The Good Life, Redefined

Epiphany 5 | Year B | Isaiah 40:21-31; Psalm 147:1-11 | Christopher Miner

Any time I look at Scripture of late, I am doing so with the folks from The Bible Project ringing in my mind. I highly recommend you check them out, especially if you want to dig deeply into what the Bible said to its original hearers and authors. They take their time to really pull on every potential interpretative thread in a passage... and if that sounds painful, they also condense their thoughts into short, easily understood videos. Everything they do is completely free and super high quality.

Right now The Bible Project is spending a year in the Sermon on the Mount, and this week they got to the first three Beatitudes. Apparently the Beatitudes are three triads of sayings, meaning each section of three sayings echo themselves thematically. (Yes, this will relate to the Lectionary readings this week... at least I think it will.) The first three Beatitudes are usually translated like this:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

I will refrain from recapping The Bible Project's really amazing work in their most recent podcast, but I would humbly suggest that we lose the magnitude and power of Jesus' words with that familiar language. Based on what this podcast broke down, I would now interpret these sayings like this:

The good life belongs to the powerless, for they will get first dibs on God's kingdom.

The good life belongs to the mourners, for they will be comforted.

The good life belongs to the unimportant commoners, for they will inherit the land.

There are a lot of ways you could take this, but look at who Jesus is pointing to as owning this blessed status - sad, impoverished, conquered nobodys. It is likely that Jesus is looking at individual people in his audience when he says these things, as most of his audience was made of up these kind of people. At the time of Jesus the Jewish people in Palestine were under the rule of the Roman Empire, and were reduced to second class citizens at best. They worked menial jobs, were heavily taxed, and in large part were barely scraping by. The had no say in government or society, even their religious society. And yet here is Jesus telling them the good life was theirs.

Jesus was pulling on imagery and ideas from Israel's history here, like in the passage in Isaiah and the Psalm. (See? I told you I would get to the Lectionary reading!) After describing Yahweh in glory and power, Isaiah says that the Lord gives strength to the powerless, and lifts up those who are weary and faint. (If you were a churchgoer in the early 2000s, I assume there is a song in your head after reading verse 31.) In the Psalm, he lifts up the downtrodden, and declares that he does not delight in strength or speed but in people who hope in his steadfast love.

Notice, though, that in the Old Testament passages God is lifting up those who are down. He is not saying they are blessed/living the good life in their current state, but that he will lift them up into a blessed/good state. Jesus looks at the same people, and declares that the blessed/good state is already theirs! Jesus does, of course, point to a future where their situations will change but that does not stop him from announcing that these people have the good life now, even in their current predicaments, problems, and pain.

We also need to be careful not to over-spiritualize what Jesus is saying here. The words he uses are describing people who are poor, powerless, and marginalized within their societies. He is not speaking about their 'spiritual' states, though I would imagine these people would feel the same way in that regard, too. Jesus is speaking to people who, in their day to day lives, were oppressed, pushed aside, and discarded, and tells them, "Congratulations! The good life is yours!" This kind of thinking is literally nonsense, in that these people could look at their lives and say that Jesus' words made no sense.

Yet they listened. And some believed it. Some began to see that Jesus was not just speaking pretty words, but was introducing a radical new way of living. He was flipping life around, proclaiming (and living) a way that emphasized service over servants, generosity over greed, faith over fear, and love over all. This way of life was so radical and incompatible with the current system that its leaders felt they needed to kill Jesus off - in their way, death was the ultimate power. Jesus, however, overcame death, and showed once and for all that his way was THE way, the ultimate Good Life, and was so powerful that death was ineffective against it.

As this site is called Living in the Way, you know which Way we prefer. The way of Jesus is the way we humans were made to live in the first place. We have wandered far, far away form this way, but God has been faithfully calling us back to it and in Jesus has made it possible for us to begin living that way again. There will come a day when this way will explode over all creation, but for now we can start living it now. This is what Jesus means when he says to the powerless, sad, and insignificant, "The good life is yours!" May we, by the power of the Father, the grace of Jesus, and the infilling of the Holy Spirit, begin to live this truly good life.