The Sermon on the Mount cannot help but become a law, an
ethic, if what is taught is abstracted from the teacher...the ecclesial
practices that have legitimated questions about whether Jesus‘s teachings in
the sermon are meant to be followed are but reflections of Christologies that
separate the person and work of Christ...
The sermon...is not a list of requirements, but rather a
description of the life of a people gathered by and around Jesus. To be saved
is to be so gathered. That is why the Beatitudes are the interpretive key to
the whole sermon – precisely because they are not recommendations. No one is asked
to go out and try to be poor in spirit or to mourn or to be meek. Rather, Jesus
is indicating that given the reality of the kingdom we should not be surprised
to find among those who follow him those who are poor in spirit, those who
mourn, those who are meek. Moreover, Jesus does not suggest that everyone who
follows him will possess al the Beatitudes, but we can be sure that some will
be poor, some will mourn, and some will be meek.
For the church to be so constituted, according to
Bonhoeffer, requires the visibility of the church. To be salt, to be made light
for the world, is a call for the church to be visible...Christians, however,
are tempted to become invisible, justifying their identification with the
surrounding culture in the name of serving the neighbor...
This does not mean that those who would follow Jesus do so
that they may be seen. Nor are disciples called to be different in order to be
different. Jesus clearly thinks that disciples will be different, but that
difference is because of what he is – the Son of God...
Each of the Beatitudes names a gift, but it is not presumed
that everyone who is a follower of Jesus will possess each beatitude. Rather,
the gifts named in the Beatitudes suggest that the diversity of these gifts
will be present in the community of those who have heard Jesus’s call to
discipleship. Indeed, to learn to be a disciple is to learn why we are
dependent on those who mourn or who are meek, though we may not possess that
gift ourselves...
the source for any understanding of the Beatitudes must be
Jesus. It is from Jesus that we learn what it means to be “poor in spirit.”
Thus Paul can commend the Philippians to have “the same mind...that was in
Christ Jesus” [Philippians 2:5-8]
Paul does not assume that our poverty of spirit is the same
as Jesus’s self-emptying, but rather that Jesus’s poverty has made it possible
for a people to exist who can live dispossessed of possessions. To be poor does
not in itself make one a follower of Jesus, but it can put you in the vicinity
of what it might mean to discover the kind of poverty that frees those who
follow Jesus from enslavement to the world. Not to be missed, moreover, is the
political significance of such poverty. Too often we fail to recognize our accommodation
to worldly powers because we fear losing our wealth – wealth that can take
quite diverse forms.
Perhaps no beatitude is more christocentric that Jesus’s
commendation of those who mourn, for they are, like him, prepared to live in
the world renouncing what the world calls happiness and even peace...Like
Jesus, moreover, the disciples endure injustice with the hard meekness that
still hungers and thirsts for righteousness. Yet the righteousness of this new
people is blessed by the mercy seen in the forgiveness that Christ showed even
to those who would kill him. Such a people are capable of peacemaking because
they are sustained by the purity derived from having no other telos but
to enact the kingdom embodied in Jesus.
Excerpted from Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew (SCM
Theological Commentary on the Bible; London: SCM Press, 2006), pp. 58-65.
