Blessed are the freaks

In the season of Advent, it feels appropriate to reflect on what the early Christian writers called “the good news”. And although the Christian tradition has often described the good news as “you’re terrible but God will forgive you and won’t send you to hell if you convert” this is not, in fact, the good news of Jesus.

For the Jewish people in Jesus’ time, the kingdom of God was centred around the idea of a divinely ordained king coming to rescue Israel from Roman oppression and to re-position her as the pre-eminent nation in the earth. And this kingdom had a kind of order to it. There were the religious leaders. They had decided that the best way to earn God’s approval – and so to usher in the coming of the Messiah – would be to follow their religious laws as devoutly as possible. In fact, they went as far as enforcing extra laws just to make sure people were behaving.

They governed this law and purity system and used their religious power and control, not only to manage the ‘people’, but also to elevate themselves. Of course there were those who failed to live up to this system of laws – and some of them were particularly obvious about it. They were known as the ‘sinners.’ And there were the poor, sick and unclean; they were probably sinners too because otherwise why would they be in the condition they were in? And then there were the women, and then the children, and so on, down the system it went.

By comparison, the Roman idea of a kingdom was associated with Caesar and his empire spreading peace through conquest, peace through victory, peace through crucifixion. The kingdom is established through power. The kingdom is established through wealth. The kingdom is upheld by a divinely ordained order; the emperor, the political and economic upper classes and the philosophers, all the way down to the slaves.

In both of these versions of a kingdom, there was an order, a structure, a way to know where you fit. You know where you wanted to be, but there were also very few ways to change your station in life. If you were a slave, there wasn’t a lot of changing that. If you were a women, well, there wasn’t much you could do about that either. If you were poor, just getting by from day-to-day is about as much as you can hope for. And if there is a God, God is definitely not that interested in you.

And into this world, a man named Jesus emerges. He begins to wander through Galilee teaching, proclaiming the ‘good news’ of the kingdom, and this good news has nothing to do with his death, or a ‘sinners prayer’. Jesus first public speech recorded in the Gospel of Matthew is what we know as the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ and it begins with what the Christian tradition has named as the “Beatitudes”. And he starts by saying:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted…

Jesus, surrounded by human masses, the poor, the sick, the outcasts, the sinners. What is Jesus doing here, among these people? And what is he trying to say?

Maybe the first thing we could point out, is what Jesus is not saying.

He is not saying: here’s what you need to do and here’s what you need to be like, if you want to be blessed.

Here’s the key.

Here’s the secret.

Here’s the eight steps to blessing.

Follow these principles and you’ll get success.

The kingdom comes to those who get these things right.

This way of reading the beatitudes is a double edged sword. It feels helpful to have lists of things to do, to be, to embrace, because then we know how to get in the good books. We can come up with goals and a plan. We can find the keys to unlocking God’s blessing, we know how to work the system. It feels achievable.

But the other side of this is the slow, building anxiety that we’re not doing all the things on the list the way that they need to be done. We’ve read the book on eight ways to get God’s blessing, the five steps to success, the three words that will change everything, but we keep stuffing it up, keep getting it wrong. It sounds so straightforward and so achievable, but remains tantalisingly out of reach.

There were many times in my life, especially in my twenties, where I so desperately wanted to live the kind of life I thought would measure up. The kind of life that good impressive Christians should have. Well behaved. Confident. A great leader. Able to make fascinating small talk. Committed. Passionate. Energetic. The list goes on.

But I never did quite feel like I was making it.

Psychologists talk about the notion of the imposter syndrome. That some people go through life trying to live up to the version of themselves that they have presented to the world but live in fear of being exposed. Living each day anxious that everyone will inevitably realise that you’re out of your depth and don’t belong. And that was me. Trying to measure up to list of things that religion expects of me, that I thought God expected of me, that I expected of myself. But on most days I was a bit worried that if people really knew what I was like they’d know that I wasn’t all of those things.

A subtle, slow, crawling anxiety.

You’ll be found out.

You don’t really belong.

So when I would read something like the beatitudes, I would try to figure out how to meet the conditions. Right – how do I become poor in spirit?! Then I’ll be blessed. That will be excellent!

But this is meant to be a pronouncement, not a set of instructions. Jesus points out all of the people who are found outside of the boundaries of the two kingdoms; the poor, the meek, those who are in mourning, those who are hungry for things to be put right, those who are merciful - these are not the people to choose if you want to start a religious, political and economic revolution!

But Jesus says, you are blessed. God is with you, and God is for you

The kingdom of heaven has come near to you.

You might not fit in the upper echelons of the political or religious clubs. You may have all sorts of reasons to be grieving. You might be in pain. People might think you’re weak because you show kindness to people and don’t play their power games. You might not have the power and prestige you think you need.

But the doors of the kingdom of God are thrown wide open to you.

God is for you.

God is with you.

This is a pronouncement, not a conditional transaction.

I’m not sure what the beatitudes of our contemporary society would be if they were to be written by the powerful. Perhaps it would be blessed are the successful and high-achievers, blessed are the property-owners who got in before the market went crazy, blessed are those who got those jeans on sale, blessed are those who are confident and sure of themselves, blessed are the middle-and-upper classes, for theirs is the future.

But the message of the kingdom is radically and profoundly different; the kingdom of God is thrown wide open to those who we would usually laugh at if they claimed that God was on their side.

So to finish, here’s my rephrase of the beatitudes.

God is for those who are down-and-out, for the freaks, the weirdos, the awkward, the suffering, the irreligious and the profane

God is for those who are deep in grief, whose pain makes them unable to participate fully in the strategies of a successful modern life;

God is for those who do not use power and strength over others in order to make their way in the world;

God is for those who long for things to be put right and for the unjust systems of the world to be torn down;

God is for those who show mercy and forgiveness to one another, rather than seeking revenge for the ways in which they have been wronged;

God is for those who can see that the external markers of religiously approved behaviour don’t mean much after all;

God is for those who resist ways of violence and oppression in the world, and instead seek to become agents of peace and reconciliation between those who do not yet understand or love one another;

And God is for those who, because they seek to live in this kind of reality, encounter the oppression, exclusion and disdain of those with power, wealth, and status.