
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translation of Isaiah, the phrase that Jesus is using here
as recorded in Matthew 5, three,becomes even more pronounced,
translating the poor as those who are crushed or bowed down.
They're literally hunched over. We find this in the Psalms, this
idea, especially Psalm 3418, in Psalm 4017, where the poor and
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the broken hearted are not just recipients of charity.
They are those whom God draws near, to whom God protects, and
whom God exalts over those who don't need him because they have
everything they need. In the Targums, the Ani, the
poor become the one who waits onthe mercy of the Messiah, not
the rich, not the celebrated, not the dudes at the top.
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In other words, the poor in thistradition are not simply
destitute, they are God's audiences, God's people, God's
remnant. This is the single mom working 2
jobs and barely making rent. This is the young man sitting in
the back of the church row wondering if he still belongs
after his past continues to haunt him.
It's the person who's been told by the community or even their
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church that they're not spiritual enough, not strong
enough, not worthy. Jesus looks at all of them and
he says, you are the ones this Kingdom, my empire belongs to.
And this isn't spiritualizing poverty.
This isn't turning somebody's misfortune into a neat little
story to make a point in a sermon or in a message or in a
political speech. This is identifying face to face
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spiritual despair as the entry point to divine citizenship.
The very people who feel disqualified from God's Kingdom
are the ones Jesus calls heirs. And to understand the subversive
power of Jesus's words in Matthew 5, three blessed are the
poor in spirit, we have to graspwhat it meant to be patochos or
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ani in the ancient world. The Greek term patochos, the
Hebrew word ani, this, all of this didn't just mean someone of
low income. It meant that, but it also
referred to someone utterly destitute, completely without
resources or social standing. It meant, in its original
language, to cower, to shrink back and evoke the image of a
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person crouching in shame. In the Greco Roman world,
poverty wasn't just unfortunate,it was often considered
dishonorable and contagious. And it was rooted in theology,
both in the Greco Roman world and in Jesus's own culture,
where if you didn't have it was because God didn't give, and if
you didn't have, it was because God didn't want to give.
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Cicero describes the poor as of ignoble birth, lacking virtus,
the Roman ideal of strength and honor and moral character.
Aristotle claimed the poor lacked the leisure and the
freedom required for virtue and wisdom in civic life.
The poor were viewed as a socialburden at best and as moral
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failures at worst. So it was their fault they were
poor. It was believed there were no
state-run welfare programs, no safety Nets.
If you didn't have a patron or awealthy relative or someone that
you could become indebted to or become enslaved to or someone to
advocate for you, you didn't survive.
Ancient writers frequently equated poverty with shame and
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moral weakness and even divine punishment.
And while the biblical traditionoffers a sort of a theological
counterpoint, especially in the Psalms and the prophets, where
God has said over and over to defend the ANI, the poor, the
humble, the afflicted, that didn't mean poor people were
honored in day-to-day life. And to the contrary, even in
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Jesus's day, the poor were oftentreated with suspicion, with
social disdain. The Torah demanded care, like I
say, over and over, for widows and orphans and strangers.
Deuteronomy 24 is an example of this, Jeremiah 22.
But this doesn't appear to be the way things played out in
real life. Not on a broader scale.
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Maybe on an individual scale, where you had someone give
generously to a poor person, butnot on a collective scale.
And by Jesus's day, many in his own world saw poverty as a sign
of personal or ancestral sin. Ancient phrase There is no death
without sin and no suffering without transgression reflects
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this widespread assumption that suffering, including financial
hardship must have a spiritual 'cause we see this idea or
similar idea play out in John 91to three where Jesus and his
disciples come upon a blind man and the disciples ask who's sin,
the man or his parents 'cause him to be blind like this.
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And Jesus says nobody did because that's not how it works.
And some of the sectarian communities like Qumran valued
voluntary poverty. So it was this noble thing to
give of yourself and become pooron purpose.
Most, including the temple elite, associated material
blessing with divine favor and viewed the amharats, the common
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people, the people of the land who are often poor, as
spiritually inferior. In Jesus world, to be poor was
not simply to lack money, it wasto lack voice, protection,
social belonging, and in the view of the people, blessing by
God. As precisely there, in that
cultural moment that Jesus dropsthis line.
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Blessed are the poor, not the strong, not the elite, not the
upwardly mobile, but the bent over, the ashamed, the pushed
out. This is a direct in version of
what his world assumed about status and divinity.
In a society where honor and merit systems both excluded the
poor, Jesus recenters them. He isn't just offering comfort,
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he's declaring a new social reality.
He isn't spiritualizing poverty either.
Matthew adds in spirit, yes, butthis doesn't soften the impact
the way we often interpret it. To do it intensifies it.
These are people whose spirits are crushed and Jesus says to
these right here belongs the Kingdom of heaven.
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This is radical because it's nota future reward only, it's a
present possession. Jesus doesn't say they will
inherit. He says right now in Jesus's
empire, the poor don't beg for crumbs from the table.
They are seated at the head of the table, and that means every
theological system, every economic model, every political
ideology that rewards the wealthy and sidelines the poor
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is now under judgement, both in Jesus's day and today.
Jesus isn't simply including thepoor.
He's not just saying, hey, everyonce in a while, go and give
someone a few bucks standing on the side of the street.
What he's doing is he's reorganizing the world around
them. That person you see on the side
of the street, Jesus is saying they are at the center of the
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Kingdom of heaven. That person who's literally
sleeping under the bridge because they have nothing.
Jesus doesn't ask questions. He says they belong at the
center of the Kingdom. And that is a tough pill to
swallow for me. But this is the challenge that
Jesus is throwing out because he's not telling them to earn
God's blessing. He's not standing up and saying,
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go and clean yourself up and then God will bless you.
He's saying you as you are rightnow where you are.
You already have God's blessing because the king has come and
you are the ones he's come for. And in Luke's version, which
we'll look more closely at in the next episode, is even
starker. Luke reports Jesus as saying,
blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the empire of God
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Rican. Noon on EE dil khon malkuta de
Aloha. Blessed are you who are poor for
yours. He says yours, not theirs.
Speaking directly to his audience at this point is the
empire of God. No qualifiers, no in spirit, no
softening. Jesus speaks directly, not some
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imagined group, but to the crowdstanding right in front of him.
These are bruised, burdened, broke and broken.
And there's no metaphor here. He means actual poverty,
economic, social, relational. Jesus is saying if you've been
cast aside by this world, you are first in line for mine.
If you're poor, physically, economically, socially, you
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belong to the empire of God. And this isn't pity, it's
proclamation. Jesus isn't saying you'll be OK
someday. He's saying you right now are
the true citizens of what's coming and what shall come in
the future. You are the future
administrators of God's restoredworld in this life and in
eternity. You're the foundation stones of
the new world Jesus is building.And that's just the beginning.
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Take a look at Jesus's next line.
Jesus says blessed are those whomourn for they will be
comforted. Ibrikunun di bakin diel Khan
Yitzhakamun, those who mourn arenot forgotten.
In Rome's system, just as in ourown culture today, sadness was
weakness. In Jesus system it's sacred.
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In Rome mourners are seen as liabilities, but in Jesus empire
they are leaders. And Jesus is saying the comfort
of heaven has already been promised to you.
