Watch the teaching related to the post below on our YouTube channel (YouTube.com/CrossWalkNapa). Or listen via your preferred podcast provider ( search CrossWalkNapa). This post is informed by, and references noted are sourced from (unless otherwise noted) Following the Call: Living the Sermon on the Mount Together, which will inform CrossWalkNapateachings throughout 2025.
For the past few weeks, we have been preparing to fully appreciate Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. We have been challenged right out of the gate, being asked by the authors in varying ways whether we really want to take Jesus serious enough to listen to and follow his teaching and example. Next week, we begin taking deeper dives into the text. This week, however, offers another preparatory session, asking us to consider what it means to be blessed, who is blessed, and how do we stay in such a blessed state of being.
We touched a bit on this last week in the chapter on Foolish Wisdom. The wisdom of Jesus’ opening Beatitudes – a series of statements declaring certain people and life experiences blessed – seems foolish to modern readers. Being blessed is often associated with having abundant creature comforts in our consumer culture, as well as having good health, a good job, and good relationships. Sometimes a winning season for the Giants, Warriors, Niners, or Sharks is ample reason to feel blessed!
Robert Schuller, a beloved mega-church TV preacher from a generation ago wrote a book on the Beatitudes called the Be Happy Attitudes. Happiness and blessedness seemed to be the same. In fact, some translations translate the Greek word, makarios, to happy (although most opt for blessed). When you hear the word “happy”, what comes to mind for you?
Pastor James C. Howell notes the depth that happiness meant to the Greek world, perhaps in contrast to the way many people think about the word today. He writes, “For the ancients, happiness was a possession of the soul, something that one acquired and that, once acquired, could not be easily taken away. Happiness designated the supreme aim of human life... living in accord with nature, in harmony with our deepest aspirations as human beings (23).” How is this similar or different than the way you typically think of happiness?
Howell contends that modern Americans associate happiness with fun, which is something that we can conjure or create. Blessed, he writes, is something different: “[American] happiness is something I pursue; happiness is up to me. But Jesus’ Beatitudes are about what we cannot achieve, what we cannot make happen, what we can only receive as the most startling of gifts... So, to be ‘blessed’ is being swept up in God’s decisive moment in the world. [N.T. Wright noted that] ‘It’s about something that’s starting to happen, not about a general truth of life. It is gospel: good news, not good advice’ (24).”
Happiness in our culture is a fleeting emotion. Blessedness seems more like a state of being. Jesus is offering some insight here that on the surface seems untrue, yet our experience, I think, in many cases validates his statement. If blessedness is a state of mind – something we tap into, then we still have agency in cultivating it, but tapping into something assumes there is something to tap into, something that is present that we did nothing to create. I think that “something” is God, or the shalom of God, or our Ground of Being, or unifying Love, or maybe even dark energy we are discovering, or perhaps the unseen web that connects everything in the expanding universe that fosters life. It seems to me that the more deeply people tap into the Source, the more blessed they feel regardless of their external circumstances.
How do we tap into it? Pastor Kathy Escobar writes about the counter-cultural, counter-intuitive Way to which Jesus referred:
[For Jesus,] in the Kingdom of God, somehow down means up. Much of my previous Christian experience was focused on rising up to be closer to God; now, I’m learning that downward is what draws me nearer to God. When I am with my friends in the darkness and pain, I am acutely aware of God’s presence more than in my comfortable places... Downward mobility is about discovering and revealing what it means to live into the kingdom of God as a Christ-follower. [The Beatitudes] inspire us toward a better way. Jesus’ words of blessing to the poor, marginalized, and downwardly mobile were not a threat or a coercion technique to force us into a miserable life. His call to go downward is a methodology for the abundant life. It is the easier yoke. If we crave God’s peace and presence, then I guess we have to trust his methods, too. It’s easy to think more money, power, or status will give us security and a stronger sense of self, yet Jesus says [in Matthew 10:39] it will be exactly the opposite: to find our lives we need to lose them (24). – Kathy Escobar
Being poor isn’t a magic remedy against the temptation of greed. Far from it – poor people can be as obsessed with money and possessions as much as wealthy. The difference is when you are poor, you are more aware of the difference between needs and wants (because you must be), and you are, I think, given an advantage of being able to see the futility of over-emphasizing material possessions (in part because they are out of reach). Poverty forces people to appreciate what they have and what is available to them, whereas the wealthier we become, the harder it is to see past our creature comforts and investment portfolios.
As I have said at other times, I don’t believe we are called to pursue poverty or mourning or persecution. I think Jesus was telling people who were in those experiences that even though it was difficult and painful, it was not in any way a reflection of God’s lack of love for them. For them to hear from Jesus that they were loved by God was revelatory and transformative in that era.
While we’re not called to poverty (although some take such a vow), we can remind ourselves of some things poverty teaches us. One lesson poverty teaches is that material possessions need not dictate our level of joy. In fact, when we can take a minute to remember that we are dust and to dust we return (along with all the stuff we buy), we can become more grounded into the essence of life instead of the stuff we consume. There is blessing in being satisfied with the basics of life.
We are not called to mourn, yet when we mourn myriad forms of loss, we often get clarity on what matters most. Especially when we lose a loved one, we don’t care much about politics or the stock market. Our priorities become aligned with love’s centrality – that’s an expression of being blessed in a very deep way.
When we choose to be humble, we find ourselves more open to the world in which we live, more connected – not separate or above it. There is a blessed peace that comes in such moments.
When we stand for and with others with grace in pursuit of justice, we soon figure out that we are not standing alone. The presence of God is already there, because grace and justice are always in beat with God’s heart. There is a kind of holiness that is born from helping others experience grace and find justice. Another form of being blessed.
When we choose to be merciful toward someone instead of retributive, we mimic the Spirit of God that always seeks our restoration and is not interested at all in our punishments. Being merciful is easiest when we are in touch with our own humanity – we can then see it and allow room for its uglier faces because we know we are human, too.
Of course, when we are pure in heart we see God – everywhere and in everything! We can foster such purity usually only through disciplined, consistent work. Meditation can be one of the most effective means of letting go of the impurities we carry. Music can sometimes be meditative, overriding our busy brains to get to our hearts. Have you ever been moved to tears by a musical piece – maybe even one without sung lyrics? We are laid bare – and pure – in such moments. We sense connection with everything, everyone – a divine experience and divine blessing.
Being a peacemaker is like standing with others with grace in pursuit of justice. God is all for peace and is constantly working toward it for all. Peace is the most common translation of the word for Shalom. Shalom is what God is all about. Shalom may, in fact, be God! After all, the writer of one of John’s letters in the New Testament said God is love, which is core to shalom.
Finally, it is hard to imagine feeling blessed while being persecuted. And yet, as Jesus noted, there is strange comfort that dedicated men and women who we now call prophets went through the wringer, too. A weird peace about it. We just need to be sure the thing we are persecuted for is truly aligned with shalom, otherwise it may be suffering simply for our own ego. There is a kind of joy knowing you left it all on the field in the hopes of fostering shalom in the process. That is a blessing.
How about you? How about spending some time with each of the Beatitudes, imagining how they resonate and ring true? Just because the words are counter-intuitive and counter-cultural does not mean they are untrue, wrong, or irrelevant. It could be that as you reflect on such things, you will discover that Jesus was right all along. In that moment, you may just sense that you are indeed blessed.