What Is the Good Life?

Scripture: Matthew 5.1-20; Romans 10.8-13

Bridge to Terabithia is the story of two young teenagers who become friends. The boy is a shy kid who likes to draw. The girl is brave and bold and has a gift for imagination and story. One Sunday she asks if she can go to church with her friend and his family. The boy and his family are regular churchgoers. The girl confesses that she and her parents never go to church. She would like to go with her friend to his church.

They all go to church together. They sing hymns. They hear a sermon. On the ride home the kids are sitting in the back of the pickup truck and the girl says to her friend,

“Wasn’t all that about Jesus interesting?”

“No it wasn’t. It was boring!” the boy replies, almost offended by the question.

“You believe it because you have to and you hate it,” the girl answers. “I think it’s beautiful and I believe it.”

The scene reminds me of how dull and deadly our presentations of Jesus can be. To make Jesus appear small or dull or simply ordinary is to seriously distort the Gospel. Jesus was anything but dull or ordinary. Dallas Willard reminds us that the first people to hear him teach and believe him did so not because they had to for fear that something bad might happen to them in the future – they believed because they were compelled by the power of his words and the force of his personality. Here was a person of great wisdom and ability, greater than they had ever encountered. They concluded that they would be fools not to follow him.

The sermon on the mountain is one such occasion. His word came simple and strong.

“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.”

These “blessed are’s. . .” are called beatitudes, or the Beatitudes. A beatitude is simply a statement of reward, a reward that may come sooner but certainly will come later.

The sermon on the mountain as a whole is Jesus message of how to really live in the presence of God’s kingdom. It asks the questions, “What is the good life?” and “Who truly is a good person?”

I think we could all agree that these are two very important questions, perhaps the most important questions a human being could ask.

For example, as recently as the beginning of the twentieth century it was still not thought odd that a professor of philosophy at Harvard University should conclude a distinguished series of lectures by saying, “Ethics is certainly the study of how life may be full and rich, and not, as is often imagined, how it may be restrained and meager. Those words of Jesus. . .announcing that he had come in order that men might have life and have it abundantly, are the clearest statement of the purposes of both morality and religion, of righteousness on earth and in heaven.” That such a statement would be professional suicide today speaks volumes about where we now stand.

Let us, like that Harvard professor, assume for a few moments this morning that Jesus had something worthwhile, even relevant, to say to humanity about how to live.

How did Jesus answer those two big questions, “What is the good life?” and “Who is a good person?”

Remember the scriptures say that great crowds were following him everywhere he went(Matthew 4.24) and these crowds consisted of people with every kind of sickness, pain, affliction, and disorder imaginable. In other words, the crowd wasn’t made up of the bright shiny people, it was made up of the mass of raw humanity. When Jesus begins to teach on the mountain, he and his disciples are surrounded by this humanity. And Jesus begins to teach by “show and tell.”

He took the most extreme examples he could find in the crowd and said, “Here, here is the good life. Here could be a good person.”

“Blessed are the poor in spirit. . .” This is a kind way of saying “Blessed are the spiritual zeros, the losers. . .” How can Jesus say this? Because that’s who he was talking to. Probably almost no one in the crowd that day were spiritually accomplished people. The spiritually accomplished, as yet, had no reason to come out into the countryside to hear this preacher. Jesus knew who he was talking to.

We have, curiously, made “poor in spirit” sound attractive in our modern or postmodern mindset. That’s not what Jesus meant. These folks had nothing spiritually attractive about them. In some church circles today we might say of them, “they’re hard-living people,” or “they don’t know their Bible.”

We’ll go on to make this point with the other beatitudes in due course, but the pattern is established here - Jesus is mostly talking about people who really have nothing going for them. The story of the Good Samaritan is like this too. Remember, Jesus never called the Samaritan good, but he knew how outrageous an example it was to use with his Jewish audience. It would be like one of us saying, “There was a certain alcoholic. . .” or “There was a certain homosexual. . .” and then tell our story with this character as the hero, as the only good person around.

Now, here’s the really important thing we need to understand about the beatitudes: These outrageous, spiritually zero people are going to be rewarded, but it’s not because of who they are or anything they’ve done. God rewards them in spite of who they are.

Jesus shows and tells us that the kingdom of God is very close to us because God is very close to us.

“The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart.”

We’re used to earning rewards – A’s and B’s in school; frequent flier miles; credit card points. But if we could earn heaven, what use would Jesus be to us except to have the good sense to say “All good people go to heaven?”

The Gospel of the Kingdom is “The last shall be first” and there is no one who is beyond beatitude. But it is all God’s doing. Our good (or bad) condition does not get us any closer to heaven. Poverty, spiritual or material, is no virtue in and of itself. But neither is it an insurmountable barrier for God or for someone who seeks God.

You might now reasonably ask, “But aren’t we supposed to be good?” Yes. And God reveals the answer to that question, “Who is a good person.” We’ll look at that question over the next several weeks. What we might find is that our definition of good is pretty weak when. . .well, there is this:

A chaplain of a state prison once received a request from a father of a young man who was interned in the prison. The young man had committed a robbery in a little town and had been sentenced to many years in jail. He was angry, embittered.

The boy’s father came each week to visit him, but the boy refused to see him.

The chaplain was asked to intervene, to plead with the boy to see his father. But the young prisoner refused to reconsider. Despite his refusal, the boy’s father took off work every week, boarded a bus, and traveled across the state in the hope of seeing his son.

Every week. And every week it became the young chaplain’s difficult task to ask the son, “Do you want to see your dad?” He then had to bear word of the refusal to the waiting father. The father would thank the chaplain, gather his belongings, and head toward the door for the bus trip back home.

One day, after telling the father the same thing, that his son would not meet with him, the chaplain said, “No one would do what you are doing. Your son is an embittered, defiant young man. Go back home and get on with your life. No one would put up with this kind of rejection, week after week. Nobody would do this.”

“He has put up with it for centuries,” said the father, as he picked up his meager belongings and headed out. And the young chaplain literally fell to his knees at this vision of the righteousness of God.

God is nearer than we think. And no one is beyond his blessing.