The Beatitudes through the Ages

Rebekah Eklund

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780802876508
• eBook ISBN: 9781467461276
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

The Beatitudes are among the most influential teachings in human history. For two millennia, they have appeared in poetry and politics, and in the thought of mystics and activists, as Christians and others have reflected on their meaning and shaped their lives according to the Beatitudes' wisdom. 
 
But what does it mean to be hungry, or meek, or pure in heart? Is poverty a material condition or a spiritual one? And what does being  blessed entail? 
 
In this book, Rebekah Eklund explores how the Beatitudes have affected readers across differing eras and contexts. From Matthew and Luke in the first century, to Martin Luther King Jr. and Billy Graham in the twentieth, Eklund considers how men and women have understood and applied the Beatitudes to their own lives through the ages. Reading in the company of past readers helps us see how rich and multifaceted the Beatitudes truly are, illuminating what they might mean for us today.

1

Meet the Beatitudes

Some Basic Questions

In this chapter, I want to consider six “big-picture” questions. These questions will lay the foundation for all the chapters to come. They are questions that recur throughout the interpretive history. Some may seem obvious (like question #5) but have surprisingly complex answers. Some have had a relatively uniform answer for a long time and then a new answer at an identifiable point in history (like question #1). All of them are essential for understanding the interpretation of each individual beatitude.

1. Are Matthew’s and Luke’s Beatitudes the same, or are they different?

2. Who are the Beatitudes for?

3. (How) are they countercultural?

4. Are they commands or descriptions?

5. How many are there?

6. When are they for?

Are Matthew’s and Luke’s Beatitudes the same, or different?

Matthew and Luke, the two “evangelists” who recorded the Beatitudes, did so with their own distinctive styles. To line up their two versions in the chart below, I’ve followed Matthew’s order and reordered Luke’s.

MATTHEW 5:1–12	LUKE 6:20–26 [REORDERED]
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.	Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God (v. 20).
	But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation (v. 24).
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.	Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh (v. 21b). Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep (v. 25b).
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.	Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled (v. 21a).
	Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry (v. 25a).
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.	Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets (vv. 22–23).
	Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets (v. 26).

Matthew and Luke: the first interpreters of Jesus’s Beatitudes

Some of the differences are immediately obvious: Matthew has more blessings; Luke has fewer. Luke has matching woes; Matthew does not.¹ Even the beatitudes that appear in both versions have minor variations.

What the chart doesn’t show is where the Beatitudes occur in the narrative flow of each gospel. If you have a Bible nearby, you might open it up and take a look. In Matthew’s account, Jesus goes up onto a mountain—an echo of Moses going up on Mt. Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments (Matt 5:1–2, Exod 34:4). In Luke, Jesus first goes up on a mountain to choose twelve of his disciples to be apostles; when he comes down from the mountain (like Moses in Exod 34:29), a great crowd presses around him hoping for healing and deliverance, and he “healed all of them” (Luke 6:19).² Then Jesus delivers the Beatitudes and their matching woes. In both accounts, two audiences are present: the disciples and the crowds (the crowd’s presence is explicit in Luke 6:20; it’s more ambiguous in Matt 5:1–2 but seems assumed in Matt 7:28–29).

If we back up into Matthew 1–4 and Luke 1–5, we see more differences in the unfolding story of Jesus’s birth and ministry. These stories are very similar in the two accounts, but the differences are not trivial either: the weeping of Rachel (Matt 2:18) is still in our ears when we hear the blessing on those who mourn (Matt 5:4), just as Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 2:46–55) sings in the background of the blessing on the poor and the woe to the rich (Luke 6:20, 24). The two evangelists have declared the speaker of the Beatitudes to be the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham (Matt 1:1), God with us (Matt 1:23), the Son of the Most High and inheritor of the throne of David (Luke 1:32), and the Messiah and Lord (Luke 2:11, 26). By the time Jesus speaks the Beatitudes, his identity is clear—perhaps not yet to the disciples and the crowds participating in the story, but certainly to us, and to the readers and hearers of the two gospel accounts.

If we continued reading after the Beatitudes, we’d find echoes of the Beatitudes in various places along the way, and sometimes even an illustration of them. I’ll highlight many of these connections in the chapters that follow.³ If we read all the way to the end of the two gospels, we might wonder how the narrative of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection illuminates the Beatitudes; we might return to read them with new eyes as the declarations of one who would die and be raised. What do the Beatitudes look like in the light of the resurrection?

For this point, I take my cue from New Testament scholar Richard Hays, who writes, “We interpret Scripture rightly only when we read it in light of the resurrection, and we begin to comprehend the resurrection only when we see it as the climax of the scriptural story of God’s gracious deliverance of Israel.”⁴ What might these insights mean when we apply them to the Beatitudes? They might lead us to see the Beatitudes as an element of God’s gracious deliverance of Israel. They should also remind us that the story of the Beatitudes is “not a story about human wisdom” but “a story about the power of the God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”⁵ This means seeing the Beatitudes as arrows pointing toward what my mentor Allen Verhey always called “God’s good future,” when all the tears will be wiped away.

