“Hunger and Thirst for Blessing”

MCCNY
November 5, 2023

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the commonwealth of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they are comforted.
Blessed are the gentle, they have inherited the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they are filled.
Blessed are the merciful, they receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, they see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, they are called the children of God.
Blessed are those who are chased and rejected for righteousness’ sake, theirs is the divine reign.
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 divine reward is great; in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Greetings and blessings from the council of elders.

What does it mean to feel blessed, to be blessed. Someone sneezes, we say bless you: and maybe we mean I notice you, feel better, I’m with you. Some of us say a blessing at dinner: and maybe it’s some version of dear food, dear hands that brought it to the table, thank you; I’m grateful for you. I notice you. We say saints are blessed, some of us pray, Blessed Mary, and maybe we still, even to this revered person, still maybe mean I notice you, I’m with you.

I’ve been mad for many years at the Matthew beatitudes for adding abstract spiritualized etherea to what is a real and lived and excruciating wealth discrepancy, then and now, in first-century Roman Palestine and in twenty-first-century end-stage capitalism. Matthew’s Jesus adds, for example, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice instead of just Luke’s Jesus’s blessed are those who hunger and thirst. Those who are hungry and thirsty are real people in real circumstances, people in flesh. I felt so strongly grumpy for years and years about Matthew’s Jesus adding blessed are the poor in spirit instead of just blessed are the poor, blessed are the destitute. It’s always felt like taking something real and lived and making it abstract and theoretical. Like forgiving trespasses instead of debts. Like accepting Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior instead of taking the lowest seat and loving both our enemy and our neighbor and freeing prisoners and ending money bail and taking up our cross to die.

What does it even mean to be poor in spirit. What’s a poor in spirit?

There’s a layer to this Matthew beatitudinal, though, that I have discovered very recently and which I don’t hate, which is an exhortation, or a manual for how to be a disciple. These beatitudes, framed this way, can turn out to be blessings for those who respond to a call to action. They might tell us how to be in right relationship, how to be in community grounded in The Way of this prophet, this anointed one. They instruct us how to follow, how to take up our cross and follow. Today’s passage is followed by “you are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor how will it be salted,” which can probably also support this. Be salty! Be meek! This works, if it works, for questions like, Do I hunger and thirst for righteousness – or do I keep my head down and look away? Am I gentle, am I pure in heart, merciful, a peacemaker – or am I violent and vengeful? Be merciful, maybe it says, and be blessed. Be a peacemaker, find favor. They work less well, though, if they work, for questions like, Am I poor in spirit? Do I mourn? As you know already, I’m struggling with what poor in spirit means. Do I want to be poor in spirit? Is that something to aspire to? I can’t imagine a prophet or his God who wants me to mourn in order to receive favor.

I think, too, though, that my favorite blessings are unconditional. I mess up so often, and so do we all. I’m not always patient or generous (no, really); neither are we all. And I want to be loved all the time; I’m not even joking about that. I want that for you, too, always, to be deeply and always blessed and loved. So a blessing, a status of favor that is granted or withheld on the basis of our discipleship, based on our meekness, or mercy, or pureness of heart, feels insufficient. It feels ungodlike. It feels like the world I live in now.

For years I’ve loved thinking of these beatitudes in the way the Jesus Seminar and Historical Jesus people talked about them, as aphorisms surely spoken by the Jesus who lived in the first century and was executed by Rome. Congratulations!, poors! Congratulations!, people frozen in grief! The words blessed mean congratulations, and Luke’s Jesus they say was using them strategically, paradoxically. My boyfriend John Dominic Crossan and his lot think it was likely that Jesus spoke like this, using memorable turns of phrases that cut across the social and religious grain. To make a point with surprise and shock; to call for a reversal of roles or to upend, frustrate ordinary expectations.