And again, he doesn't qualify this as saying God sees you and
hears you only if you're a straight, white male who belongs
in the right congregation and believes the right things and
votes the right way. He doesn't make those
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qualifications or put those restrictions on God's blessings
the way we do. He doesn't say, hey, you are
blessed, but only if you clean up your ACT before you come and
step into my congregation, but only if you reject your
political stance and you come and see things.
The way I see it, he doesn't do any of that.
What he says is Brekkinun di Bakkin, Dil Konyath Nakamun.
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Blessed are those who mourn, forthey will be comforted and
that's it. No qualifications, no
conditions. If you mourn now, you will be
comforted. In fact, he looks past those
whom we tend to see in our society and in our congregations
and in our politics, and he seesthe one mourning because their
loved one has just been shipped to another country because of
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their ethnicity. No questions asked.
He sees the mourners who don't happen to identify the way many
people believe they're supposed to identify.
No questions asked. He comforts and blesses the
mourner who struggles with anxiety because of the shame
that the religious establishmenthas heaped upon them for their
mistakes, even while that same establishment welcomes with open
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arms others who've made the samemistakes but who just happened
to write a bigger check that seems to atone for theirs.
Jesus sees those mourners, No questions asked.
Jesus sees you in your mourning,and he says you will be
comforted. And once again, Jesus is drawing
from a rich stream of biblical and liturgical memory,
especially the prophets and the Psalms.
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The word for mourn here, Baquin in Aramaic or Pantuntes in
Greek, isn't casual sadness. It's his deep lament, the kind
that shows up in funeral processions, in national exile,
in trauma, in injustice, in the death of a close loved one in
Isaiah 61 two, the same passage once again that Jesus quotes in
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Luke 4, which we discussed in previous episode.
I'll say it again, if you haven't listened to that
episode, go check it out. Isaiah 61 two says the Servant
of the Lord will come to comfortall who mourn, using the same
exact language that Matthew usesand that Luke uses to describe
those who will be comforted. And in the Aramaic translation
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of Isaiah, those mourners are identified as those who long for
the deliverance of Zion, people who are lamenting the suffering
of the people of God and awaiting their redemption.
Psalm 126 five echoes the same reversal.
Those who sow in tears will reapwith shouts of joy.
Jeremiah 31, part of the promiseof the new covenant, says, I
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will turn their morning into joy.
I will comfort them and give them gladness for sorrow.
That's verse 13. In the Aramaic translation of
that verse, this comfort is explicitly depicted as
messianic. That is, it's pointing to God's
anointed One who will be the onewho wipes away their tears and
restores the people. In Second Temple apocalyptic
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literature, mourning was a marker of those who remained
faithful in affliction, those whose grief was righteous
because they wept for a world that was just out of joint and
they refused to join in the oppressors.
This type of mourning that Jesusis addressing is not just
emotional fragility. It is covenant to loyalty.
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So when Jesus says blessed are those who mourn, he is placing
himself squarely in the line of the prophets and saying if your
heart is broken over the way this world is going, you're in
the right place. You are not weak.
Don't listen to what the world tells you.
Don't listen to what your culture tells you.
Don't listen to what your politicians tell you.
Don't listen to what your news channel tells you.
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You are the foundation of my empire.
In this way, the word yitnakamun, they will be
comforted. It's not a shallow platitude,
it's a divine reversal. It's the voice of Isaiah,
Jeremiah, the Psalms, the Aramaic Targums, all harmonizing
together in Jesus's own words tosay You weep now, you will dance
soon. The Kingdom of God has heard
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your cries and it is on the move.
In Jesus empire, grief is not a deficit, it's a credit.
Comfort is not a reward for performance.
It's the inheritance of the broken hearted.
We've looked at verse 3. We've looked at verse 4.
Let's check out Matthew 5 verse 5.
Now here Jesus says blessed are the meek for they will inherit
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the earth. Breaking noon on Naveen Dilhon
ye tune ara anavine the Aramaic for meek, not the loud, not the
strong, not the self promoting, not the self protecting, not the
self preserving. The meek will inherit the land.
Here Jesus once again is directly echoing the voice of a
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Psalm, in this particular case, Psalm 37, a text that would have
been deeply familiar to his Jewish audience, especially in
Galilee, where hopes for land and restoration were just right
there. Psalm 3711 says, But the meek
shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant
peace. The phrase there, the meek shall
inherit the land. That's exactly what Jesus quotes
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in the original Hebrew. On a veem, like Jesus's Aramaic
on avine, refers not just to quiet people, but to those who
have been humbled by affliction,the oppressed, poor, those who
refuse to retaliate, but who entrust their future to God.
In the Aramaic of Psalm 37, the phrase becomes more explicit.
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The Aramaic translates the Hebrew like this.
But the humble shall inherit theland because they wait for
deliverance from the Lord. So in other words, the meek
aren't weak. They are resistors without
swords. They are the nonviolent faithful
who wait, endure, and persevere in the hope of divine justice.
This same theme runs through Isaiah as well, especially
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Isaiah 11/4. For the Messianic king is said
to judge the poor with righteousness and decide with
equity for the meek of the land.That phrase, the meek of the
land, became a code in the prophets and in the Psalms for
the faithful remnant, the peoplecut out of power but central to
God's plan. So when Jesus says the meek will
inherit the earth, he's both quoting Scripture and reclaiming
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A prophetic tradition for those standing in front of him and for
you and me today. And it's this one that says the
people who are last in line for Roman inheritance or American
inheritance are first in line for mine.
This is Jubilee logic. This is Isaiah 61 logic.
This is Psalm 37 and Exodus 23 logic.
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The land doesn't belong to thosewho sees it.
It belongs to those who trust God enough not to.
The meek are those who don't feel so insecure and so afraid
that they've got to go on the offensive and take this land
back for Christ. Which is another way of saying
that we want to force our views on others to gain power.
That's not the meek. That's not what Jesus is calling
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for. The meek are those who view
Yahweh and who view Jesus as King on the throne, and who
trust him to do the taking and the giving so that they don't
feel the need to take from anyone.
That's who Jesus says will, in real life, and not in some weird
metaphorical way, inherit the land.
Those are the ones who will receive divine rewards beyond
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their wildest imagination. And this flipped everything Rome
taught. In Roman culture, inheritance
was reserved for the privileged.It was passed through elite
family lines, maintained by corrupt business practices,
defended by violence. But Jesus says no.
It's it's the quiet ones. It's the gentle ones, the ones
who refuse to dominate, who willreceive the very earth others
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are fighting to steal and hoard.This is a direct contradiction
of Roman political logic where land is seized by force and
inherited through bloodlines. Jesus says, Nope, not in my
Kingdom. And we saw a couple of episodes
ago in this podcast where Jesus advocated A jubilee based
economic program that prevented this sort of hoarding of
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property by those at the top that effectively shut out those
who just wanted to have a piece of land and a little bit of life
of their own. Let's look at verse 6.
Jesus says blessed are those whohunger and thirst for
righteousness. Now check this out.
The Aramaic here gets more precise.
Brikunun de kafnin, ritzakin litzidka, theohonis, boon.
