TRISTAN SHERWIN

Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s, Metro Christian Centre, Bury & Whitefield service (dated 29th August 2021).

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RECAP

We’re continuing our series looking at the Beatitudes. [If you missed any of it so far, then you can catch it up on our YouTube channel, or with my blog notes (BE : AT // What is Jesus On About?; BE : AT // Blessed are the Cracked; BE : AT // Blessed are the Groans; BE : AT // Blessed are the Searchers)].

Through the beatitudes, Jesus is inviting Israel to embrace and engage in God’s Kingdom: ‘Come, and be at this kind of life. This is how the Kingdom operates. This is what it means to be salt and light in the world.’ We are also invited to be at (to join with) the kind of life that Jesus is describing.

We have already explored Poor in Spirit; that we’re invited to taste of Humility. We’ve explored Those who Mourn, and that we’re to be people who emit the sound of Lament: we mourn and we hope. We’ve talked about The Meek, and that we are to have the touch of gentleness. When we looked at those who Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness, we discovered that we are invited to intensively crave the God who intensely seeks us. And last week, Helen took us through The Merciful, and that flowing from an understanding of God’s concern and sympathy for us, we have sympathy for others—an embodied sympathy that leads to action on the behalf of others.

This week, we are looking at Matthew 5:8: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.’

READ: MATTHEW 5:1-16 (ESV)

I SPY, WITH MY LITTLE EYE …

I’m sure most of us are familiar with a game called ‘I spy’.

Whenever we go out to eat as a family, most of our meals involve a game of ‘I spy’. It normally occurs whilst we’re waiting for the food to arrive, and it is always our eldest son, Corban, who starts us off. So, on Monday evening of this week, when we found ourselves in a restaurant, and after we’d ordered our food, Corban, like clockwork, launched us into a game of ‘I spy’. ‘I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with … C.’

Whenever Corban leads with the letter C, I’m always going to go with the obvious answer: ‘Corban?’

Corban replies, ‘No’. And so, I get annoying and go with, ‘Corban’s eyes?’ (No) ‘Corban’s ears?’ (No) ‘Corban’s shoulders?’ (No) … and I keep doing that until Corban says, ‘It’s got nothing to do with Corban.’

It doesn’t normally take that long to guess one of Corban’s, though. After a few wrong guesses, Corban usually starts handing out clues—clues which are basically the answer.

The real trick, when we play ‘I spy’ together, is to make sure our youngest son, Eaden, doesn’t get a turn. We’re not being cruel, honest! It’s just that Eaden is an absolute nightmare to play with. He is just too good. If Eaden has a turn, then it’s Eaden’s turn forever, because Eaden has this insanely annoying knack of making it difficult.

So on Monday evening, Eaden gains control, and leads off with, ‘I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with … … … … (yes, he takes this long) … … S.’

So I’m like… ‘Spoons? Shade? Shoulder? Shoe? Sock? Shirt? Salt? Salt seller? Seat? …’

‘No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.’

‘Sprinkler? Serviette? Speaker? Signs? …. Steph? (suddenly remembering my wife’s name) … ’

‘No. No. No. No. No’

‘Sherwin?… (No) … ‘Sherwin’s eyes? Sherwin’s ears? Sherwin’s nose?’ … (Eaden normally just glares at me, at this point).

I then start wondering if Eaden has forgotten how to spell. So I’m like, ‘You do know that chandelier begins with ch and not s?’And Eaden just gives me that look that says, ‘I’m not stupid.’

It’s frustrating. We were still guessing when the food arrived. And all Eaden is waiting for—and you can see the pleasure in his face—is for us to utter the words, ‘I give up!’ Which we all do, and then Eaden reveals the answer, and it’s usually something really, really annoying.

Obvious, too, once it’s pointed out.

That’s the frustration and challenge of ‘I spy’—when someone calls out a certain letter a sudden rush of ideas and options come crashing into your mind. The room is full of Ss.

