SERMON: “BE-attitudes: Blessed are the meek.”
Rev. Geoff Ross, St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, Sunday, July 14, 2013
You know you’re getting older when you start saying things like; “they don’t make
movies like they used to!” Summer time is a time for the best things in life: baseball,
cottage weekends, and movies – that summer confection known as the summer
blockbuster. But they’re not making them like they used to. In late May, 1989 Harrison
Ford rode onto the screen for the third – and best – time in Indiana Jones and the Last
Crusade – aided by Sean Connery: it’s pretty close to being a perfect movie. One of my
favorite scenes comes near the end where Indy is navigating the cave on his way, he
hopes, to find the Holy Grail. As he walks past the bodies of the hapless unnamed
characters who had had their heads cut off – and away from his father who has been shot
to provide him with the incentive to go forward – he reads from his father’s diary which
they have the bulk of the movie trying to retrieve, in the hope that it will give him
necessary instructions for getting through the trap ahead; but all it says is: “The Breath
of God. Only the penitent man will pass.”
As he moves slowly forward, covered in cobwebs and sweat, Indy begins to repeat the
phrase under his breath searching for its meaning, “Penitent man, penitent man,
penitent, penitent. The penitent man is humble before God, He kneels before God.
Kneel!” At that moment, as Indy falls to his knees, a giant blade swoops past where his
neck was just a second before – knocking off his iconic hat. Now I know it’s only a
movie – but bear with me – the word “penitent” comes from the word “repentance,”
meaning to turn away from sin. So a ‘penitent man’ is a man who has turned from his
sin. And the ‘shall pass’ is referring to a person passing through this life to Heaven. So
the meaning of this line is that only a man who has turned from his sin shall enter
Heaven – only a man/person who is humble before God, only a person who
submits/bows/surrenders themselves/kneels before God will pass from this world to the
kingdom. Conversely, because of haughtiness and pride an impenitent (which means
without repentance, without remorse) man refuses to bend his knee, refuses humble
himself before God only to be cut down. Or, as it says in Proverbs 16:18; “Pride goes
before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” It’s almost as if Indy was reading
the third beatitude: “blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” (Matt 5:5)
We’ve spent some time over the past two weeks broadening our definition – our
understanding – of what Jesus is doing/trying to say when He began preaching what was
His inaugural sermon known as the Sermon on the Mount. As we learned, when we
hopscotched our way through the Bible, connecting the dots together to reveal who Jesus
was and why He came to be-with us, Jesus wasn’t telling the poor in spirit, those in
mourning, the meek “don’t worry, be happy:” no, what He was saying – what got the
crowd so excited and worked up – was that when you are blessed, it means that God’s
presence, favour, love is now available to you: that God is on your side – that God is
supporting you, encouraging you, is with you. And how/why was this Good News?
Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, in their book Resident Aliens say that since the
beatitudes are a call for us to live lives worthy of and to the glory of God, they are less
about us and are more about who God is. To the marginal people of the world – those
who were close to God’s heart (the dispossessed, poor, orphans, widows, oppressed),
those who held out hope in the promise statements of the Old Testament blessings that
one day the world would be theirs, those who knew the promises, knew but barely
believed it would/could come true, those who were tired of seeing evil ‘win’ and
righteousness ‘fail’ – Jesus’ words revealed to them a God who was on their side; on the
side of the down and out, the side those who were mourning, the side the meek and so
on. God is a be-with God, as evidenced by His Son. The question is: are we at His side?
Let’s move on. Of all of the beatitudes the third is the most misunderstood – in fact it’s
almost mocked more than it is quoted correctly. This probably stems from the fact that
the word “meek” is often thought of as being synonymous with the word weak. In our
rough-and-rugged world of individualism – filled with Die-hard heroes – as a society,
we think of being meek/gentle as being weak, being soft, of someone who is unable to
stand firm on a position, is easy to persuade, can drift – is unmoored, weak-minded, and
weak-willed. But, biblically speaking, being meek does not equal being weak.
Interestingly, the Greek word for meek, “praus” [prah oos] – the same word that Jesus
used – referred to domesticated animals such as a horse that was saddle broken. The
word does not refer to a wild, unruly animal, but to a powerful horse or ox that was
trained so power could be controlled. The word “meek” as Jesus used it refers, as the
Nelson’s Bible Dictionary defines it, as: “an attitude of humility toward God and
gentleness toward men, springing from a recognition that God is in control.” For Jesus
to be meek is to be a person whose thoughts, words, actions, will, and emotions are all
controlled by God. The meek are those who submit, not to what others want, but to what
God wants. One translation says it well: "Blessed are they who choose to obey.”
As we looked at the first two beatitudes, I struggled a little bit because I felt like we
were repeating ourselves. However, with the third beatitude, Jesus shifts away from just
identifying people who, by a matter of circumstances were beaten down and broken, to
adding those who intentionally lived a life of humility – those who chose to be meek. As
we have heard, Jesus proclaimed that it was not the impenitent, proud, perfect, and
powerful people who will enter His kingdom – it was to be those on the margins, those
left out, and those who completely surrender themselves to God because they know
better than those so-called ‘right’ people that the only “sacrifice acceptable to God is a
broken spirit – a broken and contrite heart.” (Psalm 51:17)
The meek have accepted God’s rule over their lives – that they’re not in control – but,
paradoxically, they know at the same time that through their faith in God – a God who is
by their side, a God who is their anchor holding them fast, safe, and secure throughout
the tempests of this world/life – nothing can defeat them. And, he places his trust in the
promises found in Psalm 37: “Trust in the Lord, and do good. Commit your way to the
Lord; trust in him, and he will act. He will make your vindication shine like the light,
and the justice of your cause like the noonday. Be still before the Lord, and wait
patiently for him, [for] those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the land; the meek shall
inherit the land/earth.” (Psalm 37:1-11) Sound familiar? Yeah, it did to those people too
– the quiet, unassuming, anonymous, mild-mannered people with the superhero faith –
that were in the crowd: it was to them Jesus offered His assurance that He was on their
side – that, just as He did for the poor in spirit and those in mourning, in/through Him
their day in the sun had come!
So how can we be meek? We can be strong enough to place our hope – our faith, our
lives, our eternity – into the hands of God who, like an anchor is sure and steadfast. We
can be secure enough in our faith to be like Mary – from our second reading about Mary
and Martha – the sister who chose to be-with Jesus rather than fill her time with the socalled important, essential, life-or-death busyness that threatens to overwhelm us
keeping us from God and seducing us into self-importance. We can be humble enough
to know that we are nothing before God – that we’re nothing and, at the same time,
everything to God; that, as a child of God, there is nothing to boast in except God’s
grace known and received in/through Jesus Christ. God is on our side: the question again
is, are we on His?
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts move us respond to God’s
Good News that blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. Amen.