And I was so moved by the notion of reversal that I stopped with it there in my tracks. I fell in love with the ideas being opened to me, that there was a way of reading the bible outside of the track that was sanctioned by my childhood church and traditional theology and the cisheteronormative dominant social and power system. And I needed that reading and have been transformed by it, and my life is different and more mine than it ever was, and my ethics is closer, I think, to the original prophet and teacher than it ever was. But I fell in love with those ideas as though surprise and shock was righteous of itself. As though Jesus was there to perform magic tricks with turns of phrases, to amaze and charm me, to entertain me with his cleverness and wit. I turned Jesus into Dorothy Parker, or Fran Liebowitz. It’s not enough, I don’t think; it’s not justice. Paradox doesn’t transform or save the world; paradox is only a driving force that brings us to an awareness of what needs change. It is a really lovely, exciting impetus, a catalyst. But, still, I realize that this was my own playing at Matthew, my own version of turning something real and painful and lived into abstract rhetorical etherea. Oscar Wilde doesn’t save us, Audre Lorde does. Dorothy Allison. Kiese Laymon.

Related to nothing here, I have never been more in love with John Dominic Crossan than I was this week researching the beatitudes to prep for this sermon and discovering how very many fundamentalist Christians dislike him and mock him. This delights me; more for me. More Crossan for me.

Let’s agree on principle, then, that these are not blessings-as-floor show, turning people who are hunted and starving into props for an intellectual inversion. Although we do love us a good inversion. And let’s agree for the sake of argument, at least for now, that they are not conditional blessings to would-be disciples. Disciples are instructed a number of times throughout the gospels and I think the teacher speaks best about how to follow him when he is most direct and most honest about it: take no money, take no second tunic, take the last seat, take up your cross. Our reward is to die, folks. Sorry, not sorry. We are the ones to come after the prophets who came before us. Our reward for discipleship probably is to die with integrity; which honestly is probably why so many Christians are so bad at being Christian.

Let’s say that the blessing of Matthew’s Jesus is, indeed, a congratulations, but not ironic, and not just a rhetorical surprise. Let’s assume that Matthew’s Jesus is in earnest, truly congratulating those in the worst straights for being favored. Not people who hunger and thirst to do justice, but who ache to receive it, who are being starved of it. A hunger and a blinding thirst to receive an egg instead of a scorpion. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst to obtain justice long withheld: homos and queers and transes under W, under Trump, in DeSantis’s Florida and anyone’s Texas before or after Ann Richards. Black folks jogging on the street or eating ice cream on their couch in any state in this county since ever. Starving for justice. Starving and longing and aching to receive righteousness.

Jesus is congratulating not people who will *become non-violent, or will *do mercy and broker peace but is congratulating those who are already living these counter-dominant practices at cost, who are already being slapped on both cheeks, being taken for both cloak and tunic, who are made to walk both the first required, expected, so-called legal compelled mile and then also an additional, additionally abusive mile. He is not asking us to aspire to be harmed and neglected but is blessing those who are already frozen in grief, those who are already hunted and rejected, those who are vilified and demonized.

But I don’t think it’s a blessing for a future promise. I don’t think these blessings look ahead to a time not yet, a dream still to be realized. This speech names a present reality: people are mourning, people are grieving. People are frightened for our lives, for our friends’ lives, for our communities’ lives. It seems to name also an alternative reality, and I think we want it to: a liberation yet to come where people will be comforted, people will be fed, people will find justice. That hope resonates with many of us, I think. We pray for it. *We mourn and want to be comforted. We long and ache to receive justice – and we want it firm and fast, not threatened at every election cycle, not free at last, free at last as only words repeated in February and then shoved in a drawer.

Promises of a future reward, or aspirational righteousness, or even some great reckoning where all will be set aright Some Day are so deeply insufficient. They leave much of the present reality intact. In some ways they serve as a sedative, a seductive kind of narcotic comfort care that asks the oppressed to stay calm and allows injustice to carry on.

It does give comfort, though, and that’s not on us. I don’t mean to criticize those of us who hope for equity and repair. It is soul soothing to imagine soft places to land. This idea of “someday they’ll get theirs.” “Someday I’ll receive my fair recompense, the wages for my labor, the respect and honor that I deserve” (that we all deserve), some sweet future day. We are desperate to believe in and hope for an accounting where, in the end, the truth will out. And – and, not but – but probably a bit of but, that future framing of justice lays a lot of cover to maintain and reproduce the status quo.