What you are looking for is right there, nearby, but seeing it, especially when you have other ideas swirling around in your brain, is difficult, if not impossible.

What you are looking for is right there, nearby, but seeing it, especially when you have other ideas swirling around in your brain, is difficult, if not impossible. (BLESSED ARE THE PURE OF HEART)

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Read that last sentence again, it will, I promise, help you to grasp this beatitude.

… SOMETHING BEGINNING WITH G

Jesus says, ‘Blessed are those whose hearts are pure, for they will see God’.

As a reminder of what has been said in previous weeks, when Jesus uttered these words, Jesus was speaking to the people of Israel, his own people. They were tired of being under the boot of the Roman Kingdom. They were longing for God’s Kingdom to come on earth. They craved and yearned for comfort, justice, liberation, vindication, and mercy, desperate to inherit what God had promised.

They were hungry for God’s righteousness—they wanted to see God act out of his loyalty and faithfulness, and rescue them from their exile and bondage, from the powers that enslaved them. They wanted a Messiah, a saviour, who would bring in God’s kind of world.

And what they were looking for was right there, among them, nearby, but seeing it, especially when you have other ideas swirling around in your brain, is difficult, if not impossible.

In Jesus, God had indeed come to the rescue, and was birthing the Kingdom. Not just through Jesus’ actions and mission, but—jumping beyond the topic of this morning—God was actually incarnate in the person of Jesus. Yet, so many didn’t see God.

It’s not that God was invisible, or hiding from view, nor was God inactive. God was fully on view, with no filters. God’s nature and work were perfectly visible in Christ (Hebrews 1:1-3). The reason they didn’t recognise (see) God is because how God had come, and what God was doing did not match with the notions swirling around in their brains.

And so, as John writes it, in his Gospel account, ‘[God] came into the very world he created, but the world didn’t recognize him. [God] came to his own people, and even they rejected him.’ (John 1:10-11, NLT)

Israel was looking for a military leader, a revolutionary. For them, part of the problem was with Rome—they were under the oppressive rule of another Kingdom, they were not free. The other part of the problem was to do with unfaithfulness to the Torah (or their interpretation of the Torah). And these two problems went together: In some minds, it was Irael’s unfaithfulness to the Torah (as they understood it) that had prevented them inheriting God’s promises and being under the dominion of the Romans.

The solution Israel were looking for—the way they wanted to see God act—was to see God raise up a military leader who would topple Rome and lead the people back to being faithful to the Torah (as they understood it).

Which makes sense, if that’s how you view the problem.

But Jesus did neither of those things.

For starters, Jesus challenged their interpretation of the Torah (which dominates a good chunk of what is to come in the rest of the Sermon on the Mount). And secondly, Jesus didn’t lead a glorious military campaign against Rome.

To make matters worse, Jesus was executed by the Romans, in a horrible, excruciating, and shame-inducing manner. In other words, he was killed by the ‘bad guys’ they expected the Messiah to get rid of.

I’ve read a number of amazing Jewish thinkers over the years (people I have learnt a lot from and who I’m thankful for, and whose writing I would highly recommend), and they all say the same thing about why Jesus wasn’t, in their opinion, the Messiah: he didn’t defeat Rome—he didn’t even die trying. That’s not to say that they don’t respect Jesus, or don’t have great things to say about Jesus—they do. But they don’t see God’s saving work in Jesus. They certainly don’t see Jesus as God incarnate.

They don’t see, because it’s not what they were looking for. They wouldn’t be alone.

When Jesus died, his disciples felt they’d got it all wrong, as well. They also thought he was going to fight Rome and deliver Israel. They also saw his crucifixion as a great defeat. After his death, two of his disciples, on the road to Emmaus, grieving over what they saw as Jesus’ epic failure, confess to a stranger they had met, ‘We had thought [Jesus] was the Messiah who had come to rescue Israel.’ (Luke 24:21).

