The first six verses are certainly depressing aren’t
they? We don’t matter, don’t make a
difference in the world, don’t leave a trace behind that we really
existed. It sounds an awful lot like the
philosophy of Ecclesiastes, that all this stuff we consider of ultimate
importance is actually meaningless, even our lives. Verse 15 changes everything, “But the
righteous live forever…” The conclusions
of this passage and book and Eccelsiastes are very similar. So long as we focus our lives and attention
on things of earth, the things that aren’t material in the sense that they aren’t
eternal, we ourselves are immaterial in the same way. Ecclesiastes calls us to look to those things
“above the sun” as of ultimacy and this passage tells us that if we do, we find
immortality in ourselves because the more we value God and the things of God He
finds and assigns value to us. The
Beatitudes are Jesus’ restatement of that truth in very simple and concise
terms.
Jesus’ admonition here is to focus our attention on
ourselves rather than the flaws of others.
He is telling the disciples how to become like Him, the goal of
disciple-making by the rabbis in ancient Israel. He says clearly, “everyone when he is fully
trained will be like his teacher.” What does
it mean to be “like” the teacher? In context,
it meant that the disciple would literally think, walk, talk and teach like his
teacher. The goal was to be like the
teacher in every way. Only in this way
could the tradition be passed accurately.
The disciple would themselves become a teacher and take the
understanding of his teacher forward, not by repetition and rote but by
thinking further on what was passed on to him, accepting the guard rails of
thought that had been passed on through the teaching of their rabbi. One generation builds on the one before
without throwing out the past. We build
on Jesus, who affirmed the entire law and taught its proper interpretation.
The passage begins with a warning that I wonder if we can
completely heed. “See to it that no one
takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition…” The problem is that we come to Christ and the
Bible with a lot of preconceived ideas. We
come with a worldview that doesn’t include Him and then we layer Him on top of
that worldview. Paul told the Romans
that transformation begins with the renewing of the mind and so it does. We need always to try and hear the Word
speaking against what we hold dear that it might re-shape us in its image. That old way of thinking is what got us into
sin and death and we have been re-born with Christ in baptism. Paul’s arguments against new moons and
festivals is not that they are per se wrong, but that they are mere shadows
that were fulfilled in Jesus who is the fullness of these things. Reversion to the shadows would be preference
to the light of Christ. Those things
built to Him and now we know the full truth.
He is the key to understanding all things.
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