The Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D., Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity. File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/ Harvard Gazette
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By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D. '13
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Jan. 29, 2023)
The Beatitudes, Jesus' words this morning, this is one of my favorite passages from the gospel, from the Bible. I preached on it recently. This was the gospel lesson at my mom's funeral, which was a few weeks ago. It was one of my mom's favorite passages. My dad chose it for the funeral, and as I said, it's one of mine too. But context is everything. Yesterday I watched the footage of Tyre Nichols' murder. I had decided I didn't want to watch it because I don't want to sensationalize or exploit the suffering of him and his family. I also want to be wary of the privilege of avoidance, of being able to not see something or allowing that suffering to be invisible to me. I don't know what the right thing to do is. And the truth is, I don't know if I really made a decision. I opened the New York Times webpage and I just clicked it and it's awful. And as I watched it, I heard the words that Jesus says to us this morning.
Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who are persecuted. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness. And I have to be honest, in the context of that video, those words seemed as thin as the paper upon which they are printed. Because this is what persecution and mourning looks like. This is what hungering for justice looks like. This is what a poor, tortured spirit looks like, and it's not a blessing. It's not a blessing. Last week, Paul the Apostle, in what was read here in this church, Paul said, "The gospel sounds like foolishness to those who are perishing." I don't agree with Paul about everything, but I understand that line this morning. Jesus is beginning his ministry with these words.
This is the first public teaching in the Gospel of Matthew. He's been wandering around healing folks and then he stands in front of the crowds and this is how he starts his sermon. And he doesn't give it in the wake of violence, in the wake of trauma. He doesn't give it in the situation, in the context where we are this morning. And I'm going to suggest that this passage, these beautiful Beatitudes, are neither quietest nor sanguine. They are not overlooking or sugarcoating or rose coloring anything. And I'll do what I always do when I come into this pulpit. I'll dance around with some Greek translations. But there's a limit to that, and I think this lesson also suggests that limit, and I'm going to talk about that as well. But there are important and interesting translation issues in these lessons. That word for poor, blessed are the poor and spirit, literally in Greek that means bent over, crooked or broken with poverty, cowed by need. That's what that word means.
The word we have as meek in this translation is less like timid and more like those who endure with restraint. The word righteousness here carries a sense of justice, the political sense of justice. But the biggest one, the most important one I think, is the word that Jesus repeats over and over and over again. "Blessed." "Blessed are those." I was looking at commentators and reading commentaries on this passage and all the scholars of the New Testament, they say there isn't really a good English word for what we translate as blessed. The Greek word is makarios. The word blessed, they say, sounds a little bit too otherworldly like it's a spiritual gift, a hidden spiritual quality while you're physically suffering. And that's that's not what it means. Or in English, it's even more troubling. The English word blessed comes from the French word for bloodied. And you can see that idea of external suffering as a sign of inward sanctity. That's in our English reception and that's not what it means. And there's a problematic history around that interpretation as well.
There's also this idea that blessed are those who mourn, that it's putting off into the future your reward. But I don't think that's the sense of what's going on in this teaching either, because the first line, Jesus says, "Theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Right now it is theirs." So even later on when he says, "The kingdom of heaven will be theirs." It is now already theirs. There's a present tense to these blessings, a paradoxical present tense. And most of the commentators say that the right word to translate makarios rather than blessed is happy. The closest word is happy. Happy are those who mourn. Happy are those persecuted for righteousness' sake. Happy are those broken by poverty and broken in spirit. The advantage of that is it retains the present tense. Jesus is talking about right now. These people right now. Not something they will get later, but right now. The trouble with it is the paradox.
The trouble with it is seeing what it looks like. Whenever the gospel confuses me, I look for love. I take this from Augustine, the great teacher, who said, "the meaning of every line of scripture is love. And so if you don't see love, keep looking." And so when I have trouble finding it, that's what I look for. And I don't think there is an adequate English translation of the word makarios. I don't think it's blessed and I don't think it's happy. But I'm going to suggest another word. How about Beloved? I have to be clear, there is no philological justification for the word beloved. It's not the right word. But if you look at this full passage, the fullness of Jesus's teaching, I think love is the mystery here because you can't mourn for anything unless you love it. And you can't thirst for what is right unless someone or something that you love has been wronged. And anybody who works for peace does so because they love something enough to want it to have peace.
In fact, if you look at each of these Beatitudes, it's just another way of saying blessed are you who love. Beloved are you because God is love and so God is with you. If you love, God is with you. If you are poor and bent and broken in spirit, God is with you because God loves you. If you are persecuted for righteousness' sake, persecuted by injustice, God loves you and God is with you. God loves you, you who hunger and thirst for justice. God loves you, you who mourn. Blessed or you who love. And it does sound a little bit like foolishness. But if we reject mourning, if we decide we will never mourn again, all we are saying is that we will never love again. If we reject the hunger for justice, it just means we're giving up on love and loving our neighbor. If we reject peace, it means we're giving up on loving our enemy. And I want to be clear that Jesus is not naive. There's this line, one of the commentators I read, pointed out this line when Jesus says, "Blessed are the peacemakers."
At the time Jesus preached, the great peace was the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace, which is instituted by violence and oppression. Indeed, Jesus was crucified for disturbing the peace. He's not naive when he says these things. Love is a choice and it's a risk and it often carries hurt and harm, but giving up on love doesn't mean you give up on hurt. It just makes you wonder what the fight is for. Love is both the risk and the reward, and yet we still have this pain and this grief. We are here in the shadow of that pain and grief and we don't know, I don't know, what the right word for blessing is or what blessing looks like. And it may be that that's a translation question, the sort I like to make hay with every week up here in this pulpit. But the gospel's not concerned with translation. The gospel's question to us this morning is not one of language. It's more pressing, more piercing. The gospel's demand this morning is something else.
If this passage is about love, then our question should not be, what does blessing mean, it's what does love look like? And we know what it looks like because we've seen it. It's Tyre Nichols crying out to his mother as he's beaten. It's his mother, RowVaughn Wells, weeping for her child even as she pities the men who killed him. It's the city of Memphis, a great American city with a proud and vibrant black community, protesting righteously and angrily and peacefully when no one could blame that city had it erupted in frustration and vengeance. So we see what love looks like there, but what will it look like here? What will our love look like, we who watch or we who choose not to watch from afar? What will this country, this nation's, love look like?
It has been three years since the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, the largest protests in American history. Fifty-five years since Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. He was assassinated only a few days after Memphis Police killed an unarmed 17-year-old black child named Larry Payne who had his hands up and was asking for mercy. The question our gospel asks is not one of translation. It is a more pressing, more piercing question and it is directed at us. When will we, when will this nation, love those who are beloved of God? When will we love those who are persecuted? When will we love those who mourn? When will we love those who hunger and thirst for righteousness and justice? When will we love those who endure with resilience and restraint? When will we love those whose spirits are cowed by violence and whose bodies are literally downtrodden? When will we? When will we love? We will not know what God's blessing means until we do.