Have you ever read the Beatitudes (Mt 5 or Lk 6) and thought
“Oh dear, I am in the wrong category”? I
have been reading the book of Luke recently where chapter 6 verses 20 – 35 have
been really challenging me. “Blessed
are you who are poor for yours is the kingdom of God”. Well I’m not physically poor, especially not
in comparison to my Ugandan friends. You
could interpret the meaning to be “blessed are you who are [spiritually] poor”
and then we Westerners might have a leg to stand on! The next verse is this: “Blessed are you who
hunger now, for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.” But I’m not hungry and I’m not sad so where
does that leave me when it comes to the blessings and Kingdom of God? In our weekly Bible study that we have with
other Westerners at our home, we have been studying the book of James. What I read there challenged me even further
with recommendations that in order to follow Christ we need to “consider it
pure joy whenever you face trials of many kinds because you know that the
testing of your faith develops perseverance” (1:2) or that we should be “quick
to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger” (1:19). Or even that “faith without deeds is dead” in
2:26! So when I reached 4:9 “Grieve,
mourn and wail. Change your laughter to
mourning and your joy to gloom” I thought why on earth would I want to do that,
and why is James telling me to do so? The
next verse, 4:10 says “Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will lift you
up.” That is exactly the type of
topsy-turvy Gospel that the Beatitudes teaches so I went back to the passage I
had been reading in Luke and decided that I am not a lost cause just because I
am not sad or hungry. Instead, if I put together
James’ advice to “grieve, mourn and wail” and Jesus’ instruction that “blessed
are you who weep” I may be on to something.
If I am perfectly happy and content but there are others in the world who
are weeping and hungry, I should be coming alongside them in their sadness and
hunger. I should be putting myself in
their position to empathise and help them.
If someone is hungry but I am not, I should be helping to feed
them. If someone is crying and I am
perfectly happy I should be weeping with them in their sorrow. If someone is humble and I am proud I should
be humbling myself even lower than them to serve them. By living in this way – a way the world tells
us is a bit crazy! – God will lift me up and those blessings from the
Beatitudes are suddenly a lot more attainable and make a lot more sense.
So why am I writing this blog post? Well it’s mostly for my own benefit of
working things out for myself by physically writing them! But also, here in Uganda we come across a
variety of needs and requests and if we look carefully in the Bible there is
advice for everything, even though often it seems to be different to how we, as
humans, want to deal with things. For
example when someone asks to borrow money Jesus tells us in Luke 6:35 to “lend
to them without expecting to get anything back”. That is not what we learn in our culture
where we expect every penny within a certain time-frame, perhaps with interest. When we put this piece of Jesus’ teaching together
with the African culture where if you have more resources than someone else you
are expected to share them without expecting anything back and without asking questions
then we really have to go against our cultural grain! So I’m sharing my small insight into these
Biblical teachings because they challenge our decision making wherever we live
and whatever or whoever we come across in life, but they also give clear
instructions on how to live, which makes life easier really, rather than having
to figure things out for ourselves!
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