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Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness or justice are
starving, craving not for food, but for Sidka, for justice,
integrity, covenant, faithfulness.
They are famished for things to be made right.
This isn't a casual preference. This is a bodily craving for
equity, for fairness, for God's will to be done.
Those are the people who lie awake at night because they see
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the world's injustice and cannotbe comfortable in it.
These aren't the people who lie in bed, awake at night and dream
of being millionaires and billionaires, and who are
motivated by money and who are motivated by power and who
aspire to be at the top. These are people who want things
to be made right for those who can't protect themselves.
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And Jesus says those people, theones who ache in their bones for
a better world, they will be filled.
The ones who hunger for God's justice to come on earth as it
is in heaven, they will be filled.
They will be satisfied. The empire of God doesn't just
pacify them. It doesn't just sort of say, OK,
yeah, yeah, yeah, go on your way.
(29:03):
It answers them. And it says, I hear you.
And in the empire of God, thingswill be made right.
And this is not the justice we hear weaponized by power hungry
voices in our culture today. This is not the justice of
retribution, revenge, exclusion,nationalist identity politics.
This isn't if you break the law,you deserve what you get.
(29:23):
It's not if you're different from me, you're outside God's
plan. It's not if your faith, gender,
citizenship, or experience doesn't mirror mine.
They May God strike you down that that sort of take back this
land in the name of Christ. Bogus version of following
Jesus. That's not what it is.
That's not the version of justice that Jesus is promoting
here in addressing that is empire justice.
(29:46):
And Jesus came to destroy that then, and he shall in the future
destroy that again. This is Sidka, covenantal
restorative justice. That's the term here that Jesus
uses. The kind that feeds the hungry
rather than shames them. It restores the outcasts rather
than shuts the door on them. It lifts up the broken rather
(30:07):
than steps on them. And it rebukes the abusers of
power, even if those who are abusing power are doing so in
the name of Christ. The kind that turns morning into
dancing and oppression into release.
And the biblical echoes in this particular saying of Jesus are
unmistakable. The word sidka, or in Greek, de
caiosune, isn't merely righteousness in the sense of
(30:30):
this private morality, which we typically take this concept to
mean righteousness. In my heart, that's not what it
is. It's deeply communal,
covenantal. When Jesus talks about
righteousness and justice, he's talking about something
external. In Amos 524, one of the clearest
echoes here, the prophet cries outlet justice or mishpot, roll
down like waters and righteousness, or Sidka like an
(30:53):
ever flowing stream. The very same language that Amos
is using is the very same language that Jesus is using
here as well. Likewise in the Psalms, Psalm
72, a royal prayer for the Davidic King.
Sidka is what the Anointed 1 is meant to enact to bring about.
May He judge your people with righteousness and your poor with
(31:13):
justice. In the Aramaic of that Psalm,
the king is expanded as a messianic figure, He bringing
justice, bringing God's justice not just to Israel, but to the
whole world. So when Jesus says those who
hunger and thirst for Sidka or justice are blessed, he's
placing his listeners inside that ancient longing for a world
(31:34):
run not by greed, not by power, but by grace.
In Isaiah this longing grows even stronger.
In Isaiah 117 we see the call tothe people to seek justice,
correct oppression, and in Isaiah 11 For the messianic
ruler will judge the poor with righteousness and decide with
equity for the meek of the earth.
Again, in the Aramaic translation of this particular
(31:56):
verse in Isaiah, righteousness becomes a sign of divine
intervention. So while we think wealth is a
sign of God's blessing on me, the biblical portrait of God's
blessing upon us is that we are just.
And we are restoratively just, not punitively just.
(32:17):
That is, we're not taking punishment and executing God's
justice with a sword. We're taking God's love and his
mercy and his grace to those who, just like us, don't deserve
it. And we're extending a hand, no
questions asked. That is a sign of God's blessing
on us in the Dead Sea Scrolls, particularly in a book called
(32:39):
The Community Rule One QS. You can look this up online.
Righteousness or justice isn't just ethical.
It's not this in inward thing. It's cosmic.
So for Jesus as listeners, many of whom longed for vindication,
deliverance, equity, this beatitude didn't sound like an
internal moral principle the wayit does to us.
It sounded like your hunger willactually end soon.
(33:01):
Your physical aching will be answered.
The day you've prayed for is on its way.
Jesus is tapping into all of this and recentering it.
Sitka is not about rule following.
It's not about moral superiority.
It's not about something that I just tuck away in my heart and
then I go and live and treat people that any way that I
please. It's about God setting the world
(33:22):
to write, starting with the people the world has pushed
down. And it's about you and me going
out. If we claim to be followers of
Jesus and bringing about this restorative justice to the
world, this is what the empire of God looks like in heaven, and
this is the empire of God that Jesus has established to take
over the earth. And we're just getting started.
(33:43):
Think about living in a world inwhich you don't have all major
social and political seats of power.
Think about if you've been abused or taken advantage of or
just handed a crappy hand by life and you're just trying to
climb out. Justice for you in that
situation looks a whole lot different than it does for
someone sitting at the top of power and wealth, looking down
(34:04):
on those whom they say should have done life differently,
should have been born different,shouldn't have broken the law
the way you did, should have saved your money a little
better. For those at the bottom, justice
looks a lot more like catching abreak than punishment and shame.
For those at the bottom, justicelooks a lot less like getting a
handout than it does just not getting stepped on while they're
(34:25):
down. For those at the bottom, justice
looks a lot more like getting help trying to understand why
such horrible things happen to them when they were young than
it does being shamed for being confused about who they are now
and their place in this world. For those at the top, justice
looks like using the world systems for making sure my own
world stays clean, remains pure,keeps operating smoothly,
(34:47):
continues to expand economically, geographically,
socially, politically. But for those at the bottom,
justice looks like what Jesus himself is saying in Matthew 5
to 7 and Luke 6. And if you're at the top of the
world right now, the world and your news channel and probably
even your congregation says you just keep doing what you need to
do to keep what you have to maintain your position in
(35:09):
society, to ensure that your investments and funds grow at
all costs. But Jesus has a different take
on what it looks like to be at the top in this world, and he
addresses that in Luke 6, which we'll get to in the next
episode. If you're at the bottom though,
or just in a place in this worldwhere life isn't being kind and
where people wearing God's name or even less so, all in the name
(35:31):
of quote UN quote justice, well,Jesus has some words for you
too. And his words sound a lot more
like in his empire, both now andin eternity, that you are at the
top. And it makes this abundantly
clear. Blessed are the poor, for theirs
is the Kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for
they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they
(35:52):
will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and
thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
And if this is you, then I want you to know right now that you
are at the center of God's favorboth now and in eternity.
And if you are feeling or if you've ever felt crushed in
spirit, if you've ever mourned quietly in the dark or
questioned your worth in a system that only seems to reward
(36:13):
the powerful and polished, I want you to hear this clearly.
You aren't forgotten. You are not invisible, you are
not disqualified from the Kingdom of heaven for whatever
reasons, and I don't care who's told you you are.
You are not because Jesus says you are not.
