In what would be his last sermon, Pope Francis emphasised a contrast between the way of the world and the Way of Jesus. He said:
Today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers. Theirs is the construction site of Hell. God’s economy, on the other hand, does not kill, discard or crush. It is lowly, faithful to the earth. Your way, Jesus, is the way of the Beatitudes. It does not crush, but cultivates, repairs and protects.[1]
What is “the way of the Beatitudes”? To find out, we need to take a look at the Gospel of Matthew.
In Matthew 1-4, Matthew introduces us to the unique identity of Jesus: his genealogy, his birth in Bethlehem, his family life in Nazareth, his baptism in the Jordan River, his temptation in the desert, and the beginnings of his life as a Jewish rabbi.
In chapters 5-7, “the Sermon on the Mount,” Matthew introduces us to the distinctive teaching of Jesus. The Sermon begins with eight short statements that we call “the Beatitudes” since they begin with the words, “Blessed are…” – indicating favour, happiness, well-being (Mt 5:3-12). There is a parallel version, with some differences, in Luke 6:20-23.
Theologian and scholar Dallas Willard claims that
The Beatitudes of Jesus … are among the literary and religious treasures of the human race. Along with the Ten Commandments, the Twenty-third Psalm, the Lord’s Prayer, and a very few other passages from the Bible, they are acknowledged by almost everyone to be among the highest expressions of religious insight and moral inspiration. We can savor them, affirm them, meditate upon them, and engrave them on plaques to hang on our walls. But a major question remains: How are we to live in response to them?[2]
Over the past 2,000 years, thoughtful Christians have come up with an impressively wide range of opinions about the nature and purpose of the Beatitudes. If the Beatitudes are central to our understanding of the Way of Jesus, as I believe they are, then it’s important to know what they are, what they mean, and how to apply the teaching to our lives.
This is where it gets a bit heavy, but stay with me.
In the first few generations of the church’s existence, the Sermon on the Mount, and therefore the Beatitudes, were generally considered to be an absolute moral code set forth by Jesus to be literally followed as an alternative to Jewish legalism. As Moses gave the first Sermon on the Mount at Mt Sinai (recall the Ten Commandments and the Golden Calf incident), so Jesus gave the second Sermon here in Matthew chapters 5-7.
But is it that simple? Most Christian interpreters take other views. Monastic Christians often viewed the Sermon on the Mount as a way of life for an elite stream of Christians who chose to live outside the orbit of ordinary life. They sought to conquer the influence of the world, the flesh, and the devil through rigorous spiritual practices designed to produce a holiness that absolutely aligned with the high ideals of the Sermon.
If the Beatitudes were only for these hyper-committed Christians, then they were irrelevant for the ordinary person.
In the nineteenth century, missionary theologian and medical doctor Albert Schweitzer thought the Beatitudes were irrelevant today for another reason. He saw the Sermon on the Mount as a noble “interim ethic” developed by Jesus to prepare his apprentices for the imminent advent of a supernatural kingdom of God. But, according to Schweitzer’s research, Jesus’s plans were thwarted and the Sermon is now just a museum piece. That’s not a very helpful approach if you’re trying to work out how to live them out!
Those who follow Martin Luther’s teaching view the Sermon on the Mount as unattainable ideals designed to show our inability to please God and drive us to humility and greater dependence upon God. Similarly, the great theologian Karl Barth stated that “It would be sheer folly to interpret the imperatives of the Sermon on the Mount as if we should bestir ourselves to actualize these pictures.”[3]
Others react to the perceived weakness expressed in the Sermon. Once, when Dallas Willard had given a talk on the Beatitudes, a woman approached him. She said her son, who was in the military, had renounced his faith after hearing that the Beatitudes – with its list of the poor, the sad, the weak and the mild – were a picture of the ideal Christian.
“That’s not me,” he told his mum. “I can never be like that.”[4]
There are several other reasons why some Christians hold that the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount are irrelevant for today. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, believed that the noble ideals of the Sermon on the Mount were inadequate for modern moral questions such as the legitimacy of nuclear warfare.
Others hold that the Beatitudes can’t apply today because they encourage a works-based salvation, or they look like social justice and that would distract us from the task of getting souls into heaven.
Still others view the Beatitudes of Jesus through an eschatological or “end-times” lens. Classic dispensationalists such as J. N. Darby taught that the ethics of the Beatitudes were primarily intended as a legal framework for a future millennial kingdom that Jesus would establish on earth.