These disciples had spent time with Jesus, being taught by Jesus, and they still failed to truly see, to truly recognise what was happening because they had other ideas of what God was supposed to do floating around in their heads.

The only reason their thinking eventually changes is because of the resurrection. Their encounter with the risen Jesus makes them look back on everything else and see it all in a completely different way. After their confession, this ‘stranger’ (who we discover is Jesus), takes them on a journey through Moses and the Prophets (the Old Testament) showing how the sacred texts have always pointed towards what God would do through the Messiah.[i]

In short, Jesus helps them think differently, he renews their thinking.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

To be fair to the disciples, and the people of Israel, we, today have this same problem with seeing God. If God’s going to sort out the world, then some of us, even those who claim to know Jesus, would certainly have ideas about what God needs to do.

Maybe, given today’s political climate, we would suggest that God needs to decimate the Taliban. Or, maybe we’d say that God needs fix whatever’s broken in the rhythms of creation and solve the problem of Climate Change.

But if God came in the flesh, today, and taught what Jesus did, and modelled a life like Jesus did, and then was put to death through a shameful method of state execution, and then rose from the grave—and, in doing so, if God declared this was God’s solution, God’s rescue mission, ‘This is how I am saving the world’, we’d all be saying, ‘That’s not what we were looking for.

Actually, we’d miss it all together—we would probably not notice it. Our newsstands and daily bulletins wouldn’t shout about it, and we would not be tapping it into our internet search engines. We wouldn’t seek it, because it would not align with our set of suggestions.

Depending upon how you think about it, Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, is unexpected and surprising because it is not the solution to the problems as we see them.

Unless, maybe, the Taliban, or Climate change, are not the problem, but symptoms of something else.

Unless, maybe, in Jesus’ day, Torah-breaking was not really the problem, and Rome was also not the problem, nor the enemy—but again, symptomatic of a larger problem and another enemy.

And what if, Death and Sin and Satan were the problem—the universal problem, everybody’s problem, creation’s problem? What if defeating Sin, Satan and Death, and breaking their hold and their influence upon humanity, was the universal solution?

EXODUS

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, about how the Exodus story is so important to the people of Israel, and I mentioned briefly that in Christ’s life, death and resurrection, God was performing a new Exodus: God was breaking humanity out of its bondage to Sin, Death and Satan, just like he broke Israel out of Egypt.

The Exodus is actually the great theme of Matthew’s account of Jesus. Matthew wants his readers to see that Jesus is the new Moses, the new lawgiver, the new liberator, the one who brings a new covenant.

Jesus life and ministry, in Matthew, is a replay of the Exodus story. Jesus comes to liberate us from ‘slavery to evil, to overcome the Pharaoh of hell, to undergo a Passover death.’[ii] And Jesus is victorious in this!

As John hears it, in his vision of Jesus in the book of Revelation, ‘I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades.’ (Revelation 1:18, NIV)

Why does Jesus hold the keys of death and the grave? Because he has overthrown them and accomplished the greatest prison break in all of history.[iii]

The Swedish, Lutheran theologian and Bishop, Gustav Aulén put it this way, ‘The work of Christ is first and foremost a victory over the Powers which hold mankind in bondage: sin, death, and the devil… The victory of Christ creates a new situation, bringing their rule to an end, and setting men free from their dominion.’[iv]

But, to see God acting in that way requires a purge of some of our ways of thinking about God.

CATHARTIC THINKING AND METANOIA

It’s this that Jesus is talking about in this beatitude. It’s the pure of heart that will see God.

Jesus is not talking about perfect people.[v]

The Greek word translated pure, is the word Katharos. It might sound familiar? It’s where we get the English word Cathartic. Avoiding the unpleasant medical meaning of Cathartic—even though it would provide a perfect analogy—we’ve all had cathartic moments, where we’ve just felt the emotional relief of getting something of our chests, when we unburden ourselves.[vi] Katharos, Cathartic means to cleanse, to purge, to expel.

