Blessed Are the Losers

We are turning to Matthew 5 this morning. We're going to be reading the start of Jesus' great Sermon on the Mount. As you turn there, I am going to tell you that I'm very excited about the start of the rugby world cup happening in a couple of weeks' time. Yeah. Some of the wives and the ladies here are shaking their heads.

They're not happy because they might not see their men for a little while, especially because it's something like, you know, it's in France, so it'll be early mornings. But the reason I'm excited about it is that there's always a great underdog story with these tournaments. Very recently, we had the Matildas, you know, outperforming expectations and we love to jump on a great underdog bandwagon. Something of that underdog status this morning is being told to us in the Beatitudes, which we're going to read. Blessed are the underdogs.

And so with that sort of idea in mind, let's read what Jesus says in Matthew 5:1-12. Seeing the crowds, He, who is Jesus, went up on the mountain. And when He sat down, His disciples came to Him. And He opened His mouth and taught them, saying, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on My account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven. For so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. So far, our reading. This is the word of the Lord.

Well, we see this passage and we see in this passage a series of blessings. These blessings traditionally are called the Beatitudes. Now that word is a strange word. It's something that we don't really use in any everyday English conversation. The word beatitude is over a thousand years old.

The term is literally defined as these blessings. So there's no place else where you'll use the word beatitude and it not refer to these blessings. Now Jesus is obviously talking about one theme, and that is being blessed. The original Greek word for blessed is makarios, and it can be translated with slightly more nuanced words like fortunate, privileged, or even favoured. So you could read these statements as Jesus saying something like, favoured are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Favoured, privileged, or even happy. In other words, the word blessed is a very dynamic word. Fundamentally, it indicates that you have received a transcendent goodness, something from God supernaturally bestowed on us. But the term has far-ranging implications as well. In one sense, to be blessed is to experience an emotional gladness.

You are happy because of this divine favour. Alternatively, blessedness is also a mark of commendation. It's a congratulations for you have received God's favour resulting from having performed well in His sight. The word also identifies someone's objective state in that you are more fortunate than others. It's a comparative sort of statement.

An average Aussie will call you lucky. So the word blessed carries all of those nuances in the passage. And so when Jesus starts each of his poetic statements with the phrase blessed are, keep this in mind. Blessed are the poor in spirit means lucky, fortunate, happy are those who are poor in spirit. If you have a quick look here, you'll see that there are eight beatitudes in verses 3 to 10.

The one in verse 11 can be sort of taken as part of it, but it's probably it's a little bit different if you look at the structure of the sentence here. It may be more of a summary statement. Verses 3 to 10, however, give you eight statements. And so you can see that those eight beatitudes are then broken in four. The first four are statements to do with a great reversal of fortune.

You are poor in spirit, but you receive the kingdom of heaven. You mourn, but you will be comforted. You are meek, or gentle, and you shall inherit the earth. You are hungry and you are thirsty for righteousness, and you will be satisfied. Then the other half of the beatitudes are that you are pure in heart, that you are peacemakers, that you are persecuted for righteousness' sake, and then you are ones that are persecuted for being righteous.

Now these four are to do with character traits. They're not the reversal of fortune. They are godly characteristics. But notice that the reward for these character traits is an astounding intimacy with God. So it's not a reversal of fortunes, it's a reward.

You will be children of God. You will see God. You will receive mercy. So Jesus is talking about being blessed. Now, why is that important for us?

Why would Jesus begin His sermon with this explanation? Well, Jesus is touching on the thing that we desire most in life. In fact, Jesus is getting to the core of our purpose in living. The thing we're all desperately searching for is actually to be blessed. Verse 1 begins by telling us that Jesus has two audiences in mind when he begins his teaching.

First, we are told that Jesus sees the crowds. He looks over the vast amount of people who had come to listen to Him, and for this reason, He goes and He stands on a slope of a mountain, and He begins to speak. But His speech is not directed to the crowds. We are told that Jesus teaches those who come to Him as His disciples. So Jesus sees the crowds, but He addresses His disciples.

It's an interesting dynamic, isn't it? Perhaps you can argue that Jesus knows that the world is interested in what He has to say. They've come out to see what Jesus is about, but He knows that only His disciples will really listen to His teaching. And that's significant to realise when you think about what Jesus is about to say about a life of happiness. The entire crowd there would have been interested in hearing Jesus talk about obtaining blessedness.