And you are exactly the person, according to Jesus, that Jesus
opens his constitution with. That is the founding principles
(36:35):
of the Empire of God. Not the religious elite, not the
political elite, not the social elite, Not the people who are
inside the empire and shutting the doors to those who are
outside. Not the ones who are removing
you from safety and security. Not the ones who dominate the
airwaves and sit comfortably in pews patted by privilege.
Jesus starts his empire with you, and that means you're not
(36:57):
just included. You're at the center.
You're the cornerstone of the world.
He's building on earth as it is in heaven.
So let this reframe what blessing looks like to you.
It's not ease. It's not applause.
It's not being right or rich or respected when we say, oh, God
has just blessed me. And when we say that, we're
(37:18):
talking about how much wealth wehave or just how great and
polished of a life we have. We need to really rethink what
we understand God's blessing to look like.
And I'm not saying we don't be grateful for what we have.
Not at all. But when we start to say, well
God's blessed me for this or that, the assumption that we
don't think about is that God hasn't blessed that person on
(37:41):
the street and God has chosen not to bless them on the street
and that's why they're there. That's the assumption we're
making. When we make that assumption, we
completely miss what the empire of God looks like and what Jesus
is saying here in these so-called beatitudes.
Because at the center of God's empire are those who don't fit
(38:02):
what we would say as someone having been blessed by God.
Someone who has nothing may be cursed, may be shamed in this
world. And we drive by them on the
street and we duck our head whenwe stop, stop light because
they're holding up a sign that they just need some food for the
day. And we say, oh, shame on them,
God has blessed me. But I think we should start to
(38:23):
rethink and reframe the way we understand how God views people
in this world that we otherwise dismiss.
Because if Jesus is right, he's saying that that person that we
dismiss, that person that doesn't have a name, doesn't
have a place, who has nothing tohis or her name, that's the
person who belongs at the centerof his Kingdom both here and in
(38:45):
the world to come. So when Jesus is talking about
justice, about blessing, about God's Kingdom, he's talking
about a hunger for justice for those who can't defend
themselves. He's talking about quiet
endurance in which you wait on God rather than go and take the
world by force. He's a faith to keep mourning,
keep hoping, keep trusting that God is on the move even when the
(39:07):
world and especially the Christian world seems unmoved
and harsh. And if this has stirred anything
in you or if it's made you upsetor angry at me, I'm OK with
that. But if it's resonated with a
part of you that has long felt small or unseen, and stay with
me. Because next time we're going to
sit down with Jesus and Luke 6. And things are about to get even
(39:27):
more direct there. Jesus doesn't just bless the
poor. He has some stern warnings for
those who have wealth and power.And he doesn't just comfort the
mourners. He flips the system so that they
are the ones who he sees favorably.
So come back next time. And as always, Lake Almont, go
and learn. I'll see you next time on what
the Bible actually says.
What's up everybody, welcome to the What the Bible actually says
podcast. I'm your host, Tyson put off and
I'm thrilled to have you today. If this is your first time
listening Bao Kava to the show, and if you're a regular
listener, Rakim Hashmim, welcomeback.
I'm so glad to have you. Either way.
Before we begin, as always, let me remind you to subscribe and
(00:35):
don't forget to visit bibleactuallysays.com for free
resources, exclusive content, updates on what's coming next,
and don't forget to let us know your thoughts in the comments.
We want to hear from you. So in the previous episode, we
set the stage for Jesus's Sermonon the Mount and Sermon on the
Plane as recorded in Matthew 5, seven, and Luke 6.
(00:59):
We essentially set the context and located Jesus's Sermon on
the Mount and Sermon on the Plane in their geographical and
cultural and social history. It's going to be important to
understand that as we head into these next episodes, including
this one in which we really dissect the text and break down
(01:20):
his words and look at what Jesusactually says.
So if you haven't yet, go ahead and have a listen and then come
back to this one with that background in mind.
So let's slow down now. In this episode, we're going to
listen carefully to what Jesus actually says in this, what I
call campaign declaration. Because if this really is his
(01:42):
constitution, his manifesto for a new empire, then these opening
lines matter far more than we realize.
And what I'm talking about is what we call the Beatitudes,
which are a set of pithy sayingson the surface that we've taken
as this sort of way to be spiritual, this way to tap into
(02:03):
our spiritual life, you might call it.
And what's striking about these so-called beatitudes, these
opening remarks in Jesus Sermon on the Mount, Sermon on the
plane, is how familiar and unfamiliar they are at the same
time. They're not obscure words,
they're famous, but we've heard them so many times that we've
(02:24):
really lost our sense of not just the depth of what Jesus is
saying there, but the danger that was intrinsic to what he
was saying for those who decidedto follow him in his original
context. So these beatitudes in Matthew 5
and the blessings and woes in Luke 6 aren't just sweet
sayings. They are imperial inversions, a
(02:46):
reordering of the world from thebottom up.
And I'm going to expand on all of that and I'm going to explain
what all of that means. But I just want to give you a
heads up about what we're in forwhen we start to dissect these
so-called Beatitudes. So let's take a look at the
text. Go get your Bible.
If you don't have it or if you're on the go, just listen.
And then you can go back, look at the text after you have some
(03:06):
time to sit down and look at it closely.
Or if you need, go to bibleactuallysays.com.
Subscribe there and you'll get access to the show notes in the
biblical text that we're lookingat here.
But let's start with Matthew in this episode in in the next one,
we're going to take a close lookat Luke.
So in Matthew 5, one to two, we're told that Jesus went up to
(03:27):
the mountain and after he sat down, his disciples came to him.
Then he began to speak and taught them.
So this posture, sitting down toteach is the posture of
authority. Rabbi sat down when they
delivered rulings. King sat down when they issued
decrees and Jesus is doing both.He's sitting in a posture of
authority and he's about to deliver the most radical, mind
(03:49):
blowing, world changing message ever declared in public.
Then in verse 3 gives his opening line.
And just as a reminder, this, aswe talked about in the previous
episode, this is far less like achurch service or a revival or a
Billy Graham rally. This is Jesus launching his
messianic campaign. This is more like a political
(04:11):
rally than a church service. So when Jesus begins to speak,
he's not just laying out something that we're supposed to
embrace in our heart and then dowhatever else we want to do in
our lives publicly. What Jesus is saying here in
these verses in this speech is he's laying out his vision for
how what he calls the empire of God is supposed to look.
(04:34):
So he opens up in verse 3 in a sitting posture and he says this
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of
heaven. And I imagine he paused after
each of these so-called Beatitudes just to let his
audience digest what he's sayingbecause none of what he says in
Matthew 5 to 7 and Luke 6 is expected for us.
(04:55):
We sit here and we read the showcalled Sermon on the Mount and
the Sermon on the plane. And these are familiar texts to
us. We we print bits and pieces of
these in really fancy fonts on Home Decor and buy it from Hobby
Lobby or on Etsy. I mean, his buy one, get one
half off. So why not, right?
And we recite these sayings fromthis account in sermons, not
necessarily as the primary verseof the message, but as sort of a
(05:17):
support verse from time to time to the other other verses that
we're discussing in the message.But there wasn't a single line,
a single verse of this campaign speech of Jesus that his
listeners would have expected tohear it first the way we do.