Cleansed, purged, expelled is what Jesus means by pure.

When it comes to the word heart, we need to understand that the ancient world referred to the heart in the same way that we, in the modern world, talk about our brains: it was seen as the seat of our thinking, our reasoning, our thought patterns.

When Jesus says pure of heart, he’s talking about people with cleansed thinking: people who think clearly, who see without other notions and polluted theology impairing their vision.

To go back to my ‘I spy’ analogy, these people will see that God is right there, in Jesus, among them, nearby, because other ideas are not swirling around their brains and making it difficult.

Or, to put it back into Jesus’ context, these people will recognise what God is doing in Jesus, because their brains are not swimming with toxic ideas of God launching a military coup against Rome.

The pure of heart are those who are willing to have their thinking about God turned upside down, inside out and expelled by the self-revelation of God in Jesus.

The pure of heart are those who are willing to have their thinking about God turned upside down, inside out and expelled by the self-revelation of God in Jesus.

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This isn’t the only time that Jesus says something this, by the way.

For example, in Matthew 4:17, Jesus says, ‘Repent, for the Kingdom is at hand (has come, it is nearby)’ (also Mark 1:15). We may be used to hearing that word repent in a rather sinister fashion. But in the Greek, it is the word Metanoia, and it means ‘a change of mind’.

‘Change your mind,’ Jesus is saying, ‘for the Kingdom has come.’ Again, like with the beatitude, Jesus is highlighting that if they do not change the way they think God’s Kingdom looks, if they don’t relinquish their expectations of what God will do, then they’ll miss the fact that God is among them. They won’t recognise it, because their focus will be elsewhere.

There’s another term Jesus uses to describe this. It occurs in John 3, when Jesus is speaking to a Pharisee called Nicodemus. Jesus tells Nicodemus, that ‘unless you are born again, you can never see the Kingdom of God.’ (John 3:3, italics mine)

Of course, Jesus isn’t talking about literally going back into your mother’s womb. But he is saying to Nicodemus (and to us), as part of this massive term, that without God’s Spirit, without allowing God to speak on his own behalf, left to your own way of thinking about God, you’re not going to get your head around what God is doing. ‘Unless you allow God to reboot you, all of you—your ideas and preformed ways of thinking—you’ll miss it.’[vii]

Without catharsis, without a change in our thinking, we won’t be able to identify God’s movements among us.

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Again, this is true of all of us. We all have ideas about what God is like—even the atheists among us, and especially the religious among us. Even before we became Christian, we had ideas about God.

Maybe we saw God as the cosmic law-enforcer, who just hands out rules and punishments? Or as a genie-like character—who makes our wishes and dreams come true? Or as a divine vending machine—if we behave the right way, input the correct spiritual currency into God then God will dispense blessings? Or maybe, because of how it’s been taught and what we’ve experienced, we saw God as a tyrant, an oppressor, and certainly not as a saviour?

The list could go on and on … but some of these ideas may still impair our view of God when we pray, when we worship, when we read scripture, when we encounter others.

The challenge of this beatitude—of Jesus’ life—is have we heard what God has said about himself through God’s self-revelation of his self through Jesus? It’s there that we see God.

Eugene Peterson, in the Message translation of this verse, puts it this way, ‘You’re blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.’ (Matthew 5:8, MSG)

As someone said, way back in 1887, ‘To “see God,” then, is to realize the character of God, to look upon His attributes, to understand His dealings, to recognize His workings with us and around us.’[viii]

If you want to realise the character of God, if you want to understand God’s dealings, and recognise his working with us and around us, then look at Jesus.

But if we are saturated with other ideas about what God is like, and how God moves, then we will be unaware of God’s movements in our midst. Worse still, we may misdiagnose some things that happen as being of God, when they are not.

An earthquake happens in Haiti, or a disease breaks out somewhere, and some people say it’s God—then I think you need to look at Jesus, who came to repair creation and to heal the sick.