They'd be interested to hear how do you get that because that's the human desire. But in His opening statement, He already shows that it is to only those willing to follow Jesus Christ, only those will ultimately find it. So Jesus sees a crowd interested in hearing about happiness, but He knows that only His disciples will actually understand it or receive it. But Jesus' presumption is the right one. We all desire to be blessed.

We all long for a life touched by transcendent fortune, a happy life. In fact, the Bible is actually full of this acknowledgement. Go to the Psalms, go to the Proverbs, go to Job, go to the letter of James in the New Testament, and you'll find these books talking about how to be blessed, how to find blessedness. But in contrast to nearly every man-centred opinion on blessedness, the Bible makes this counterintuitive point. Blessedness is never found directly.

The happiness of being blessed is always and only a byproduct of seeking something else. Nowhere in the Bible will you find a statement like blessed are those who seek blessedness. Happy are the ones who rush for happiness. Now, if you've been a Christian for a while, you may know this instinctively. The Bible doesn't promise happiness to the person pursuing happiness.

Instead, hunger and thirst for righteousness, Jesus says, and you will somehow receive blessing. Seek righteousness and you will have happiness thrown in. But seek happiness over righteousness and you receive neither. Jesus begins His greatest sermon by isolating the main need of every human heart, and that is we want to be blessed. We want to be happy.

But then Jesus says that the key to this blessing is to be a loser. Jesus sees the crowds clamouring for knowledge on blessedness, and He knows that the human heart is naturally inclined to seek happiness, and yet He says that happiness is never found in pursuing happiness. So what is the key? Well, very quickly, you realise that the conditions of blessedness here is to be somehow a perpetual underdog. You see this common thread in the list: those who mourn, those who are spiritually poor, those who are meek, those who hunger to live righteously, presumably because they know they can't, presumably because they know they are unrighteous.

To those who don't pursue vengeance but show mercy, to those who don't pursue, who don't punish but seek peace, all of those categories, whether it's the reversal of fortunes section or whether it's the godly character section, all of those are considered weak weakness in the eyes of the world. They are categories of weakness. In the eyes of just about every generation of human beings in the world, the ones who exhibit these characteristics are the ones who fail. But Jesus says, blessed are the losers who do the opposite of what the world considers to be strong. Happy, fortunate, privileged are the losers.

In fact, it's precisely this counterintuitive truth which is the interpretive key to understanding the entire Sermon on the Mount. Have a think about all the things that Jesus will say. If you scan through those passages of teaching, you'll find that in it, Jesus gives teaching that tells us in the Christian life that life in the kingdom is marked by all sorts of upside-down characteristics. The Christian life, for example, is not retaliating when you are offended or abused. The Christian life is not hating, but praying for your enemies.

The Christian life is not to curse. We don't lust. We don't divorce. We don't swear. We don't brag.

We don't backbite. We don't worry. Why? Because, says Jesus, that is not in the nature of our God and it is not aligned with the nature of His kingdom. Those are all things that Jesus teaches us in the Sermon on the Mount, but He begins those teachings by introducing the Beatitudes.

Why? Because the Beatitudes are not a list of requirements for you and I to have, you and I to strive for, and I've heard sermons that suggest that. We are not being told by Jesus to be poor in spirit. We're not being told by Jesus to mourn. Jesus isn't asking these things of us. Jesus instead is saying that those who have pulled away from the crowds, those who have been drawn to listen to Him are those who inevitably are poor in spirit.

The ones that come to Jesus are those who mourn. The ones who come to Jesus are weak. They desire righteousness because they can't have it themselves. They can't generate it themselves. In other words, if you are a Christian today, you're a Christian because you're an oddball.

We're all losers. You're not the strong ones. You're not the self-sufficient ones. You are, I am the weak ones. But says Jesus, blessed are the losers for they receive what?

The kingdom. You may have noticed that the Beatitudes really open and close with the same blessing. Verse 3 and verse 10, we find the same things being said to receive the kingdom. So verse 3: blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Verse 10: blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

In Hebrew poetry, repetition is very important. And so what we're finding here probably is the key blessing. The key blessing is to receive the kingdom of heaven. So on the one hand, if you look at all the character traits, the godly traits, and if you look at the life situations, the bad situations that people are in that lead to this blessedness, you'll see that it's all weakness. It's none of it is strength in the eyes of the world.