I mean, it wouldn't have taken long before they began to
understand whom he favored and whom he did not favor.
(05:39):
But line after line, Jesus makesdeclarations that completely
upend what people in his own world, as well as people in our
own world think about who God is, whom he favors, and how he
wants his empire to operate. His opening line wasn't.
We're going to go and make our people great again.
We're going to go take back the nation from those who've
(06:00):
corrupted it. We're going to go force people
to recognize who God is and how powerful he is.
And we're going to do it with strength and power and
domination and force if necessary, because God bless us.
That's exactly not how Jesus opened his campaign speech in
Matthew 5. Three, Jesus said nothing like
that. And trust me, that's what many
of his listeners wanted to hear,and it's who many of his people
(06:22):
thought God was all about. But On the contrary, Jesus
declares blessed are the poor, for theirs is the Kingdom of
heaven. Now keep in mind that's our
English translation. Remember that the New Testament
was written in ancient Greek, but Jesus actually spoke in a
Galilean form of Aramaic. So in Galilean Aramaic, the
(06:42):
language Jesus actually spoke Matthew 5 three would have
sounded something closer to breek enun aniye bruja dilhon al
Kuta dishmaya. So the first couple of words
here breek enun. It's not a passive wish, it's a
declaration. It's not may you be blessed.
(07:04):
It's you are blessed and not because of something you've
done, but because of who God is and what kind of Kingdom Jesus
is inaugurating. This is constitutional language.
These are not hopes or private affirmations the way we often
take these. This is Jesus speaking and
issuing royal policy to the masses.
(07:25):
Just as Caesar might say these are the people who belong to
Rome and the Roman Empire. Jesus is saying these are people
who belong to the empire of God.This is his opening line, his
pream, and he begins with the least likely citizens, the amha
arets, the people of the land, rather than the elite and the
(07:45):
wealthy and the powerful. This isn't a private fundraiser
in which he's schmoozing up to the wealthy donors and the
powerful who can make connections for him so that they
can get him in the door and cut deals behind the scenes so that
he can launch his Kingdom in that manner.
He's taking it to the masses, tothe poor, to the Amha arets, the
(08:05):
people of the land, and he's announcing what his Kingdom is
going to look like and whom it'sgoing to favor on earth as it is
in heaven. And the people he identifies are
the Annie Bruja, the poor in spirit.
Now this is interesting because we take this and we make it into
a sweet little saying of Jesus and an encouragement.
(08:26):
And it absolutely is 100% supposed to be an encouragement.
But when he says poor in spirit,this is not about quiet humility
or this vague sort of sense of religious brokenness.
It refers to those who are crushed internally.
They're exhausted, they're disenfranchised, they're running
on empty. And Jesus is drawing directly
(08:49):
from a deep prophetic stream when he uses these words.
The Hebrew word ani in its Aramaic and Greek counterparts,
the Greek is potokos. These terms often referred not
just to economic poverty, but tothe afflicted, the humbled, the
dependent. Isaiah 61, one quoted by Jesus
(09:09):
in Luke 4. Remember when he goes back home
to his synagogue in Nazareth andhe makes that speech in the
synagogue and he declares that the Spirit of the Lord has
anointed him. We talked about that in a
previous episode. If you didn't listen to that, go
check it out. But he announces, quoting Isaiah
61, one that he has come and he's been anointed to bring good
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news to the poor. Same word there.
That's the word Luke uses here. The Greek is putokoi in the
Aramaic Targum of Isaiah. Just a note about the Bible
because I'm going to use some ofthese words throughout this
podcast. The Old Testament was written in
Hebrew, but since everyone in Jesus's day spoke Aramaic, there
(09:53):
were Aramaic translations of theOld Testament that we call
Targums. Likewise, there were a lot of
Greek speakers throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, and
so there's an ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Old
Testament that we call the Septuagint.
Anyway, all of that to say, in Targum, Isaiah, so the Aramaic
(10:14):
translation of Isaiah, the phrase that Jesus is using here
as recorded in Matthew 5, three,becomes even more pronounced,
translating the poor as those who are crushed or bowed down.
They're literally hunched over. We find this in the Psalms, this
idea, especially Psalm 3418, in Psalm 4017, where the poor and
(10:35):
the broken hearted are not just recipients of charity.
They are those whom God draws near, to whom God protects, and
whom God exalts over those who don't need him because they have
everything they need. In the Targums, the Ani, the
poor become the one who waits onthe mercy of the Messiah, not
the rich, not the celebrated, not the dudes at the top.
(10:58):
In other words, the poor in thistradition are not simply
destitute, they are God's audiences, God's people, God's
remnant. This is the single mom working 2
jobs and barely making rent. This is the young man sitting in
the back of the church row wondering if he still belongs
after his past continues to haunt him.
It's the person who's been told by the community or even their
(11:19):
church that they're not spiritual enough, not strong
enough, not worthy. Jesus looks at all of them and
he says, you are the ones this Kingdom, my empire belongs to.
And this isn't spiritualizing poverty.
This isn't turning somebody's misfortune into a neat little
story to make a point in a sermon or in a message or in a
political speech. This is identifying face to face
(11:41):
spiritual despair as the entry point to divine citizenship.
The very people who feel disqualified from God's Kingdom
are the ones Jesus calls heirs. And to understand the subversive
power of Jesus's words in Matthew 5, three blessed are the
poor in spirit, we have to graspwhat it meant to be patochos or
(12:02):
ani in the ancient world. The Greek term patochos, the
Hebrew word ani, this, all of this didn't just mean someone of
low income. It meant that, but it also
referred to someone utterly destitute, completely without
resources or social standing. It meant, in its original
language, to cower, to shrink back and evoke the image of a
(12:23):
person crouching in shame. In the Greco Roman world,
poverty wasn't just unfortunate,it was often considered
dishonorable and contagious. And it was rooted in theology,
both in the Greco Roman world and in Jesus's own culture,
where if you didn't have it was because God didn't give, and if
you didn't have, it was because God didn't want to give.
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Cicero describes the poor as of ignoble birth, lacking virtus,
the Roman ideal of strength and honor and moral character.
Aristotle claimed the poor lacked the leisure and the
freedom required for virtue and wisdom in civic life.
The poor were viewed as a socialburden at best and as moral
(13:06):
failures at worst. So it was their fault they were
poor. It was believed there were no
state-run welfare programs, no safety Nets.
If you didn't have a patron or awealthy relative or someone that
you could become indebted to or become enslaved to or someone to
advocate for you, you didn't survive.
Ancient writers frequently equated poverty with shame and
(13:29):
moral weakness and even divine punishment.
And while the biblical traditionoffers a sort of a theological
counterpoint, especially in the Psalms and the prophets, where
God has said over and over to defend the ANI, the poor, the
humble, the afflicted, that didn't mean poor people were
honored in day-to-day life. And to the contrary, even in
(13:51):
Jesus's day, the poor were oftentreated with suspicion, with
social disdain. The Torah demanded care, like I
say, over and over, for widows and orphans and strangers.
Deuteronomy 24 is an example of this, Jeremiah 22.
But this doesn't appear to be the way things played out in
real life. Not on a broader scale.
(14:12):
Maybe on an individual scale, where you had someone give
generously to a poor person, butnot on a collective scale.
