As you reflect on the Beatitudes, which I hope you have been doing with me, you may feel that tension between wanting to live in this way every day all the time and the fact that clearly you don’t (Well, I DON’T!).
Again, as followers of Christ, we are asked to live in the tension of justification and sanctification, of being declared righteous and yet needing lots of growth, of waiting to be what we are. Here is what N.T. Wright says about the Beatitudes regarding that tension:
“They [the Beatitudes] are announcing a new state of affairs, a new reality which is in the process of bursting into the world. They are declaring that something that wasn’t previously the case is now going to be; that the life of heaven, which had seemed so distant and unreal, is in the process of coming true on earth….
How does the ultimate promised future correspond to the present practices and habits Jesus insists upon? In two contrasting ways.
On the one hand, there is a direct correspondence, where the future state is exactly anticipated in the present habits of life: humility, meekness, mercy, purity, peacemaking. When the final kingdom arrives, we won’t stop being humble, meek, and pure. (“That’s enough of that! Now we can be what we’ve always wanted — namely, proud, arrogant, and impure!”) No: these qualities will shine through all the more powerfully.
What Jesus is saying…is, “Now that I’m here, God’s new world is coming to birth; and once, you realize that, you’ll see that these are the habits of heart which anticipate the new world here and now.’ These qualities — purity of heart, mercy, and so on — are not, so to speak, ‘things you have to do’ to earn a ‘reward,’ a ‘payment.’ Nor are they merely the ‘rules of conduct’ laid down for new converts to follow — rules that some today might perceive as somewhat arbitrary. They are, in themselves the signs of life, the language of life, the life of new creation, the life of new covenant, the life which Jesus came to bring. As we shall see, they are part of that radical Christian modification of the ancient Greek notion of virtue, the modification that quickly settled into the overall pattern of faith, hope, and love.”