But then you notice that this weakness doesn't remain. You mourn, but you will be comforted. Those who hunger and thirst are satisfied. The weakness is reversed. Likewise, the godly character traits of mercy, purity, peacemaking, again, they're not the strong traits, but all of these are rewarded.

And where are these things reversed or rewarded? In the kingdom. What is this kingdom? Well, we know from Jesus' teaching, we know from the evidence of the whole Bible that the kingdom of God is God's perfect and good rule. It's an existence where all that is broken, all that is cursed has finally been fixed.

Some people confuse the kingdom with heaven. We long for the good of heaven, but the kingdom is more than heaven. The kingdom is heaven on earth. The kingdom is a flesh and bone existence, but just perfect. The kingdom is where all that is weak is reversed, where godliness is actually celebrated now rather than oppressed and rejected.

That is the kingdom. And Jesus says this is the thing that we are all longing for. Think about it. The kingdom is better than the utopia that the lefties fight for on behalf of the weak. Right?

And it's better than the moralism that the righties fight for on behalf of the so-called godly. The kingdom is the perfection we're all longing for. But notice the wording of Jesus when He talks about us. Notice the tense. He says, blessed.

That's present tense. In other words, even though the reversals and the rewards of the kingdom are future, you shall be satisfied, you shall be comforted. The blessing is experienced now. How?

Well, flip a page earlier in your Bible and you'll notice that in the previous chapter, chapter 4, we have the beginning of Jesus' public ministry. Go to verse 17 in chapter 4, and you'll see that of all Jesus' preaching, we have a summary of it given to us in a single line, which simply says, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, or the kingdom of heaven is near. Why will the losers listed in the Beatitudes experience blessedness now? Because the kingdom of God has arrived. Even though the kingdom's reversals take place in the future, you experience a blessedness now.

Why? Because while on the one hand, you and I are keenly aware of the weakness of our existence, knowing that we don't have perfection yet, we are promised by Jesus that perfection is coming. But then on the other hand, Jesus says you and I can count ourselves privileged, fortunate, even lucky because the reality of this kingdom has started arriving. How do we know it's arrived? If you're mourning today, if you know that you are not righteous towards God, you have failed to live a holy life, how do you know that it's arrived?

Because Jesus has arrived. That is really what Jesus is saying when He says, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. He is saying, I'm here and the kingdom has arrived because I have. And that is an outrageously bold statement. For anyone to say that, who can't back it up, that is a ridiculous statement.

Now we might ask, KJ, where do we see this happening? Where do we see that this kingdom is breaking into the world because Jesus is here? Well, we see many instances of that in Jesus' miracles. Jesus heals. Right?

He restores. He releases all sorts of conditions and diseases and afflictions, but we know that's not the main sign. In fact, that's not the thing that brings people to faith in Jesus as the Messiah. That can be explained away and people over two thousand years have done that. The sign of the kingdom comes at the end of Jesus' ministry here on earth.

It is in His resurrection. You see, the thing is, if Jesus rose from the dead, then the Beatitudes finally make sense. If Jesus rose from the grave, you and I have to accept everything that has been taught here. If He didn't rise from the dead, then who cares what He said? It's just more noise amongst all the other people's opinions.

The issue on which everything depends is not whether or not you respect Jesus' teaching here. The issue depends on whether you believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Because if Jesus did rise from the dead, then His resurrection proves the kingdom come. It proves that the curse is being reversed. It proves that the things that are unfair and unjust, the things that are mournful in the kingdoms of men and Satan are able to be overturned by the hand of God.

The blessedness of the Beatitudes is the joy, the peace and the hope that the kingdom is actually here because a Saviour has arrived. In Jesus, we have someone who is making all things new. But the hiddenness of the Beatitudes, the upside-downness of the Beatitudes means that it's only those who are deeply aware of the world's brokenness and of their own brokenness that are truly fortunate with this knowledge. Because at the heart of that realisation of brokenness lies faith. In order to believe in Jesus, you need to know how broken and needy you are.

Blessed are the losers, therefore, because you receive the kingdom of God. What does that mean for us? How does it change the way that we live as Christians? Just a few things I think that are some logical implications. Firstly, we need to know that in order for us to be saved, you must realise that you are a loser.

