It’s interesting. When I decided to start working through Matthew, I wasn’t thinking about how chapters 5 – 7 in that book are exactly what Willard works through in the majority of The Divine Conspiracy. As I’m reading through the Beatitudes in particular, I keep recalling some things he mentions…
“The Beatitudes are not teachings on how to be blessed. They are not instructions to do anything. No one is actually being told that they are better off for being poor, for mourning, for being persecuted, and so on…They are explanations and illustrations, drawn from the immediate setting, of the present availability of the kingdom through personal relationship to Jesus.
The Beatitudes simply cannot be ‘good news’ if they are understood as a set of ‘how tos’ for achieving blessedness. They would then only amount to a new legalism. They would not serve to throw open the kingdom – anything but…
Jesus is correcting a general assumption or practice thought to govern the situation at hand. This is seen in Mark 10 about the rich young ruler…Jesus did not say that the rich cannot enter the kingdom. In fact he said they could – with God’s help, which is the only way anyone can do it… He simply upset the prevailing general assumption about God and riches. For how could God favor a person, however rich, who loves him less than wealth?
So with the story of the Good Samaritan…the story does not teach that we can have eternal life just by loving our neighbor. We cannot get away with that nice legalism either. The issue of our posture toward God still has to be taken into account. But in God’s order nothing can substitute for loving people. And we define who our neighbor is by our love…If Jesus were here today, the story would be told differently…To make his point now, Jesus might have said, “the good Iraqi,” “good Communist,” “good feminist,” “good homosexual,” or “good priest.” All of these break up pet generalizations concerning who surely is or is not leading the eternal kind of life.
We all know people who please God and have his blessing without being poor, hungry, grief-stricken, or persecuted. They trust Jesus with all their heart, and they love and serve their neighbors and others in his name. Their hearts are full of peace and joy in believing, and they ‘do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God.’
[The beatitudes] serve to clarify Jesus’ fundamental message: the free availability of God’s rule and righteousness to all of humanity through the reliance upon Jesus himself, the person now loose in the world among us…The gospel of the kingdom is that no one is beyond beatitude, because the rule of God from the heavens is available to all. We respond appropriately to the beatitudes of Jesus by living as if this were so…
Lostness does not have to wear a stuffed shirt to find redemption. So we must see from our heart that:
Blessed are the physically repulsive,
Those who smell bad,
The twisted, misshapen, deformed,
The too big, too little, too loud,
The bald, the fat, and the old –
For they are all riotously celebrated in the party of Jesus…
Also, the flunk-outs, and drop-outs and burned-outs. The broke and the broken. The drug heads and the divorced. The HIV-positive and the herpes-ridden. The brain-damaged and the incurably ill. The barren and the pregnant-too-many-times, the overemployed, the underemployed…the parents with children living on the street, the incompetent, the stupid…
Even the moral disasters will be received by God as they come to rely on Jesus, count on him, and make him their companion is his Kingdom. Murderers and child-molesters. The brutal and bigoted. Drug lords and pornographers. War criminals and sadists. The pederast and the perpetrator of incest. Those who rob the aged and weak. The cheat and the liar: Blessed! Blessed! Blessed! As they flee into the arms of The Kingdom Among Us.”
The Divine Conspiracy, a whole bunch of different pages