NILS VON KALM looks at the idea of ‘blessing’ and who Jesus was referring to in the Beatitudes…
Melbourne, Australia
Christians love talking about blessing. Many mega-churches are obsessed with it.
When something goes right for us, we say we’ve been blessed. The blessings of God are seen as good favour having been visited on you, probably for something you’ve done to please God. It’s like a reward.
Christians love talking about blessing, says Nils von Kalm, but where did we get the idea of a performance-based God who gives us good things when we do something good? PICTURE: elwynn1130/iStockphoto
Where did we get the idea of a performance-based God who gives us good things when we do something good? It certainly isn’t in the Bible.
Many churches in the West propagate what I call a ‘blessing theology’. It’s not quite the prosperity gospel but it’s not far away from it. And it’s mainstream in many of our churches, to the point where we don’t even recognise it.
“This idea is proclaimed as a subtle form of ‘trusting’ God. It is believing that if we live right, things will go right, that if we tithe a certain amount, we will receive financial blessing. The flip side is that if life is going badly for me then I must be doing something wrong; I must have sinned in some way.”
This idea is proclaimed as a subtle form of “trusting” God. It is believing that if we live right, things will go right, that if we tithe a certain amount, we will receive financial blessing. The flip side is that if life is going badly for me then I must be doing something wrong; I must have sinned in some way.
But life just isn’t like that and it’s not our fault. Jesus said the rain falls on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45). That’s just the way life is.
Unfortunately the church is so caught up in its ‘blessing theology’ that it falls mostly on secular artists to come out and write honestly about life. Listen to John Mellencamp, from his 2009 song, Longest Days:
“Nothing lasts forever,
The best efforts don’t always pay.
Sometimes you get sick and you don’t get better.
That’s when life is short, even in its longest days”
Job knew that. Yes, he received abundant material blessings after his suffering, but he is an exception, not the rule. The rule in the Bible is that all its great leaders went through a wilderness experience of some sort, especially Jesus. That’s why He is referred to in Isaiah as a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, and that it is by His suffering that we are healed. It is not despite his suffering, but through His suffering that salvation is offered to the world.
When Jesus talked about blessings, He gave us the Beatitudes. It’s the poor who are blessed, those who mourn. The ones nobody cares about, the ones who always miss out, the ones for whom something is always going wrong. They are blessed by God, now.
That’s how God sees blessings. It’s quite different to how much of the church sees them. The people who heard the Sermon on the Mount were people who were living under the oppression of occupation by a foreign power. They were desperate for a messiah to overthrow the might of the Romans. They were constantly given the message that they were nothing, that they were there to serve Rome. But Jesus told them they were blessed; that they – the “useless” ones, were actually the salt of the earth and the light of the world and to not hide their light, so that people could see how good God is.
Jesus said the poor and mournful are just as worthy of God’s blessings as anyone else. In fact, God has a special care for them as they are always trodden on and considered unworthy or sinful.
The reason He said these people are blessed is because it is when you are poor in spirit, when you mourn and when you are persecuted; in other words, when you are at the end of your rope and have nothing left to hold on to, that you can more clearly see that God is all really all you’ve ever had.
Jesus’ blessing of the poor of course includes the materially poor. Tim Costello tells the story of when he was in Sri Lanka just after the Asian tsunami in 2004. Back in comfortable Australia, people were asking how you could believe in a God who would allow such a disaster to happen. But that wasn’t what the people directly affected by it in Sri Lanka were asking. The people who lost everything over there were answering that question by saying “How can we not believe in God; God is all we have left!”.
It is only when we accept that good and bad things happen to us no matter what type of people we are, that we realise that life is ultimately out of our control. It is then that we can more fully surrender to Christ and more fully realise that nothing in life can be ultimately relied upon to give us what we need except God alone.
And it is this that leads to the joy we really desire in our heart of hearts. This is why the only time Jesus speaks of His own joy is on the night before He dies (John 15:11), the night He is betrayed by one of His closest friends, the night He is denied by an even closer friend, the night all His best friends abandon Him in the hour of His greatest need as He endures an unjust trial and the mockery of those who should know better.
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It is when we fully surrender to God because we finally know that God is the only one who can satisfy the deepest longing in our hearts that we find the joy we ultimately long for.
The Gospel is not about self-fulfilment; it’s about submitting to the love of God for us and realising that we often get in the way of that.
When Jesus was asked about who sinned when the tower fell and killed 18 people (Luke 13:4), He said it wasn’t about whether or not anyone sinned. Good and bad things happen to anyone. People who do bad things often get away with it and people who do good things are often misunderstood and not recognised.
It’s not about reward and punishment. It’s about love. Jesus said to go away and do your good deeds and not worry about whether anyone sees them. It’s about giving to others. Don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.
The ‘blessing theology’ that pervades many of our churches is nothing more than a reflection of our individualistic culture. It has very little at all to do with Jesus and following Him. The Gospels tell us that Jesus is always on the side of the oppressed. Always. And, as Bono said at the 2006 National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC, God is with us if we are with them.