Fr Jean Philippe of the French Community of the Beatitudes teaches that the happiness promised by the Beatitudes will not be fully experienced until we enter the Kingdom of God after death.
“On earth,” he says, “we have only a partial participation, a foretaste. At the same time, though, the Kingdom is already present.”[5]
The Lutheran and Calvinist Reformers applied the Sermon on the Mount to all Christians but limited its ethics to personal relationships, excluding the public and social justice dimensions. The Reformers and the Puritans taught that “the law sends us to Christ to be justified, and Christ sends us back to the law to be sanctified.”[6]
The other main view is that “the Sermon on the Mount is the moral portrait of Jesus’ own people.”[7] For example, John Stott, the British evangelical preacher, suggests that the Sermon on the Mount “depicts the behaviour which Jesus expected of each of his disciples.”[8]
In this view, Christians are well aware of their spiritual poverty and God’s grace, they earnestly desire to be and do right, and “out of a pure heart they cultivate the inner virtues of mercy, peace, and patience during persecution” that the Beatitudes encourage.[9] Referring to the Beatitudes, Stott writes,
All these qualities are to characterise all [Christ’s] followers. Just as the ninefold fruit of the Spirit which Paul lists is to ripen in every Christian character, so the eight beatitudes which Christ speaks describe his ideal for every citizen of God’s kingdom. Unlike the gifts of the Spirit which he distributes to different members of Christ’s body in order to equip them for different kinds of service, the same Spirit is concerned to work all these Christian graces in us all. There is no escape from our responsibility to covet them all.[10]
I mentioned at the start Pope Francis’s beautiful statement, “Your way, Jesus, is the way of the Beatitudes.” It is the Way of Jesus because the principles distil the essence of the upside-down kingdom he came to inaugurate. It is the Way of Jesus because only through the power of his Spirit can we live out these principles in our lives and in our world. But best of all, it is the Way of Jesus because the Beatitudes provide a portrait of the life and ministry of Jesus.
In his inaugural sermon at the synagogue in Nazareth (Lk 4:16-21), Jesus quotes from Isaiah 61:1f, which has a similar list of promises and blessings as the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes echo the messianic promise in Isaiah 61.[11] More on this next week.
If this is true, then Jesus came to change the world, to turn the world upside down, to right wrongs, to pour out compassion, to normalise mercy and establish justice, to fill the universe with love.
And it is true. Jesus calls us to say “no” to what John Dear has called “the anti-Beatitudes,” and to say “yes” to the way of Jesus, the way of the Beatitudes. No longer do we say,
Blessed are the rich.
Blessed are those who never mourn,
who cause others to mourn.
Blessed are the violent, the oppressors,
those who dominate others or run
the domination system.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for injustice.
Blessed are those who show no mercy.
Blessed are the impure of heart.
Blessed are the warmakers.
Blessed are those who are never persecuted,
who never struggle for justice,
who never rock the boat
on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised
who are never insulted because of their allegiance
to the nonviolent Jesus.[12]
No. We stand with our Master Jesus, embodying with him the true Beatitudes, joining with him in his mission to change the world.
Sermon 807 copyright © 2025 Rod Benson. Preached at North Rocks Community Church, Sydney, Australia, on Sunday 11 May 2025. Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from The Christian Standard Bible (Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020).
References
[1] Pope Francis, “The Way of the Cross,” Colosseum, Rome, 18 Apr 2025. Available here.
[2] Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 98.
[3] Quoted in Pinchas Lapide, The Sermon on the Mount: Utopia or Program for Action? (trans. A. Swidler; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986), 4.
[4] Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, 99.
[5] Jean Philippe, The Eight Doors of the Kingdom: Meditations on the Beatitudes (New York: Scepter Publishers, 2018), 19.
[6] John R. W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount (Leicester: IVP, 1988), 36.
[7] Scot McKnight, The Sermon on the Mount (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013), 1.
[8] Stott, Sermon on the Mount, 24.
[9] Joe E. Trull, Walking in the Way: An Introduction to Christian Ethics (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1997), 72.
[10] Stott, Sermon on the Mount, 31.
[11] David P. Gushee & Glen H. Stassen, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context (second edition; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 24.
[12] John Dear, quoted in Charles E. Moore (ed.), Following the Call: Living the Sermon on the Mount (Walden, NY: Plough Publishing House, 2021), 20f.
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iDigress 