And by Jesus's day, many in his own world saw poverty as a sign
of personal or ancestral sin. Ancient phrase There is no death
without sin and no suffering without transgression reflects
(14:32):
this widespread assumption that suffering, including financial
hardship must have a spiritual 'cause we see this idea or
similar idea play out in John 91to three where Jesus and his
disciples come upon a blind man and the disciples ask who's sin,
the man or his parents 'cause him to be blind like this.
(14:53):
And Jesus says nobody did because that's not how it works.
And some of the sectarian communities like Qumran valued
voluntary poverty. So it was this noble thing to
give of yourself and become pooron purpose.
Most, including the temple elite, associated material
blessing with divine favor and viewed the amharats, the common
(15:13):
people, the people of the land who are often poor, as
spiritually inferior. In Jesus world, to be poor was
not simply to lack money, it wasto lack voice, protection,
social belonging, and in the view of the people, blessing by
God. As precisely there, in that
cultural moment that Jesus dropsthis line.
(15:34):
Blessed are the poor, not the strong, not the elite, not the
upwardly mobile, but the bent over, the ashamed, the pushed
out. This is a direct in version of
what his world assumed about status and divinity.
In a society where honor and merit systems both excluded the
poor, Jesus recenters them. He isn't just offering comfort,
(15:56):
he's declaring a new social reality.
He isn't spiritualizing poverty either.
Matthew adds in spirit, yes, butthis doesn't soften the impact
the way we often interpret it. To do it intensifies it.
These are people whose spirits are crushed and Jesus says to
these right here belongs the Kingdom of heaven.
(16:18):
This is radical because it's nota future reward only, it's a
present possession. Jesus doesn't say they will
inherit. He says right now in Jesus's
empire, the poor don't beg for crumbs from the table.
They are seated at the head of the table, and that means every
theological system, every economic model, every political
ideology that rewards the wealthy and sidelines the poor
(16:40):
is now under judgement, both in Jesus's day and today.
Jesus isn't simply including thepoor.
He's not just saying, hey, everyonce in a while, go and give
someone a few bucks standing on the side of the street.
What he's doing is he's reorganizing the world around
them. That person you see on the side
of the street, Jesus is saying they are at the center of the
(17:04):
Kingdom of heaven. That person who's literally
sleeping under the bridge because they have nothing.
Jesus doesn't ask questions. He says they belong at the
center of the Kingdom. And that is a tough pill to
swallow for me. But this is the challenge that
Jesus is throwing out because he's not telling them to earn
God's blessing. He's not standing up and saying,
(17:26):
go and clean yourself up and then God will bless you.
He's saying you as you are rightnow where you are.
You already have God's blessing because the king has come and
you are the ones he's come for. And in Luke's version, which
we'll look more closely at in the next episode, is even
starker. Luke reports Jesus as saying,
blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the empire of God
(17:49):
Rican. Noon on EE dil khon malkuta de
Aloha. Blessed are you who are poor for
yours. He says yours, not theirs.
Speaking directly to his audience at this point is the
empire of God. No qualifiers, no in spirit, no
softening. Jesus speaks directly, not some
(18:10):
imagined group, but to the crowdstanding right in front of him.
These are bruised, burdened, broke and broken.
And there's no metaphor here. He means actual poverty,
economic, social, relational. Jesus is saying if you've been
cast aside by this world, you are first in line for mine.
If you're poor, physically, economically, socially, you
(18:30):
belong to the empire of God. And this isn't pity, it's
proclamation. Jesus isn't saying you'll be OK
someday. He's saying you right now are
the true citizens of what's coming and what shall come in
the future. You are the future
administrators of God's restoredworld in this life and in
eternity. You're the foundation stones of
the new world Jesus is building.And that's just the beginning.
(18:55):
Take a look at Jesus's next line.
Jesus says blessed are those whomourn for they will be
comforted. Ibrikunun di bakin diel Khan
Yitzhakamun, those who mourn arenot forgotten.
In Rome's system, just as in ourown culture today, sadness was
weakness. In Jesus system it's sacred.
(19:16):
In Rome mourners are seen as liabilities, but in Jesus empire
they are leaders. And Jesus is saying the comfort
of heaven has already been promised to you.
And again, he doesn't qualify this as saying God sees you and
hears you only if you're a straight, white male who belongs
in the right congregation and believes the right things and
votes the right way. He doesn't make those
(19:38):
qualifications or put those restrictions on God's blessings
the way we do. He doesn't say, hey, you are
blessed, but only if you clean up your ACT before you come and
step into my congregation, but only if you reject your
political stance and you come and see things.
The way I see it, he doesn't do any of that.
What he says is Brekkinun di Bakkin, Dil Konyath Nakamun.
(20:01):
Blessed are those who mourn, forthey will be comforted and
that's it. No qualifications, no
conditions. If you mourn now, you will be
comforted. In fact, he looks past those
whom we tend to see in our society and in our congregations
and in our politics, and he seesthe one mourning because their
loved one has just been shipped to another country because of
(20:23):
their ethnicity. No questions asked.
He sees the mourners who don't happen to identify the way many
people believe they're supposed to identify.
No questions asked. He comforts and blesses the
mourner who struggles with anxiety because of the shame
that the religious establishmenthas heaped upon them for their
mistakes, even while that same establishment welcomes with open
(20:43):
arms others who've made the samemistakes but who just happened
to write a bigger check that seems to atone for theirs.
Jesus sees those mourners, No questions asked.
Jesus sees you in your mourning,and he says you will be
comforted. And once again, Jesus is drawing
from a rich stream of biblical and liturgical memory,
especially the prophets and the Psalms.
(21:05):
The word for mourn here, Baquin in Aramaic or Pantuntes in
Greek, isn't casual sadness. It's his deep lament, the kind
that shows up in funeral processions, in national exile,
in trauma, in injustice, in the death of a close loved one in
Isaiah 61 two, the same passage once again that Jesus quotes in
(21:27):
Luke 4, which we discussed in previous episode.
I'll say it again, if you haven't listened to that
episode, go check it out. Isaiah 61 two says the Servant
of the Lord will come to comfortall who mourn, using the same
exact language that Matthew usesand that Luke uses to describe
those who will be comforted. And in the Aramaic translation
(21:50):
of Isaiah, those mourners are identified as those who long for
the deliverance of Zion, people who are lamenting the suffering
of the people of God and awaiting their redemption.
Psalm 126 five echoes the same reversal.
Those who sow in tears will reapwith shouts of joy.
Jeremiah 31, part of the promiseof the new covenant, says, I
(22:11):
will turn their morning into joy.
I will comfort them and give them gladness for sorrow.
That's verse 13. In the Aramaic translation of
that verse, this comfort is explicitly depicted as
messianic. That is, it's pointing to God's
anointed One who will be the onewho wipes away their tears and
restores the people. In Second Temple apocalyptic
(22:34):
literature, mourning was a marker of those who remained
faithful in affliction, those whose grief was righteous
because they wept for a world that was just out of joint and
they refused to join in the oppressors.
This type of mourning that Jesusis addressing is not just
emotional fragility. It is covenant to loyalty.