The contexts of the Beatitudes matter, including the end of the story. The evangelists have incorporated the Beatitudes with care into the larger narratives of their gospels. They’ve also made some modifications of their own to the Beatitudes themselves. Of course, it’s possible that Jesus spoke both versions on two different occasions, and the two evangelists faithfully recorded the two versions separately. Interpreters throughout history suggest this possibility; this is especially true of preachers, who have experience of preaching similar sermons on more than one occasion! A few people have even proposed that Jesus delivered variants on the Beatitudes several times throughout his three-year preaching career, as preachers often do.

It’s more common to assume that there was one original version of the Beatitudes preached by Jesus. If this is true, then why are the two versions in Matthew and Luke different? Either (a) they were remembered and passed down to Matthew and Luke separately, in slightly different oral and/or written forms; or (b) Matthew and/or Luke made modifications to the original, to emphasize their respective theological aims. I tend toward option (b), mainly because I see Matthew and Luke as careful curators of their material, rather than as mere transcribers. Having once been a preacher myself, I wouldn’t dismiss the earlier option either—that Jesus could have preached slightly different versions of the Beatitudes multiple times throughout his career. Clearly the gospels don’t record, exhaustively, everything he said and did (John 21:25).

Another way to explain the differences in the versions is to suggest that Matthew and Luke have tailored the Beatitudes for their respective audiences. This is plausible, but the difficulty is that we know so little about the gospel audiences. Scholars speculate that Luke addressed a largely gentile audience in Asia Minor, whereas Matthew’s was mostly or exclusively Jewish, perhaps in Antioch, Syria. Some scholars have argued that Luke’s attention to the poor throughout his gospel springs from the low socioeconomic status of Christians in his local churches; others suggest that it derives from the growing wealth of the early Christian churches and Luke’s attempt to unsettle their material comfort and call them back to the radical roots of the gospel. This shows just how difficult it can be to pin down the precise social contexts of each evangelist.

So it’s obvious that the Beatitudes are not exactly the same in Matthew and in Luke. But the more important question is whether they are fundamentally the same. That is, are they expressing the same essential message, or not? Here opinion splits along chronological lines. Premodern interpreters uniformly assume that the two versions of the Beatitudes preserved in Matthew and Luke contain essentially the same teaching, whereas from the Enlightenment onward, modern scholars often assume the opposite.

The unity of Scripture

Augustine (354–430), in his Harmony of the Gospels, explored three possibilities for why Matthew and Luke recorded different versions of the Sermon on the Mount: (1) The Sermon was preached once, but the disciples remembered or reported it with some minor differences; (2) Jesus gave the Matthean version first on the mount and then descended to the “level place” (Luke 6:17) and gave the Lukan version; or (3) Jesus went up on the mountain and, after choosing the twelve disciples, he descended to a level spot on the slope of the mountain where the multitudes could sit and there delivered the one Sermon recorded with small variations by both evangelists.⁶ Option #3 proved popular, but Augustine showed little interest in choosing one solution over the other. What mattered to him was the harmony of the two teachings. The two Sermons (and thus the two versions of the Beatitudes) offered a unified and harmonious witness.

Premodern interpreters like Augustine also had a favorite when it came to the two versions. They lavished far more attention on Matthew’s Beatitudes.⁷ Of the earliest patristic interpreters, it seems that only Tertullian and Ambrose of Milan gave sustained attention to Luke’s version (Tertullian did so in order to refute Marcion of Sinope, who used Luke for his own anti-Jewish purposes; Ambrose was one of the few ancient Christians who wrote a commentary on Luke). For the most part, this preference simply reflected the popularity of Matthew as a Gospel in the early church. Every now and then, commentators used the differences between the two accounts to elevate Matthew’s version over Luke’s.

For example, an incomplete and anonymous fifth-century commentary on Matthew (ca. 425–430?) argued that Jesus first spoke the partial Lukan Beatitudes to “ordinary people” on the plain, but then ascended onto the mountain, which represents “the pinnacle of the church,” to address the more complete Matthean Beatitudes to “the perfect and the rulers of the people,” i.e., the apostles.⁸ Several hundred years later, Bernard of Clairvaux wrote a parable in which Christ and a monk carrying eight bundles (representing the eight Matthean Beatitudes) encounter a trader carrying four bundles (representing the Lukan Beatitudes). The four Lukan Beatitudes are treated rather scornfully as an inferio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Dale C. Allison Jr.
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Meet the Beatitudes: Some Basic Questions
• 2. The Tangled Skein of Our Lives: A Whirlwind Tour through History
• 3. Drained of All Other Waters: The Poor in Spirit and the Poor
• 4. By Trials Furrowed: Those Who Mourn and Weep
• 5. Yield Your Ground: The Meek
• 6. Our Daily Bread: The Hungry and Thirsty (for Justice)
• 7. Stretching Out the Hand: The Merciful
• 8. Such Powerful Light: The Pure in Heart
• 9. The Heart of God: The Peacemakers
• 10. Mischief-Makers and Bandits: The Persecuted
• Conclusion
• Bibliography