I don’t think that’s what Matthew’s Jesus is saying. The list of blessings is in the indicative mode, not the imperative. They are a description, not prescription; they describe what is already. Matthew’s Jesus is in earnest, congratulating those in the worst straights for their divine favor, and they are both literally already poor and demoralized, aching to receive due process, hunted and discarded, *and they are already blessed.

In these verses and in Jesus’s cosmology, it is the broken and reviled who are favored. It’s a rearrangement of status and strata. It is that terrifically surprising inversion that moves me so much and excites me, but not for its own sake. It works rhetorically like an apocalypse, but it is literal: an *actual tearing and upending of the way things work, and a concrete rearrangement of our values and assumptions. I think it’s another way of saying the last are first – and living it. Let children come to me, for such is heaven – and living it. Invite nobodies to your weddings and feasts – and inviting them. I think it’s another way of saying be born again, from above. Be baptized, in spirit and in truth. Open your senses and be awakened, be enlightened, come to this full and perfect realization – and live it.

Luke’s Mary says almost the same thing in her great speech: You have looked with favor on my lowliness and now everyone for all time calls me blessed. It’s not about Mary, though. It’s not just about Mary. It’s not just about this particular mother. It’s about Black people dying during childbirth at nearly three times the rate of others. Overturning Roe impairs every pregnant or potentially pregnant person’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and Black folks as ever disproportionately bear the brunt. It’s about for the first time in twenty years the infant mortality rate went up in 2022, especially for those born to Native American, Alaskan Native, and white parents. Only for Black infants did the mortality rate not increase, and still Black infants have by far the highest death numbers. It’s about trans people targeted for sexual assault at four times the rate of non-trans people, and a study in Denmark that has us at nearly 8 times the suicide rates. I could go on with details about who is dying in what horrifying numbers. But we know about this country’s entrenched racism and economic exploitation and manipulation of power and public fear. We know already. And what we don’t know is part of the problem.

In a world where Black folks are favored and blessed, death rates of infants and parents during childbirth don’t have this sinister racial spike. In a world where transes are favored and blessed, we aren’t killing ourselves and being assaulted and being killed at exponential rates. In that world, Black folks and trans folks are favored and blessed, enjoying life and liberty and pursuing happiness. And that world isn’t aspirational or a sedative or a temporary reality from one federal administration to the next. It is something real and is created by us, all of us together, and it happens and is happening now everywhere, everywhere, every day, and this passage is, after all, also an exhortation to us as disciples or followers or whatever we call ourselves. People who say that justice matters. This passage is also, after all, a call for us all to value and favor and notice and be with and attend to the needs of the people who have needs and to meet those needs and make real the blessing and make “on earth” the “as it is in heaven.” The blessings aren’t for us to attain as our special reward for doing righteousness or peacemaking and whatnot, heaven isn’t a prize. Heaven isn’t an inverted exclusive cocktail party. As much as we like a good inversion. But the blessings are for us in all the ways that everyone benefits when all people and all infants and all transes have access to good reproductive and gender-affirming and general healthcare. And so on. We all benefit. It’s a world where everyone is comforted and fed and shown mercy. A world defined by mercy and ceasefire. It’s a world where everyone is first, and where *everyone is last, first because everyone has wellness and enough and surplus for leisure, and last because *everyone is watching out for and attending to and affirming one another.

Matthew’s Jesus says again and again (I think all the Jesuses do) that this world, this kingdom, or empire, or country of God, God’s Presidency, this way of living together in community is already here. He keeps saying it is near, it is nigh. He says it again and again: it is already ours. I feel more cynical and pessimistic than Jesus, though, which is probably one of the many reasons no one is calling me the messiah. But I do believe in us. I do have faith in us and in this, and there are many of us who recognize that our hope and wellness is tied to one another. We create and experience this Jesus world all around us, this world of The Way, and we recognize the people named here in this list, and recognize them as blessed, and we know them to be saints, and we are citizens of that realm. We enlist in that world. We pledge our allegiance to it. We pledge our allegiance to *that.

I love you; rock the blessing.

Peace.