(22:56):
So when Jesus says blessed are those who mourn, he is placing
himself squarely in the line of the prophets and saying if your
heart is broken over the way this world is going, you're in
the right place. You are not weak.
Don't listen to what the world tells you.
Don't listen to what your culture tells you.
Don't listen to what your politicians tell you.
Don't listen to what your news channel tells you.
(23:17):
You are the foundation of my empire.
In this way, the word yitnakamun, they will be
comforted. It's not a shallow platitude,
it's a divine reversal. It's the voice of Isaiah,
Jeremiah, the Psalms, the Aramaic Targums, all harmonizing
together in Jesus's own words tosay You weep now, you will dance
soon. The Kingdom of God has heard
(23:38):
your cries and it is on the move.
In Jesus empire, grief is not a deficit, it's a credit.
Comfort is not a reward for performance.
It's the inheritance of the broken hearted.
We've looked at verse 3. We've looked at verse 4.
Let's check out Matthew 5 verse 5.
Now here Jesus says blessed are the meek for they will inherit
(24:01):
the earth. Breaking noon on Naveen Dilhon
ye tune ara anavine the Aramaic for meek, not the loud, not the
strong, not the self promoting, not the self protecting, not the
self preserving. The meek will inherit the land.
Here Jesus once again is directly echoing the voice of a
(24:22):
Psalm, in this particular case, Psalm 37, a text that would have
been deeply familiar to his Jewish audience, especially in
Galilee, where hopes for land and restoration were just right
there. Psalm 3711 says, But the meek
shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant
peace. The phrase there, the meek shall
inherit the land. That's exactly what Jesus quotes
(24:44):
in the original Hebrew. On a veem, like Jesus's Aramaic
on avine, refers not just to quiet people, but to those who
have been humbled by affliction,the oppressed, poor, those who
refuse to retaliate, but who entrust their future to God.
In the Aramaic of Psalm 37, the phrase becomes more explicit.
(25:05):
The Aramaic translates the Hebrew like this.
But the humble shall inherit theland because they wait for
deliverance from the Lord. So in other words, the meek
aren't weak. They are resistors without
swords. They are the nonviolent faithful
who wait, endure, and persevere in the hope of divine justice.
This same theme runs through Isaiah as well, especially
(25:27):
Isaiah 11/4. For the Messianic king is said
to judge the poor with righteousness and decide with
equity for the meek of the land.That phrase, the meek of the
land, became a code in the prophets and in the Psalms for
the faithful remnant, the peoplecut out of power but central to
God's plan. So when Jesus says the meek will
inherit the earth, he's both quoting Scripture and reclaiming
(25:49):
A prophetic tradition for those standing in front of him and for
you and me today. And it's this one that says the
people who are last in line for Roman inheritance or American
inheritance are first in line for mine.
This is Jubilee logic. This is Isaiah 61 logic.
This is Psalm 37 and Exodus 23 logic.
(26:09):
The land doesn't belong to thosewho sees it.
It belongs to those who trust God enough not to.
The meek are those who don't feel so insecure and so afraid
that they've got to go on the offensive and take this land
back for Christ. Which is another way of saying
that we want to force our views on others to gain power.
That's not the meek. That's not what Jesus is calling
(26:29):
for. The meek are those who view
Yahweh and who view Jesus as King on the throne, and who
trust him to do the taking and the giving so that they don't
feel the need to take from anyone.
That's who Jesus says will, in real life, and not in some weird
metaphorical way, inherit the land.
Those are the ones who will receive divine rewards beyond
(26:50):
their wildest imagination. And this flipped everything Rome
taught. In Roman culture, inheritance
was reserved for the privileged.It was passed through elite
family lines, maintained by corrupt business practices,
defended by violence. But Jesus says no.
It's it's the quiet ones. It's the gentle ones, the ones
who refuse to dominate, who willreceive the very earth others
(27:13):
are fighting to steal and hoard.This is a direct contradiction
of Roman political logic where land is seized by force and
inherited through bloodlines. Jesus says, Nope, not in my
Kingdom. And we saw a couple of episodes
ago in this podcast where Jesus advocated A jubilee based
economic program that prevented this sort of hoarding of
(27:33):
property by those at the top that effectively shut out those
who just wanted to have a piece of land and a little bit of life
of their own. Let's look at verse 6.
Jesus says blessed are those whohunger and thirst for
righteousness. Now check this out.
The Aramaic here gets more precise.
Brikunun de kafnin, ritzakin litzidka, theohonis, boon.
(27:58):
Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness or justice are
starving, craving not for food, but for Sidka, for justice,
integrity, covenant, faithfulness.
They are famished for things to be made right.
This isn't a casual preference. This is a bodily craving for
equity, for fairness, for God's will to be done.
Those are the people who lie awake at night because they see
(28:20):
the world's injustice and cannotbe comfortable in it.
These aren't the people who lie in bed, awake at night and dream
of being millionaires and billionaires, and who are
motivated by money and who are motivated by power and who
aspire to be at the top. These are people who want things
to be made right for those who can't protect themselves.
(28:42):
And Jesus says those people, theones who ache in their bones for
a better world, they will be filled.
The ones who hunger for God's justice to come on earth as it
is in heaven, they will be filled.
They will be satisfied. The empire of God doesn't just
pacify them. It doesn't just sort of say, OK,
yeah, yeah, yeah, go on your way.
(29:03):
It answers them. And it says, I hear you.
And in the empire of God, thingswill be made right.
And this is not the justice we hear weaponized by power hungry
voices in our culture today. This is not the justice of
retribution, revenge, exclusion,nationalist identity politics.
This isn't if you break the law,you deserve what you get.
(29:23):
It's not if you're different from me, you're outside God's
plan. It's not if your faith, gender,
citizenship, or experience doesn't mirror mine.
They May God strike you down that that sort of take back this
land in the name of Christ. Bogus version of following
Jesus. That's not what it is.
That's not the version of justice that Jesus is promoting
here in addressing that is empire justice.
(29:46):
And Jesus came to destroy that then, and he shall in the future
destroy that again. This is Sidka, covenantal
restorative justice. That's the term here that Jesus
uses. The kind that feeds the hungry
rather than shames them. It restores the outcasts rather
than shuts the door on them. It lifts up the broken rather
(30:07):
than steps on them. And it rebukes the abusers of
power, even if those who are abusing power are doing so in
the name of Christ. The kind that turns morning into
dancing and oppression into release.
And the biblical echoes in this particular saying of Jesus are
unmistakable. The word sidka, or in Greek, de
caiosune, isn't merely righteousness in the sense of
(30:30):
this private morality, which we typically take this concept to
mean righteousness. In my heart, that's not what it
is. It's deeply communal,
covenantal. When Jesus talks about
righteousness and justice, he's talking about something
external. In Amos 524, one of the clearest
echoes here, the prophet cries outlet justice or mishpot, roll
down like waters and righteousness, or Sidka like an
(30:53):
ever flowing stream. The very same language that Amos
is using is the very same language that Jesus is using
here as well. Likewise in the Psalms, Psalm
72, a royal prayer for the Davidic King.
Sidka is what the Anointed 1 is meant to enact to bring about.
