Youth can skew perspective dramatically. Ideas become bigger and bolder. They have an electricity to them. Idealism can look at the brokenness in the world and see a blank canvas rather than a bleak landscape. There is beauty in that passionate naïveté. I think it moves individuals to take risks that more mature individuals would not.
But that energy can cause one to charge blindly past the obvious. For years, I have read the Beatitudes as this countercultural statement. The promises of blessing that Jesus makes in the opening chapters of Matthew 5 stick it to how the world works. The meek inheriting the earth! The poor in spirit possessing God's kingdom! I will not lie that I have written dramas in which characters are enraptured by the beauty of these ideas. And there is good reason for that. Those words are beautiful. Those words are a comfort.
But those words are also so very obviously difficult. Blessed are you, Jesus says, when your world is completely turned upside down. That is good news for the people crawling around in the margins. Yet the culmination of that good news for the mourning, the meek, the persecuted, etc. is off in the future. They will be comforted. They will inherit the earth. Their reward is great in heaven. How far off into the future are these blessings? We don't know.
Thus there is an ache and a groan to these words. Where I had always heard three power chords and rebellion there also lurks a minor key dirge. I heard the blessings, but in my youthful enthusiasm I did not hear the reality that those outcasts must wait. Yes, they will be comforted, they will inherit the earth, and they will receive mercy. But perhaps not today and maybe not tomorrow. Right now the world is still going to be a place that crushes the meek and ignores the peacemakers. God, that is hard to hear.
I think I sometimes make the mistake of swinging too wildly from one extreme to another. I hear Jesus say that the Kingdom of God is going to create this counterintuitive world and my eyes light up with idealism. I find the ache of the Beatitudes hiding in plain site and I'm tempted to sink in that reality like quicksand. Living exists somewhere in the tension between the two.
I have used the word tension often to describe the Christian faith. And I wonder if that gives off the wrong idea or at least an incomplete one. When I talk about living in tension it projects an image of someone in a constant state of stress. It's like there is a rope tied to these two extremes and the Christian is in the middle holding on to both, straining not to be pulled apart. That sounds miserable.
Yet I don't believe the tension is supposed to be embodied in us. God doesn't want us to constantly feel like we're being pulled apart. Don't get me wrong: dealing with this Jesus stuff can be tense business. But maybe the tension is in the road we walk. A tightrope pulled between two poles is tense (this is my family's carnie background bubbling to the surface apparently).
Perhaps we as Christians are walking that tightrope from a world where the poor in spirit are not blessed to a world in which blessings pour out for those on the margins. We're somewhere in between. We are not yet where the merciful will receive mercy, but nor are solely in a realm where might makes right. Those two worlds clash and collide out on the wire. Sometimes we might lose our balance. Sometimes we might be tempted to escape to one end of the rope or the other because it's safer on the platforms than it is swaying under the big top. But as long as we have breath in our lungs, we are on that wire between the ache and the hope.
I started writing this post fixated on the difficult part of this passage. How could I have been so blind to gloss over all the future tenseness of what Jesus was saying? How could I have been so naive to focus on the blessings? It was like crashing down to earth. Yet in the crash I have been reminded how much I need the different sets of eyes with which I have read the Beatitudes: the sober reality and the youthful excitement. The ache reminds us of the world in which we live. The hope compels us to keep walking the wire towards the new world into which God is calling us.