A “miracle” breaks out in a meeting and someone is “divinely” given gold teeth, and it is declared as a work of God—then I think you need to look at Jesus. When Jesus healed those who could not walk, he didn’t give them gold legs or a gold walking frame, he gave them something better; restored function in their natural legs. In the same way, why would Jesus hand out gold teeth when a natural tooth is best?

Someone stands up, calling us to hate someone, or some group, and to see and treat them as enemies who need to be attacked, or treated like subhuman, or second-class, and maybe they base that hate on their nationality, or their colour, or their background, and they declare this as God’s will—then we really need to look at Jesus. Who taught us to love our enemies. Who invited us to be peacemakers. Who loved and served all humanity. And who gave his life for everyone, and calls us to exhibit that level of mercy/sympathy towards others.

The examples could go on. The point is, Jesus is where we see God. And I wonder, how often do we base our ideas of God on our own thinking, our own prejudices, our own wants, instead of looking at what God has said about himself in Jesus Christ?

As the famous proverb says it, ‘Lean not in your own understanding, but … ‘ (Proverbs 3:5)

Blessed are the Pure in heart, the cathartic, the born again, those who are willing to relinquish their ways of boxing God in, because they will see what God has said and done through Jesus Christ.

 ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God / Renew a loyal spirit within me.’

Psalm 51:10 (NLT)

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[i] As an aside, this passage in Luke 24 also stimulates thought and curiosity in me. In Luke 24:27 we read, ‘The Jesus quoted passages from the writings of Moses and all the prophets, explaining what all the Scriptures said about himself’ (NLT). That must have been a fascinating conversation to hear. As I read this passage, I always ask the same thing, ‘why didn’t Luke put some more ink to parchment and record that conversation?’

[ii] Chad Bird, Unveiling Mercy: 365 Daily Devotions Based on Insights from Old Testament Hebrew, p.66.

[iii] Understanding the Exodus story really does help make sense of Matthew’s story of Jesus. Additionally, understanding the Exodus also helps us to understand the Book of Revelation. The Exodus story is replayed on overcharge in Revelation. Again, like Matthew, I would suggest that Revelation also wants us to grasp that the Exodus, the Passover, has transpired in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Grasping the Exodus motifs in Revelation helps eradicate the dispensationalist tendencies that have been imported into the text by readers.

[iv] Gustav Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement. As quoted by, Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, p. 361. By the way, I highly recommend Rutledge’s book on this topic. It’s simply outstanding.

[v] I know that will get people talking. Yes, our hearts (in the “spiritual” context of this conversation) matter greatly. Guarding our hearts is important, and our hearts express themselves in our lives. But—as I am just about to say—our thinking, our judgements, our prejudices etc., need to be changed. The problem is that we can fall into the trap of moralism (a trap Christian legalism often falls into), in that we believe doing external things is more important than dealing with the inside stuff that matters. In such a mindset, purity devolves into ‘purity culture’ and is expressed in a life of evasion. But this is approaching the issue from the wrong direction. Purity—as Jesus will repeat to his peers—is a matter of the inside first.

[vi] You can look up the medical meaning for yourself—just don’t do it close to a meal time.

[vii] To be clear, I am all for spiritual rebirth, becoming a new creation, a new identity etc., when the term Born Again is used (Peter certainly has this in mind when he uses the term in his epistle, 1 Peter 1:3, 23). But, what is often neglected, or overlooked, is that Jesus, in his conversation with Nicodemus, is challenging (and encouraging) this theological intellectual to be prepared to start again with how he thinks about God and how he perceives the Kingdom coming; a start that requires Nicodemus to be open to the intervention of God’s self-revelation.

[viii] Rev. C. J. Ridgeway, The Mountain of Blessedness: A Course of Addresses on the Beatitudes (Preached at Christ Church, Lancaster Gate, 1887), p.78.