Called to Transform the World

This Sunday we are presented with Matthew's account of the Beatitudes. Tradition tells us that Jesus taught the disciples and the crowds from the top of a hill overlooking the Sea of Galilee. An image that remembers Moses offering the guide for living a good life that would be expanded into the covenant with God's people. When Matthew tells us that Jesus went up the hill, he is positioning the New Covenant in this context. And just like the commandments that Moses delivered these Beatitudes tell us in no uncertain terms that, if what we desire is to be at rights with God, we must be people that actively seek to set the world to rights too.

I'm really not sure if the Beatitudes were given in the form we have them today. At the very least we know that Luke's account differs from Matthew's - abandoning the imagery of Moses and tempering the language of suffering borrowed from the Old Testament. But as we read Matthew's version this Sunday it is the differences that draw my attention.

While Luke's account reads as a message of comfort and hope for those on the margins, Matthew's strikes me as more of a call to action - to stand with and for the afflicted - to transform the world into the Kingdom of God that is referenced in the first and the last lines of his text.

As he speaks, Jesus builds momentum. From a promise of God's comfort and mercy, to one of being recognised as God's children, and heirs of the kingdom itself for those who stand as peacemakers, even in the face of tyranny.

And what is a peacemaker? Someone that avoids conflict, or someone that acts deliberately to create the conditions for peace and justice?

Matthew's text points to the latter when it refers to those who hunger and thirst for what is right and just. Those who cannot live without it, who cannot be sustained by anything less.

This image of hunger and thirst in the first chapters of Matthew's Gospel calls to mind the hunger and thirst that Jesus addresses in its last chapters, "for when I was hungry you gave me something to eat, and when I was thirsty you gave me something to drink."

And this, Jesus says, is the key to the Kingdom that the Beatitudes offers as our inheritance. To pray, yes, but also to act - to be a peace-maker.

And when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of calumny against for doing it - do it anyway.

And all this with the beginning of Lent now less than three weeks away.

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