May He judge your people with righteousness and your poor with
(31:13):
justice. In the Aramaic of that Psalm,
the king is expanded as a messianic figure, He bringing
justice, bringing God's justice not just to Israel, but to the
whole world. So when Jesus says those who
hunger and thirst for Sidka or justice are blessed, he's
placing his listeners inside that ancient longing for a world
(31:34):
run not by greed, not by power, but by grace.
In Isaiah this longing grows even stronger.
In Isaiah 117 we see the call tothe people to seek justice,
correct oppression, and in Isaiah 11 For the messianic
ruler will judge the poor with righteousness and decide with
equity for the meek of the earth.
Again, in the Aramaic translation of this particular
(31:56):
verse in Isaiah, righteousness becomes a sign of divine
intervention. So while we think wealth is a
sign of God's blessing on me, the biblical portrait of God's
blessing upon us is that we are just.
And we are restoratively just, not punitively just.
(32:17):
That is, we're not taking punishment and executing God's
justice with a sword. We're taking God's love and his
mercy and his grace to those who, just like us, don't deserve
it. And we're extending a hand, no
questions asked. That is a sign of God's blessing
on us in the Dead Sea Scrolls, particularly in a book called
(32:39):
The Community Rule One QS. You can look this up online.
Righteousness or justice isn't just ethical.
It's not this in inward thing. It's cosmic.
So for Jesus as listeners, many of whom longed for vindication,
deliverance, equity, this beatitude didn't sound like an
internal moral principle the wayit does to us.
It sounded like your hunger willactually end soon.
(33:01):
Your physical aching will be answered.
The day you've prayed for is on its way.
Jesus is tapping into all of this and recentering it.
Sitka is not about rule following.
It's not about moral superiority.
It's not about something that I just tuck away in my heart and
then I go and live and treat people that any way that I
please. It's about God setting the world
(33:22):
to write, starting with the people the world has pushed
down. And it's about you and me going
out. If we claim to be followers of
Jesus and bringing about this restorative justice to the
world, this is what the empire of God looks like in heaven, and
this is the empire of God that Jesus has established to take
over the earth. And we're just getting started.
(33:43):
Think about living in a world inwhich you don't have all major
social and political seats of power.
Think about if you've been abused or taken advantage of or
just handed a crappy hand by life and you're just trying to
climb out. Justice for you in that
situation looks a whole lot different than it does for
someone sitting at the top of power and wealth, looking down
(34:04):
on those whom they say should have done life differently,
should have been born different,shouldn't have broken the law
the way you did, should have saved your money a little
better. For those at the bottom, justice
looks a lot more like catching abreak than punishment and shame.
For those at the bottom, justicelooks a lot less like getting a
handout than it does just not getting stepped on while they're
(34:25):
down. For those at the bottom, justice
looks a lot more like getting help trying to understand why
such horrible things happen to them when they were young than
it does being shamed for being confused about who they are now
and their place in this world. For those at the top, justice
looks like using the world systems for making sure my own
world stays clean, remains pure,keeps operating smoothly,
(34:47):
continues to expand economically, geographically,
socially, politically. But for those at the bottom,
justice looks like what Jesus himself is saying in Matthew 5
to 7 and Luke 6. And if you're at the top of the
world right now, the world and your news channel and probably
even your congregation says you just keep doing what you need to
do to keep what you have to maintain your position in
(35:09):
society, to ensure that your investments and funds grow at
all costs. But Jesus has a different take
on what it looks like to be at the top in this world, and he
addresses that in Luke 6, which we'll get to in the next
episode. If you're at the bottom though,
or just in a place in this worldwhere life isn't being kind and
where people wearing God's name or even less so, all in the name
(35:31):
of quote UN quote justice, well,Jesus has some words for you
too. And his words sound a lot more
like in his empire, both now andin eternity, that you are at the
top. And it makes this abundantly
clear. Blessed are the poor, for theirs
is the Kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for
they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they
(35:52):
will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and
thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
And if this is you, then I want you to know right now that you
are at the center of God's favorboth now and in eternity.
And if you are feeling or if you've ever felt crushed in
spirit, if you've ever mourned quietly in the dark or
questioned your worth in a system that only seems to reward
(36:13):
the powerful and polished, I want you to hear this clearly.
You aren't forgotten. You are not invisible, you are
not disqualified from the Kingdom of heaven for whatever
reasons, and I don't care who's told you you are.
You are not because Jesus says you are not.
And you are exactly the person, according to Jesus, that Jesus
opens his constitution with. That is the founding principles
(36:35):
of the Empire of God. Not the religious elite, not the
political elite, not the social elite, Not the people who are
inside the empire and shutting the doors to those who are
outside. Not the ones who are removing
you from safety and security. Not the ones who dominate the
airwaves and sit comfortably in pews patted by privilege.
Jesus starts his empire with you, and that means you're not
(36:57):
just included. You're at the center.
You're the cornerstone of the world.
He's building on earth as it is in heaven.
So let this reframe what blessing looks like to you.
It's not ease. It's not applause.
It's not being right or rich or respected when we say, oh, God
has just blessed me. And when we say that, we're
(37:18):
talking about how much wealth wehave or just how great and
polished of a life we have. We need to really rethink what
we understand God's blessing to look like.
And I'm not saying we don't be grateful for what we have.
Not at all. But when we start to say, well
God's blessed me for this or that, the assumption that we
don't think about is that God hasn't blessed that person on
(37:41):
the street and God has chosen not to bless them on the street
and that's why they're there. That's the assumption we're
making. When we make that assumption, we
completely miss what the empire of God looks like and what Jesus
is saying here in these so-called beatitudes.
Because at the center of God's empire are those who don't fit
(38:02):
what we would say as someone having been blessed by God.
Someone who has nothing may be cursed, may be shamed in this
world. And we drive by them on the
street and we duck our head whenwe stop, stop light because
they're holding up a sign that they just need some food for the
day. And we say, oh, shame on them,
God has blessed me. But I think we should start to
(38:23):
rethink and reframe the way we understand how God views people
in this world that we otherwise dismiss.
Because if Jesus is right, he's saying that that person that we
dismiss, that person that doesn't have a name, doesn't
have a place, who has nothing tohis or her name, that's the
person who belongs at the centerof his Kingdom both here and in
(38:45):
the world to come. So when Jesus is talking about
justice, about blessing, about God's Kingdom, he's talking
about a hunger for justice for those who can't defend
themselves. He's talking about quiet
endurance in which you wait on God rather than go and take the
world by force. He's a faith to keep mourning,
keep hoping, keep trusting that God is on the move even when the
(39:07):
world and especially the Christian world seems unmoved
and harsh. And if this has stirred anything
in you or if it's made you upsetor angry at me, I'm OK with
that. But if it's resonated with a
part of you that has long felt small or unseen, and stay with
me. Because next time we're going to
sit down with Jesus and Luke 6. And things are about to get even
(39:27):
more direct there. Jesus doesn't just bless the
poor. He has some stern warnings for
those who have wealth and power.And he doesn't just comfort the
mourners. He flips the system so that they
are the ones who he sees favorably.
So come back next time. And as always, Lake Almont, go
and learn. I'll see you next time on what
the Bible actually says.
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