Please don't let these things batter your ego too much. But you have to realise that you are sinful, that you are broken, that you are cursed, that you cannot save yourself, that you cannot rescue this world, that you need Jesus Christ to rescue you. The things that our lefty friends forget is that they can't bring utopia. The things that our righty friends forget is that they can't fix moralism. They can't make us godly.

But trust your allegiance to Jesus and you will be blessed. In order to be saved, you must realise that you are a loser. Secondly, if you're a Christian, stay a loser. Now that you're in the kingdom, as the rest of Jesus' teaching will show us, realising that you are a loser, you now must operate like you are one. Don't claw.

Don't bite. Don't position yourself to be a winner. That's the thing that the people in the false kingdoms do. Those who have missed their entry into the kingdom are the ones who claw and position and bite. Recognise yourself as the underdog.

Embrace it, stay humble, and therefore stay dependent on God to give you what you need. And then thirdly, be patient with fellow citizens or fellow losers in the kingdom. If you need to be a loser to enter the kingdom, it means that you will be surrounded by other losers who are also in the kingdom. Interestingly, Jesus doesn't say that Christians will have all these Beatitudes either. Some will mourn, some won't.

Some will hunger and thirst for righteousness because they feel that they don't have it, but others won't. Jesus doesn't say we have all the marks of the Beatitudes, but He is saying that the kingdom will have all the Beatitudes represented there. So it means in our church, there will be people who are mourning. There will be people who are weak spiritually. There are people who struggle with their righteousness.

There are those who alternatively will seek mercy, who will be meek, who will be peaceable, and so on. But don't be surprised when you find broken people in the church. Don't be surprised when people don't behave in godly ways. Why? Because it's precisely because we aren't godly that we've come to Jesus.

Be patient with each other. Help each other carry these beatitudinal burdens that are on us. It's Father's Day, and it wouldn't be suitable to pass the day without a story about my little one-year-old Alida, who has recently learnt a powerful truth: that her dad's kisses can take away any ouchies. Anyone that has ever sat at the back of the church will know that Alida is a very busy girl. And with that busyness comes grazed knees.

But the pain of a grazed knee can be magically taken away from a single kiss from her papa. Now, any parent who has experienced this phenomenon will also tell you of this powerful impact of hope, and it's only a difference of a few seconds. But because a leader has this hope in the power of her papa's kiss, that instance where her whole world has come crashing down around her from her ouchie, where she can be inconsolable, screaming down the ceiling, but as soon as she hears papa will give it a kiss, the tears stop instantly. Papa hasn't kissed it yet.

Papa's starting to reach in. But the hope and the consolation and the pain-freeness has already started. That is what Jesus is getting at. Blessed are you now, for you have received the kingdom. And you have received it because Jesus has risen from the dead.

And so we see that the degree of peace, the patience, the hope of a leader in the midst of her ouchie is dependent on how much trust and faith she has that her papa's kiss will take away the pain. Blessed is the one who can know that their God is able to and has already started to fix all that is wrong with their lives. We all want to be blessed. That is not a sinful thing to desire. It's a human thing.

But Jesus tells us today that only the losers will find it. But this blessing is only ever received through citizenship and unity in God's kingdom with Him. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we thank you for the hope beautifully presented in its counterintuitive upside-downness. And Lord, forgive us for when we struggle with that counterintuitiveness, when we operate in worlds and workplaces where there is only one way, and that is always that the strong win.

That the strong are the sufficient ones. Where the victory goes to the ones who don't desire mercy but will seek out vengeance. Victory goes to the ones who don't make peace, but will keep fighting. Help us, Lord, to remember that our lives are not marked with those things. It is a falsehood.

It goes against our nature, the nature that has brought us into the kingdom to become like that. Because the truth is, Lord, we have only received what you've given us because at one time we've known that we are weak and we are weak. Lord, help us to fix our eyes on the day where we will be satisfied with righteousness. Help us to fix our eyes on the day we will receive mercy even when we have not received mercy in this life. Help us, Lord, when we struggle with our faith in you, when we doubt, when we fluctuate.

Help us, Lord, when we are poor in our spirit to know that we will receive the kingdom of God even as we have already started to. Thank you, Lord, for the ultimate presentation that the kingdom has arrived in that great reversal of fortune in the resurrection of Jesus. And help us to keep that as the rudder of our lives, the anchor. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.