Posted by PS on June 09, 2003 at 15:31:09:
In Reply to: Wow posted by Rob on June 09, 2003 at 09:57:14:
: The beatitudes are heavy. I have read / listened to them over and over lately and - wow! Blessed are the poor in spirit. What does it mean to be poor in spirit? I wonder, he says to the crowd "you are the salt of the earth..." and "you are the light of the world..." was he talking as though all who were in the crowd were his followers (how can "non-believers" be the salt and light of this world)?
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Consider a room with a light in it. If the light burns out, it is still the light of the room. But the room is now very dark because that which was supposed to give light does not. If salt has lost it saltiness, it is still salt, but it cannot do what it was supposed to do--preserve and add flavor to food. All people are light and salt in the sense of God's ideal plan and purpose, but few are giving light or flavor to the world as they were meant to and fulfilling their destiny in this regard.
The Beatitudes are the kind of wisdom teaching we find in the book of James also. It is instructive to note that many of the canonizing church fathers in the 4th century and the later fathers of the reformation in the 16th century had problems with this kind of teaching because they thought it legalistic and against grace, and wanted to eliminate the book of James from the New Testament. However, James is the closest thing to the wisdom teaching of Jesus in the gospels. (Think about that!) When you take wisdom and hear it as a law, it loses its power to give life and becomes a yoke of condemnation. This a problem with much of the biblical teaching today--not understanding and accepting the specific writing in its context and AS THE GENRE OF LITERATURE that it is. Rob's next observation illustrates this point well...
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: Jesus says that "if your right eye offends you pluck it out...if your right hand offends you cut it off, for it is better for you to enter the Kingdom of Heaven maimed then to have your whole body burn in hell". This is new testament stuff. We would have a hell of a lot of limbless people hanging around earth if that was the case. What does he mean by "offend"? Does he mean, for example, a lustful eye towards one of the opposite sex (it could happen to girls to!)? Is he serious? What does forgiveness of sins play in our lives if this is the case (i'm saying this because "pluck it out" sounds like penance more than anything else).
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This is hyperbole aimed at illustrating correct priorities (Jesus' really BIG emphasis most of the time). There are many different genres of literary form in the various books of the Bible, and the gospels are a unique genre in that they embody many of the other genres. This section is not meant to be taken to be a direct command to do exactly what the metaphor or parable illustrates. For another example, how could the disciples literally eat Jesus's flesh and drink his blood, as he tells them they must do in John? (We actually talked about this passage in depth on Sunday.) Much more was much more being communicated here, and the hyperbolic metaphor made certain nobody could accept this at the common sense understanding. Jesus explained later to his disciples: "The words I speak to you are SPIRIT, and they are LIFE." The teaching you mentioned about gouging your eye out has the same effect--people must understand there is a higher principle being taught here, not a new Torah decree to self-mutilate. The disciples eventually understood this--if not, how come none of Jesus' disciples ever did anything like this? (There were a few believers in later centuries who castrated themselves because they had chosen a life a celibacy, for instance, Origen of Alexandria, but this is the only historic Christian self-mutilation I know of.)
Now I have NOT commented on the meanings of these passages, because they are deep and nuanced, and time really does not permit me to do that here. I have to relegate that to Sundays and Thursdays, when I can run my mouth for an hour. ;-) But like I mentioned Sunday, I just want us to think about the genres of literature we are reading in the Bible and in Jesus' teaching specifically, and apply them accordingly. This does not "tame them down" at all; it actualizes them and empowers them to draw us to Jesus and give us new and changed lives, rather than to kill us with the letter of a new and even harder New Testament law.